Introduction

Introductory Note

There is now available to the English-speaking public, in a new Pelican edition, a more accurate and beautiful translation of Marx’s Capital, Vol. 1. by Ben Fowkes. The relevance of Marx's work to an analysis of today's global crisis, and the need to answer the vulgarization of Marx's Capital contained in the Introduction by the Trotskyist-Maixist, Ernest Mandel, makes the publication of this pamphlet especially urgent. The British and United States Marxist-Humanists therefore asked me to write a special Introduction to the republication of the four chapters on the three volumes of Capital that first appeared in Marxism and Freedom, herein reproduced exactly as originally written in 1957, except, in the case of footnotes. (1) page references to the Kerr edition of Capital, Vol. I. will also include the corresponding pagination of the new Pelican edition; (2) the expansion with new material of several footnotes; and (3) a new postscriptum added directly to p. 10, Chapter VI, on the Paris Commune. The reproduced chapters follow the pagination of this pamphlet. I have also appended a critique of Tony Cliff. — R.D.