This is the middle volume of the three that make up Theories of Surplus-Value, the historical fourth volume of Capital. Marx wrote the whole of it in a single 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 turn it into a book; 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 Two translated by Renate Simpson from the German and edited by S. Ryazanskaya, first printed in 1968, and co-issued in Britain by Lawrence & Wishart. Where Part One took the story from the Physiocrats through Adam Smith, Part Two is the Ricardo volume. It is dominated by the towering figure of David Ricardo, the last and greatest of the classical economists, and by the two questions on which Marx thought the fate of the whole science turned: the theory of rent, and the possibility of crisis.
Read on its own terms, this is the volume where Marx's powers as a critic are at their height. His treatment of Ricardo is a model of what criticism can be — not the dismissal of an enemy but the honouring of a great mind, taken at his strongest, followed step by step through his own logic to the exact point where it breaks, and shown why it breaks. Marx works through Ricardo's theory of rent and sets his own against it, disentangles the differential rent of better soils from the absolute rent that landed property as such can command; he separates, as Ricardo could not, surplus-value in general from the particular form of profit; and in the chapter on accumulation he mounts his most sustained assault on the comfortable doctrine, inherited from Jean-Baptiste Say, that a general glut of the market is impossible because every sale is also a purchase and supply creates its own demand. That doctrine, Marx shows, rests on treating the circulation of commodities as mere barter — on what he mocks as the "metaphysical equilibrium of sellers and buyers" — and it dissolves the moment money is allowed to be what it is, a store of value that can be withheld. Yet he refuses the opposite temptation of the underconsumptionists just as firmly: "The word over-production in itself leads to error," he warns, for so long as real human needs go unmet there can be no over-production of useful things — only an over-production of capital, of commodities that cannot be sold at a profit. Crisis is a disorder of the social form, not of abundance.
An honest introduction must also mark where the volume is unfinished and unsure, and here the duty is plain. This is a draft, a set of notebooks whose very order was imposed by its editors rather than by Marx, and it shows: the argument circles, breaks off, and buries its best insights in long quarrels with forgotten men. Above all, the crisis theory that generations have quarried from these pages is scattered and suggestive rather than systematic. The great chapter on general crises that a reader keeps expecting was never written; what we have are the materials for it, brilliant and incomplete, from which Marxists have built rival theories — underconsumption, disproportion, the falling rate of profit — each able to claim a paragraph of Part Two as its warrant. To read the volume as Marx left it, rather than as any school later tidied it, is to feel the questions still open.
Which is where the strange career of this book in the state that made it scripture begins. Part Two was mined above all for its crisis theory, pressed into the doctrine of the "general crisis of capitalism" — the promised final breakdown of the West forever announced and forever deferred, a barometer of loyalty to Moscow more than an analysis of anything. But the volume's categories, turned homeward, were awkward in the extreme. Marx's theory of differential rent had made the differing fertility and location of land into a precise instrument for understanding why some producers earn a surplus that others cannot; it was exactly the tool that Soviet planners, forbidden on principle to charge rent for land, oil or ore, could not bring themselves to use — and so they priced their continent's soil and minerals at nothing and squandered them on a scale the capitalist rentier would have found insane. The demonstration that crises are a disorder of the value form — of production for profit rather than for need — could be aimed outward at the West with relish, but never inward at an economy whose chronic shortages, unsaleable stockpiles and idle capacity were plainly disorders of its form of production too. The state that canonised the anatomy of capitalist rent and crisis forbade anyone to ask whether its own unpriced rents and its own recurrent disproportions wore any of the same features.
None of this is a charge against Marx, and none against the revolution that first raised his work as a banner. A backward and blockaded country genuinely had to accumulate from a low base, and the tragedy is that a real necessity was administered by a bureaucracy 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 turned Part Two's own question — whose surplus, and by what disproportions? — on the Soviet economy itself; and it was Ernest Mandel, whose Late Capitalism built its whole theory of long waves and crises on these chapters, who did with them what the manuals forbade, using Marx's unfinished crisis theory as a living tool rather than an embalmed slogan.
So what is this Ricardo volume worth now? More, perhaps, than when it was written. We live in the age its crisis chapters anticipated — of gluts amid unmet need, of idle capacity and demand propped up by debt, of the "metaphysical equilibrium" of Say's Law resurrected under new names every time an economist insists that markets clear themselves. Marx's refusal of both the complacency that denies crisis and the underconsumptionism that mistakes it for mere shortage is still the sanest starting point we have. His rent theory, too, has outlived the socialism that would not use it: in an age of resource depletion, of oil and land and now the very atmosphere treated as free gifts to be exhausted, the analysis of who captures the surplus that scarce nature commands is more urgent than ever. And his way of reading Ricardo — with the generosity that honours a science and the rigour that finds its limit — is worth more than any dogma built on him. Cleared of the catechism that froze it into a barometer of the West's collapse, this middle volume of Marx's history is not the charter of any plan but the anatomy of the economy we still inhabit, its crises and its rents alike.