William J. Blake: An American Looks at Karl Marx
We have summarized the doctrines of Karl Marx as they appeared in the celebrated first volume of Capital.1 This is the only one of the three volumes of Marx’s major treatise that has enjoyed wide reading. It was finished by Marx himself and issued by him.
Its literary style, despite the captious references of those who have not tried to read it seriously, is remarkable. It is a storehouse of wit, satire, learning, allusiveness, and it is an expository and oratorical triumph. The freight of European thought is unloaded in precious packets in the book.
But it remains only a first volume. Marx specifically confines it to a study of capitalist production, as a process, that is, not as the real or total position of capitalist production, but a study of it, isolated from its great context, so as better to illustrate its mechanisms.
Since for Marx historical materialism is always based on the modes of production and the study of society begins with a study of production relations, this is a most apt proceeding.
True, he refers in the book to the sphere of circulation, especially that in which the capitalist buys labor-power and sells his commodities so as to realize the surplus-value therein. His study of the universal equivalent, of the general form of value, of its money manifestation, are also given in the first volume.
But basically it is the process of capitalist production, hedged by a series of assumptions, such as that goods are exchanged at values, that interests Marx. But even if the process of production be primary and the circulatory phenomena of economics derivative, the latter exist nevertheless, and if they do not reveal either the skeleton or the physiology of capitalism, they certainly are its morphological aspect. We know our friends by their appearance, whatever the zoologist may classify them as, the physician treat them as, or the chemist dissolve them into.
Capitalism presents itself to the human race not as a transient historic form but as the life they live, and they act in their daily existence as though its mask were its face; but since the history of men is also the history of their outward behavior, Marx studies that as well.
The second volume of Marx, which deals with the circulation of capital,2 and the third, that deals with profits, rent, and interest, were edited by Engels from Marx’s notes. This heroic undertaking was faithfully accomplished, but the literary style of Volume One is missing, although certain sections, like the critique of Adam Smith in the second volume and the exposition of rent in the third, are admirably written.
Not only were the notes unfinished but they are repetitious in a curious sense. For Marx was approaching his subject from many angles, and Engels wished to show how this method worked. So that while we can see that Marx ignored neither a book nor even a citation, and that he laid the resources of reading at the service of thought, yet the reader may feel as wearied as he does when he must for the hundredth time hear the leitmotif of Siegfried in Wagner’s operas.
For these and many other reasons it would not be imprudent to say that the second volume of Marx has not had a hundredth of the readers of the first, and that the more-perused third volume has not had a tenth. (We are not speaking of purchasers, but of readers.)
Where the popularizations of Marx are fat and full on the first volume, they beat a retreat on the third, except for the theory of profit, merchant’s profit, interest, and rent, and are almost silent on the second volume.
The fourth volume, Theories of Surplus-Value, has not at this writing received an English dress.
The translations of the second and third volumes of Capital, too, though conscientious (and a laborious task for which we must ever be grateful), were done by a man with an inward knowledge of German and an outward knowledge of English. Hence care must be used, since some of the sentences are errant as to meaning. New editions are now being prepared, in which the original texts of Engels and Marx are being collated and the translation undertaken by men sensitive to the precise qualities of English diction.
The controversies that have raged about Marx in German, the main vehicle of criticism, have as often converged on the third volume of Capital as on the first. We move, then, to the theory of profit as there revealed.
1. And the theory of the average rate of profit from the third volume.
2. A better classification would be: Volume I, origin and static laws of profit; Volume II, division of profits by categories, as effected in circulation; Volume III, synthesis of production and circulation in the motion of profits.