No book has been more revered and less read than this one. Capital was published in Hamburg in 1867, the only one of its three volumes Marx lived to see through the press; the second and third he left as manuscripts, and it fell to Engels to assemble them after his friend's death. It was the fruit of a quarter of a century — the long years in the Reading Room of the British Museum, kept alive by Engels's money and broken by the deaths of his children — and Marx knew it was unfinished even as it appeared. What appeared, and what you hold, is Volume One: the analysis of how capital produces itself, of the working day, of machinery, of the accumulation that made the modern world. It is the part of the design that Marx polished to a high finish, and it can be read on its own. That it can be read on its own is one reason it became something its author never intended it to be — a scripture.
The text here is the English of 1887, translated by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling and edited by Frederick Engels, who checked it against the later German editions and Anglicised Marx's examples with his own hand. It is, in a real sense, Engels's English Capital as much as Marx's German one, and it carries the prefaces and afterwords — to the first German edition, to the French, to the second, third and fourth German, to the English — in which the two men argued over how the book should be read. Progress Publishers in Moscow reprinted this translation and sent it round the world in editions of a size no commercial house could match. To open it now is to open the most influential single volume of the nineteenth century in the words its authors approved for English readers.
What the book does supremely, it does from its first move. Marx does not begin with the state, or the market, or the great men of commerce; he begins with a single commodity, the "cell-form" of bourgeois wealth, because "the wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as an immense accumulation of commodities." From that unremarkable object he draws the whole system out. The commodity has a use and a price, and the price conceals a secret: that behind the equal exchange of things lies an unequal relation between people. This is the discovery on which everything turns — that the worker sells not labour but labour-power, the capacity to work, and that the working day is longer than the hours needed to reproduce its price, so that a surplus is pumped out in the very act of a fair bargain. Marx takes us, in one of the great sentences of the book, out of the marketplace "where everything takes place on the surface and in view of all men," that "very Eden of the innate rights of man" ruled by "Freedom, Equality, Property," down into "the hidden abode of production, on whose threshold there stares us in the face 'No admittance except on business.'" The critique of political economy is precisely this descent: the showing of exploitation inside, and not against, the rules of the fair exchange.
And it does something else that no economics textbook does: it names the enchantment. In the chapter on what Marx calls the fetishism of commodities, he shows how, under this mode of production, "a definite social relation between men" assumes "in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things." Human labour, coordinated through the market, comes back to its authors as the power of money and goods over them, as if value were a property of objects rather than a relation among people. This is the deepest thing in the book, and the most easily forgotten by those who would later turn Capital into a manual. Then there is the fury. The chapter on the working day is history and moral witness at once — the children in the match factories, the seamstresses worked to death — driven by a logic that Marx catches in the capitalist's own motto, "Après moi le déluge!" And the closing part, on so-called primitive accumulation, tears the polite story of thrift and enterprise to pieces: the real origin of capital was conquest, enslavement, enclosure and plunder, a history "written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire," so that capital comes into the world "dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt." The book ends on a prophecy stated as a law of the process itself: the centralisation of capital reaches a point where "the expropriators are expropriated."
It is an honest introduction that also says where the book is unfinished, and it is unfinished in ways that matter. This is Volume One alone. The questions it postpones — how values become the prices we actually see, how the surplus is shared out among industrialists, merchants, bankers and landlords, how the system's crises arise and recur — Marx deferred to volumes he did not complete, and Engels had to reconstruct the third from drafts. Read without that knowledge, some of Volume One reads as more closed than Marx meant it. The passages on the "general law of capitalist accumulation," which describe a growing mass of misery at one pole and wealth at the other, were later taken as a flat prophecy that workers must grow absolutely poorer without end — a reading the twentieth century did not bear out and that Marx's own more careful formulations do not require. And Capital is a critique of the existing order, not a design for the next one: Marx says almost nothing here about how a socialist economy would actually be run, and he said little of it anywhere, on principle, distrusting recipes for "the cook-shops of the future." That silence is not a defect of the book. It became a problem only for those who wanted to quarry a blueprint out of it and, finding none, supplied their own while keeping his name on the cover.
