Volume Three is where Capital comes up for air. The first volume took the reader down into what Marx called the hidden abode of production and found there the secret of surplus-value; the second followed that value as it circulated and was realised; and the third climbs back to the surface of society, to the daylight world of profit and interest and rent, and shows how the laws worked out in the depths appear — disguised, inverted, almost unrecognisable — in the ordinary consciousness of businessmen and economists. It is the volume that speaks the language of the everyday, of the balance sheet and the bank and the landlord's rent-roll, and for that reason it is the one a reader can open at almost any page and feel the shock of recognition. It is also the volume Marx never lived to complete. He drafted its manuscript in 1864 and 1865, before Volume One was even in print, and then left it; and after his death in 1883 it fell to Engels to make a book of the fragments, a labour that took him the better part of a decade and gave the world, in 1894, the text you now hold — here in the English of Progress Publishers, Moscow, the edition prepared by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism and long co-issued in the United States by International Publishers of New York.
Engels was, as always, candid about the state of what Marx had left him, and his candour is the honest place to begin, because no volume of Capital passes through a second hand as visibly as this one. What Marx left was not a manuscript needing tidying but a great unfinished argument — whole chapters sketched, others broken off, the reasoning sometimes worked to a fine polish and sometimes only indicated. Engels ordered it, filled its gaps, smoothed its transitions, and in places sharpened Marx's tentative formulations into firmer statements than Marx himself had committed to. This was not falsification; it was the only way the book could exist at all, and Engels laboured at it with a self-denial that does him honour. But it matters, and it matters especially for what came later. When the Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe finally published Marx's own 1864–65 manuscript a century afterward, scholars could at last measure editor against author, and they found that the shape of some of the volume's most famous doctrines — above all the status of the law of the falling rate of profit — owed more to Engels's editing than the sacred-text treatment of Volume Three would ever admit. A book already shaped once is a book especially easy to shape again.
The volume's architecture is a descent from the abstract to the concrete. Part One converts surplus-value into profit and shows how the rate of profit, calculated on the whole capital advanced, disguises the rate of exploitation that produced it. Part Two takes the great step: the formation of a general rate of profit across competing capitals, and with it the transformation of the values of commodities into their prices of production — the demonstration that individual prices systematically diverge from values precisely so that the law of value can assert itself over the system as a whole. Part Three states the law Marx thought the deepest tendency of the whole mode of production, the tendency of the rate of profit to fall as accumulation raises the weight of machinery over living labour, together with the counteracting influences that hold it off — the theory from which every serious Marxist account of capitalist crisis has since been built. The later parts anatomise the forms in which surplus-value is divided among its claimants: commercial profit, interest and the whole architecture of credit, and the ground-rent that the landlord draws. And it closes, in the chapter on the trinity formula, with the most concentrated statement Marx ever wrote of what he called the fetishism of economic relations — the way capital, land and labour come to appear as three natural sources each yielding its natural return, so that the divided spoils of exploitation present themselves as the just wages of three cooperating "factors."
Two things in this volume have proved more durable than almost anything else Marx wrote. The first is the analysis of credit and what he named fictitious capital — paper claims on future surplus-value that circulate, swell, and collapse with a logic of their own, the moneyed world of the stock exchange and the bill of exchange traced back to the real accumulation it both serves and mocks. A reader who lived through 2008 will find these chapters uncannily current, as though written about our own age of leverage and asset bubbles rather than about the mid-Victorian money market. The second is the closing vision of the realm of freedom. Beyond the sphere of material necessity, Marx writes, "begins that development of human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can blossom forth only with this realm of necessity as its basis." And then the sentence that ought to be carved over the door of every socialism that claims his name: "The shortening of the working-day is its basic prerequisite." Wealth, for the Marx of Volume Three, is finally measured not in output but in free time — in the disposable hours a rational society wins back for the free development of its members. Hold that sentence; we shall need it.
