8
Preface to the First German Edition (Marx 1867)
sin, c.f. mortal sin], as compared with criticism of existing property relations. Nevertheless, there
is an unmistakable advance. I refer, e.g., to the Blue book published within the last few weeks:
“Correspondence with Her Majesty’s Missions Abroad, regarding Industrial Questions and
Trades’ Unions.” The representatives of the English Crown in foreign countries there declare in
so many words that in Germany, in France, to be brief, in all the civilised states of the European
Continent, radical change in the existing relations between capital and labour is as evident and
inevitable as in England. At the same time, on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, Mr. Wade,
vice-president of the United States, declared in public meetings that, after the abolition of slavery,
a radical change of the relations of capital and of property in land is next upon the order of the
day. These are signs of the times, not to be hidden by purple mantles or black cassocks. They do
not signify that tomorrow a miracle will happen. They show that, within the ruling classes
themselves, a foreboding is dawning, that the present society is no solid crystal, but an organism
capable of change, and is constantly changing.
The second volume of this book will treat of the process of the circulation of capital (Book II.),
and of the varied forms assumed by capital in the course of its development (Book III.), the third
and last volume (Book IV.), the history of the theory.
Every opinion based on scientific criticism I welcome. As to prejudices of so-called public
opinion, to which I have never made concessions, now as aforetime the maxim of the great
Florentine is mine:
“Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti.”
[Follow your own course, and let people talk – paraphrased from Dante]
Karl Marx
London
July 25, 1867
1
This is the more necessary, as even the section of Ferdinand Lassalle’s work against Schulze-
Delitzsch, in which he professes to give “the intellectual quintessence” of my explanations on these
subjects, contains important mistakes. If Ferdinand Lassalle has borrowed almost literally from my
writings, and without any acknowledgement, all the general theoretical propositions in his economic
works, e.g., those on the historical character of capital, on the connexion between the conditions of
production and the mode of production, &c., &c., even to the terminology created by me, this may
perhaps be due to purposes of propaganda. I am here, of course, not speaking of his detailed working
out and application of these propositions, with which I have nothing to do.
Preface to the French Edition (Marx, 1872)
To the citizen Maurice Lachâtre
Dear Citizen,
I applaud your idea of publishing the translation of “Das Kapital” as a serial. In this form the
book will be more accessible to the working class, a consideration which to me outweighs
everything else.
That is the good side of your suggestion, but here is the reverse of the medal: the method of
analysis which I have employed, and which had not previously been applied to economic
subjects, makes the reading of the first chapters rather arduous, and it is to be feared that the
French public, always impatient to come to a conclusion, eager to know the connexion between
general principles and the immediate questions that have aroused their passions, may be
disheartened because they will be unable to move on at once.
That is a disadvantage I am powerless to overcome, unless it be by forewarning and forearming
those readers who zealously seek the truth. There is no royal road to science, and only those who
do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits.
Believe me,
dear citizen,
Your devoted,
Karl Marx
London
March 18, 1872
Afterword to the Second German Edition (1873)
I must start by informing the readers of the first edition about the alterations made in the second
edition. One is struck at once by the clearer arrangement of the book. Additional notes are
everywhere marked as notes to the second edition. The following are the most important points
with regard to the text itself:
In Chapter I, Section 1, the derivation of value from an analysis of the equations by which every
exchange-value is expressed has been carried out with greater scientific strictness; likewise the
connexion between the substance of value and the determination of the magnitude of value by
socially necessary labour-time, which was only alluded to in the first edition, is now expressly
emphasised. Chapter I, Section 3 (the Form of Value), has been completely revised, a task which
was made necessary by the double exposition in the first edition, if nothing else. – Let me remark,
in passing, that that double exposition had been occasioned by my friend, Dr. L Kugelmann in
Hanover. I was visiting him in the spring of 1867 when the first proof-sheets arrived from
Hamburg, and he convinced me that most readers needed a supplementary, more didactic
explanation of the form of value. – The last section of the first chapter, “The Fetishism of
Commodities, etc.,” has largely been altered. Chapter III, Section I (The Measure of Value), has
been carefully revised, because in the first edition this section had been treated negligently, the
reader having been referred to the explanation already given in “Zur Kritik der Politischen
Oekonomie,” Berlin 1859. Chapter VII, particularly Part 2 [Eng. ed., Chapter IX, Section 2], has
been re-written to a great extent.
It would be a waste of time to go into all the partial textual changes, which were often purely
stylistic. They occur throughout the book. Nevertheless I find now, on revising the French
translation appearing in Paris, that several parts of the German original stand in need of rather
thorough remoulding, other parts require rather heavy stylistic editing, and still others painstaking
elimination of occasional slips. But there was no time for that. For I had been informed only in
the autumn of 1871, when in the midst of other urgent work, that the book was sold out and that
the printing of the second edition was to begin in January of 1872.
The appreciation which “Das Kapital” rapidly gained in wide circles of the German working class
is the best reward of my labours. Herr Mayer, a Vienna manufacturer, who in economic matters
represents the bourgeois point of view, in a pamphlet published during the Franco-German War
aptly expounded the idea that the great capacity for theory, which used to be considered a
hereditary German possession, had almost completely disappeared amongst the so-called
educated classes in Germany, but that amongst its working class, on the contrary, that capacity
was celebrating its revival.
To the present moment Political Economy, in Germany, is a foreign science. Gustav von Gulich
in his “Historical description of Commerce, Industry,” &c.,
1
especially in the two first volumes
published in 1830, has examined at length the historical circumstances that prevented, in
Germany, the development of the capitalist mode of production, and consequently the
development, in that country, of modern bourgeois society. Thus the soil whence Political
Economy springs was wanting. This “science” had to be imported from England and France as a
ready-made article; its German professors remained schoolboys. The theoretical expression of a
foreign reality was turned, in their hands, into a collection of dogmas, interpreted by them in
terms of the petty trading world around them, and therefore misinterpreted. The feeling of
scientific impotence, a feeling not wholly to be repressed, and the uneasy consciousness of having