Which is the question this great text puts to the state that canonised it: was that state consistent with the book it printed in millions? Capital was made the foundation stone of an official science, Marxist-Leninist political economy, taught by rote from Moscow to Vladivostok and codified in the manuals this very publisher issued — the Academy's fat Political Economy textbook, the potted primers that reduced three volumes to a set of laws to be recited. And the recitation inverted the book. Capital is, from its first page to its last, the critique of the commodity, of wage-labour, of money, of the fetishism by which human relations appear as the movement of things. The society that made it holy kept the wage and the money-form, set piece-rates of exactly the kind Marx anatomises in his chapter on piece-wages, imposed labour discipline and one-man management and the stopwatch, and measured its socialism in tons of pig-iron and plan-fulfilment percentages — the fetishism of the product raised to a principle of government. The book that taught workers to read the wage as the form which hides their exploitation was published, in vast printings, by a state that paid wages and jailed the workers who struck against them. Marx's own categories, turned homeward, described the thing that was banning their use.
The proof is in what the official science did with Marx's method. The writings in which that method is most alive — the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, with their theory of alienated labour, and the Grundrisse, the vast notebooks in which Capital was drafted — were published late and handled at arm's length, because their Hegelian, humanist Marx, for whom communism was the overcoming of estrangement, embarrassed a doctrine that preferred its Marx in the form of iron laws. When Soviet scholars in the 1920s took the analysis of the value-form seriously and argued about it freely — Isaak Rubin's Essays on Marx's Theory of Value is the finest of that work — the debate was closed down by administrative means; Rubin was arrested at the decade's turn and perished in the purges. To study Capital had become dangerous; to quote it was compulsory. This is the exact signature of reification: a living argument frozen into an icon, the icon set up precisely so that no one need argue any more. The canonised Capital, like the embalmed body in the mausoleum, was the measure of the betrayal and not its cause.
None of which is a charge against Marx or against the revolution that first raised his book to a banner. The Bolsheviks who seized power in 1917 did so in a ruined and encircled country, and much of what hardened afterwards began as the improvisation of a siege — civil war, blockade, famine, the physical destruction of the very working class in whose name the state ruled. The tradition that kept faith with the living Marx located the degeneration there, in the isolation of the revolution once the German rising failed and in the usurpation of power by a privileged bureaucracy, and not in the founding analysis. It was Trotsky, in The Revolution Betrayed, who used Marx's own tools on the Soviet Union itself — asking what social relations lay behind the plan's fetish of output, whose labour the new stratum lived on — and thereby did what the textbooks forbade: he turned the critique of political economy on the state that had made it a catechism. That is the difference between the two Marxisms that share these pages. One recites that the commodity conceals a social relation and then forbids you to ask which social relation the recital conceals. The other reads the book as Marx wrote it, as an instrument for seeing through appearances, and is willing to point it anywhere.
So what is Capital worth now, a century and a half on and a generation past the state that claimed it? It is worth exactly what it always was and never was allowed to be: not a bible of "Marxist economics," not a plan for an economy, but the most powerful critique ever written of the way of producing wealth that still governs the planet. Its object has not gone away. The commodity still presents itself as an immense accumulation; labour is still bought as a capacity and worked for longer than it costs; the fetish still makes the movement of prices and shares look like a force of nature rather than the sum of what people do to one another; and the blood and dirt of accumulation are still being shed, now in the mines and sweatshops and warehouses of a world market Marx could only glimpse. Read as its authors meant it, in Engels's careful English, Capital is a workshop and not a shrine — a way of thinking one is expected to use, and to turn, when the occasion demands, on any state or party that would rather one only knelt. The living current in Marxism, read against its embalming, is simply this book put back to work.