It is an honest introduction that also says where the volume is unfinished or unsure, and here that duty is heavy, for Volume Three left the movement two problems it has quarrelled over ever since. The first is the transformation of values into prices, which Engels, in his preface, turned almost into a sporting challenge: he had defied the economists, he recalls, to show "in which way an equal average rate of profit can and must come about, not only without a violation of the law of value, but on the very basis of it." Marx's own solution, when it appeared, satisfied few; within a decade Bortkiewicz had shown that Marx's arithmetic could not hold both of its promised identities at once, and the "transformation problem" has been a hundred-year battlefield of Marxist economics down to the present. The second is the falling rate of profit itself, which Marx stated as a tendency hedged by counter-tendencies so powerful that he never claimed to have shown which must win — a genuine openness that Engels's editing narrowed and that the later official Marxism closed altogether, hardening a subtle tendency into an iron law of collapse. To read the volume as Marx left it, rather than as the manuals recited it, is to feel the questions still live.
Which brings us to the strange career of this book in the state that made it scripture. Of the three volumes, Volume Three was the one the Soviet Union found most useful as a weapon and most awkward as a mirror. Its crisis theory was pressed into the doctrine of the general crisis of capitalism, the promised final breakdown forever arriving; its anatomy of profit and rent and interest was read out, chapter and verse, as the indictment of the Western economies. But the categories it dissects — profit, rent, interest, the unequal rates that competition equalises — were forbidden to turn homeward. Officially the USSR had abolished them: no profit, no rent, no law of value, only the plan. And yet they would not stay abolished. The law of value under socialism became the great undead question of Soviet economics, conceded by Stalin himself in 1952 to "operate" still, in "transformed" form, even as he denied that surplus or rent could exist in a workers' state; and when the economy seized up, the Liberman proposals and the Kosygin reform of 1965 quietly smuggled profit back through the front door as the enterprises' index of success. The differential rent that Volume Three had made a precise instrument was exactly the tool Soviet planners were ideologically forbidden to use, and so they priced land and oil and ore at nothing and squandered them on a continental scale. The state that canonised the anatomy of capitalist exploitation could not bring itself to ask whether its own extraction of a surplus it did not distribute, its own unpriced rents, its own driving of labour, wore any of the same forms. That refusal — to cite the book endlessly and to think with it never — is the exact signature of reification.
Nowhere is the inversion sharper than at the volume's emancipatory summit. Marx had made free time the measure of wealth and the shortening of the working day the prerequisite of freedom; the Soviet order made labour output the measure of everything and lengthened, in every real sense, the working day of the Soviet worker — the storming and the tonnage-plan, the queue and the second shift, the old rule that those who will not work shall not eat turned from a rebuke to idle owners into a discipline over the exhausted. The book's own telos, the association of free producers rationally regulating their metabolism with nature and winning back their hours, stood as the standing measure of how far the regime had departed from it. This is no charge against Marx, and none against the revolution that first raised his work to 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 the volume's own question homeward and asked whose surplus the plan was pumping; and it was Ernest Mandel, whose Late Capitalism built its whole theory of the long waves and the crises on these chapters, who did with Volume Three what the manuals forbade — used it as a living tool rather than an embalmed relic.
So what is Volume Three worth now, past the state that mined it for slogans and buried what it could not use? It is worth more, perhaps, than when it was written, because the world has grown into it. Ours is the age of fictitious capital come of age — of finance towering over production, of asset bubbles and leverage and the rentier's return, of an economy in which the trinity formula's naturalised returns to "capital" and "land" are the common sense that Volume Three exists to shatter. Its account of why profit, interest and rent appear as the innocent yield of cooperating factors, rather than as the divided plunder of unpaid labour, is still the deepest answer we have to the naturalisation of what capitalism distributes. And its closing horizon — free time, not output, as the measure of human wealth — is the anti-productivist, ecological, emancipatory core that both capital and its bureaucratic caricature contrived to bury, and that a living Marxism recovers against them both. Read as Marx drafted it and Engels assembled it, cleared of the catechism that froze it into an icon, this last and most worldly volume of Capital is not the charter of any plan but the anatomy of the economy we actually inhabit — and, turned homeward as Trotsky turned it, the measure of every order, Western or Soviet, that still extracts a surplus in the dark and calls the daylight forms of it natural. The living current in this book is simply Volume Three put back to work.