This is the last of the three volumes of Theories of Surplus-Value, the historical fourth volume of Capital. Marx wrote the whole work in one sustained effort between January 1862 and July 1863, as the longest and most elaborated part of the manuscript from which all of Capital was later drawn, but he never lived to make a book of it; it was first published posthumously by Karl Kautsky between 1905 and 1910, and reaches the reader here in the English of Progress Publishers, Moscow — this Part Three translated from the German by Jack Cohen and S. W. Ryazanskaya, edited by S. W. Ryazanskaya and Richard Dixon, first printed in 1971, and co-issued in Britain by Lawrence & Wishart. Where Part One took the history from the Physiocrats through Adam Smith and Part Two was the volume of Ricardo, Part Three is the volume of the aftermath: the disintegration of the Ricardian school, the "vulgar" economists who came after, the opposition that turned Ricardo's own weapons against capital, and — in its closing addenda on "Revenue and its Sources" — Marx's most concentrated statement of what he called the fetishism of economic relations.
Read on its own terms, Part Three is the volume where Marx's history of a science becomes a history of its decline. He watches the great edifice Ricardo built dissolve in two directions at once. On one side stand the epigones — McCulloch, James Mill and their kind — who kept Ricardo's forms while emptying them of their content, until, in Marx's account, the science curdled into apologetics, a defence of the existing order dressed in the language of the laws it no longer sought to explain. On the other stand the men Marx found far more interesting: the Ricardian socialists and the radical pamphleteers who took Ricardo's own demonstration that labour is the source of value and drew from it the conclusion Ricardo had refused — that the profit of capital is a deduction from the product of the worker. And in the addenda that crown the volume, Marx anatomises the deepest illusion of all, the one he named the trinity formula: the way capital, land and labour come to appear as three natural sources each yielding its own natural return — profit, rent, wages — so that the divided spoils of exploitation present themselves as the just earnings of three cooperating "factors." "The form of revenue and the sources of revenue," he writes, "are the most fetishistic expression of the relations of capitalist production" — the surface on which a social relation of exploitation is made to look like a fact of nature.
An honest introduction must also say where the volume falls short. Like its companions it is a draft, a set of notebooks whose order was imposed by its editors, and it shows the strain: the argument breaks off and resumes, and the long polemic against Malthus in particular runs hotter than cold analysis requires, its contempt sometimes outrunning its demonstration. The distinction between "classical" and "vulgar" economy on which the whole volume turns is a powerful one, but Marx wields it more as a verdict than as a settled criterion, and it can slide toward a charge laid against anyone who describes the surface of the economy at all. This is a quarry, not a monument — richest where it is least finished.
And yet its central charge is the one that returns, with an irony no censor could edit out, to the state that made Marx into scripture. For what Marx accused the vulgar economists of doing — taking the surface categories of their economy for natural facts, and dressing that acceptance as science in order to justify the order those categories served — is precisely what Soviet political economy came to do with its own. The plan, the plan-price, the output norm, the labour quota became self-evident givens, a second nature no more to be questioned than rent and profit and wages had been for the apologists Marx flayed; and the economists of the Soviet state, required to prove that whatever the bureaucracy decided was the lawful unfolding of socialism, became the vulgar economists of their own regime. The volume that dissects the fetishism of revenue-and-its-sources became the charter of a new fetishism. When Stalin conceded in 1952 that the law of value still "operated" under socialism, and when the reformers of the 1960s tried to smuggle profit back as an index of enterprise success, they were living inside the contradiction Part Three had diagnosed in advance: categories they had declared abolished, reasserting themselves through the surface of an economy whose apologists were forbidden to name them.
None of this is a reproach to Marx, and none to the revolution that first raised his name as a banner. A backward, invaded, blockaded country genuinely had to build from a low base, and the tragedy is that a real necessity was administered by a caste that had usurped the workers' power and could permit no rival reading of the texts it recited. It was Trotsky, in The Revolution Betrayed, who refused both the liberal verdict that the doctrine was the original sin and the official myth that the state embodied it, and located the degeneration where it belonged — in isolation, backwardness and bureaucratic usurpation; and it was Ernest Mandel who, drawing on these very chapters, kept the distinction between a critical and an apologetic economics alive against a Marxism that had itself gone vulgar. The canonised text, here as everywhere, is the measure of the betrayal, not its cause.
So what is this closing volume worth now? A great deal, because the fetishism it anatomises is the common sense of our own age. We live surrounded by economic categories that present themselves as facts of nature — the "return" to capital, the "reward" of the entrepreneur, the yield of the rentier and the platform-landlord booked as the wages of innovation — and Marx's demonstration that these surface forms are the most fetishistic expression of a social relation, not its explanation, is still the deepest answer we have to the naturalisation of what capitalism distributes. His recovery of the radicals who turned Ricardo against capital is a reminder that the classics can be read for emancipation as well as apology; and his distinction between a science that seeks the hidden relation and a "vulgarity" that rests content with the surface is a standing challenge to every economics, Western or Soviet, that mistakes the appearance of its world for its truth. Cleared of the catechism that froze it into a fourth gospel, this last volume of Marx's unfinished history is not the charter of any plan but the anatomy of a fetishism we still inhabit — and the tools to see through it.