The Logic and Scope of Capital, Volumes II and III

CHAPTER EIGHT

THE LOGIC AND SCOPE OF CAPITAL, VOLUMES II AND III

“All science would be superfluous if the appearance, the form and the nature of things were wholly indentical.” (CAPITAL, Vol. Ill).

Political economy has produced two theories between which it oscillated: (1) that production creates its own market; and (2) that it is impossible for the worker “to buy back” the products he himself produced. Marx's great contribution consisted in dialectically combining these. The dominant feature remained the fact that production did create its own market. But this did not negate the existence of under-consumption. It merely showed that within capitalistic production there resides a disregard for the limits of consumption.

The outstanding characteristic of Volume II, whose subject is the process of circulation, is its demonstration that “realizing surplus value,” that is, selling, is not the problem. The significance of the first two parts dealing with the metamorphoses and turnover of capital lies in the analysis that the very continuity of the process of circulation involves the sphere of reproduction. Thus, even when Marx’s point of departure is the market, reproduction is of the essence.

Reproduction, he states, must be posed “in its fundamental simplicity,” that is to say, it is necessary not to get lost in “a vicious circle of prerequisites”–of constantly going to market with the products produced and returning from market with commodities bought.

1) The Two Departments of Social Production: Means of Production and Means of Consumption

To cut through the tangle of markets, Marx divides the entire social product into two, and only two, main departments: Department I produces means of production, and Department II produces means of consumption.1 The division is symptomatic of the class division in society. Marx categorically refused to divide social production into more than two departments, for example, a third department for the production of gold, although gold is neither a means of production nor a means of consumption, but rather a means of circulation. That is an entirely subordinate question, however, to the basic postulate of a closed society in which there are only two classes and hence only two decisive divisions of social production. It is the premise that decides the boundaries of the problem. The relationship between the two branches is not merely a technical one. It is rooted in the class relationship between the worker and the capitalist.

Surplus value is not some disembodied spirit floating between heaven and earth, but is embodied within means of production and within means of consumption. To try to separate surplus value from means of production and from means of consumption is to fall into the petty-bourgeois quagmire of underconsumptionism. It is impossible to have the slightest comprehension of the economic laws of capitalistic production without being oppressively aware of the role of the material form of constant capital. The material elements of simple production and reproduction–labor power, raw materials and means of production–are the elements of expanded reproduction. In order to produce ever greater quantities of products, more means of production are necessary. That, and not the “market,” is the differentia specifica of expanded reproduction.

Marx established that the social product cannot be “either” means of production “or” means of consumption. There is a preponderance of means of production over means of consumption. Marx’s point here is that the bodily form of value predetermines the destination of commodities: iron is not consumed by people but by steel; sugar is not consumed by machines but by people. Value may be indifferent to the useful form which holds it, but it must be incorporated in some use-value to be realized. Just because the capitalist is only interested in surplus value (profit) doesn't mean that he can disembody it from the article in which it is embodied.

The division of the whole product into but two departments is not a hypothesis. It is a fact. It not only is so. It must be so, for the use-values produced are not those used by workers, nor even by capitalists, but by capital. We can see this most clearly in this country, for example, where ninety per cent of pig iron is “consumed” by the companies which produce it; fifty per cent of the “market” for the products of the steel industry is the transportation industry. Where all utilitarian economists were floundering in talking of use-values because they were talking of articles for consumption, Marx shows that the use-value of the means of production shows how important is “the determination of use-value in the determination of economic orders.”2 Under capitalism, the means of production form the greater part of the two departments of social production and, therefore, also of the “market.” That is what Marx called “the real being of capital,” and that is why the market was not the problem.

The consumption market is limited to the luxuries of the capitalists, and the needs of the workers, paid at value. It cannot be larger. The only market that can expand beyond the limits of the workers paid at value is the capital goods market. Means of production literally shoot up to the sky. To illustrate this for both simple and expanded reproduction, Marx devised his famous formulas which show constant capital to be greater than variable capital and surplus value.

To understand the formulas one must comprehend the premise upon which they are built: a closed capitalist society, that is, an isolated society dominated by the law of value. For Marx, the fundamental conflict in a capitalist society is that between capital and labor; all other elements are subordinate. If this is so in life, then the first necessity in theory is to pose the problem as one between the capitalist and the worker, purely and simply. Hence, the assumption of a society consisting only of workers and capitalists. Hence, the exclusion of “third groups” and, as he states repeatedly, the exclusion of foreign trade as having nothing to do fundamentally with the conflict between the worker and the capitalist.

A capitalist society is distinguished from all previous societies by being a value-producing society. The law of value has nothing in common with the fact that in other class societies the worker was paid his means of subsistence. Under capitalism the thirst for unpaid hours of labor comes from the very nature of production and is not limited by the gluttony of the master. Value, the socially necessary labor time needed to produce commodities, is constantly changing due to the unceasing technological revolutions in production. This is a never-ending source of disturbance in the conditions of production as well as in the social relations, and distinguishes capitalism from all other modes of production. Marx’s isolated capitalist society is dominated by this law of value, and Marx does not let us forget that this law is a law of the world market. “The industrialist always has the world market before him, compares and must continually compare his cost prices with those of the whole world, and not only with those of his home market.”3

Thus, while Marx excludes foreign trade, he nevertheless places his society in the environment of the world market. These are the conditions of the problem.

Marx’s formulas were designed to serve two purposes: (1) on the one hand, he wished to expose the “incredible aberration” of Adam Smith, who “spirited away” the constant portion of capital by asserting that “in the final analysis” it dissolved itself into wages; (2) on the other hand, Marx wanted to answer the underconsumptionist argument that continued capital accumulation was impossible because of inability to sell, that is, because of “overproduction.”

Smith's “fundamentally perverted analysis”4 became part of the dogma of political economy because it dovetailed with the class interests of the capitalists to have that error retained. If, as Smith maintained, the constant portion of capital “in the final analysis” dissolved itself into wages, then the workers need not struggle against a “temporary” appropriation of the unpaid hours of labor. They need merely wait for the product of their labor to “dissolve” itself into wages. Marx proved the contrary to be true. Not only did the constant portion of capital not “dissolve” itself into wages, but it became the very instrumentality through which the capitalist gained the mastery over the living worker. Utopian socialists who didn’t grasp this freed themselves of the actualities of the class struggle.

Each of the two departments of social production comprises three elements: (1) constant capital; (2) variable capital; and (3) surplus value. Just as the division of social production into two main departments was not merely technical, so this was not a merely technical division. It was rooted in the relationship of worker to capitalist, and was inseparable from the inherent laws of capitalist production. “It is purely a tautology to say that crises are caused by the scarcity of solvent consumers, or of a paying consumption. The capitalist system does not know any other modes of consumption but a paying one, except that of the pauper or of the ‘thief’ .... But if one were to attempt to clothe this tautology with a semblance of profounder justification by saying that the working class received too small a portion of their own product, and the evil would be remedied by giving them a larger share of it, or raising their wages, we should reply that crises are precisely always preceded by a period in which wages rise generally and the working class actually get a larger share of the annual product intended for consumption. From the point of view of the advocates of ‘simple’ (!) common sense, such a period should rather remove a crisis.”5

Marx spent a seemingly interminable time in exposing the error of Smith. This was so because this was the great divide not alone between bourgeois economics and Marxism, but also between petty-bourgeois criticism, utopian socialism, and scientific socialism. There is not the wealth of statistical and historical material in Volume II, which Marx did not live to complete for publication, that there is in Volume I, which he prepared for the printer himself. This has given rise to as many misrepresentations among Marxists as among anti-Marxists. The chief objection is directed against Marx’s thesis that production creates its own market. The objectors say that this implies a “balance” between production and consumption. The truth is that the proportional relationship between Departments I and II, in the Marxian formula, means the exact opposite. Marx based himself on the laws of accumulation which he analyzed in Volume I when he showed that constant capital keeps on expanding. The exact relationship to variable capital that he gives it is seven to one. It should therefore have been clear that the “balance” that exists in the formulas–which were built on the most extreme assumptions of “an isolated nation” with no foreign trade, nor with the ordinary headaches of sales–exists solely because of the production relations under capitalism which resulted in this fantastic proportion of seven to one. That is why Marx’s categories are so immutable for capitalism and apply to no other society. They assume that what is produced is consumed because it is capitalist production, and capitalist production is the production of capital and hence is consumed by capital. Marx built his theory of capitalist breakdown on this. To deduce from the formulas that there was “no disproportion” in an ideal capitalism with no market troubles, is enough to make Marx turn in his grave.

What Marx did, in disproving the underconsumption theory was to demonstrate that there is no direct connection between production and consumption. As Lenin phrased it, in the most profound analysis that Volume II ever received: “The difference in view of the petty-bourgeois economists from the views of Marx does not consist in the fact that the first realize in general the connection between production and consumption in capitalist society, and the second do not. (This would be absurd.) The distinction consists in this, that the petty-bourgeois economists considered this tie between production and consumption to be a direct one, thought that production follows consumption. Marx shows that the connection is only an indirect one, that it is connected only in the final instance, because in capitalist society consumption follows production.” 6

The preponderance of production over consumption was considered to mean the “automatic” collapse of capitalist society. Where the classicists saw only the tendency toward equilibrium, the petty-bourgeois critics saw only the tendency away from equilibrium. Marx demonstrated that both tendencies were there, inextricably connected. Volume II is both a critique of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois thought, and an analysis of the actual movement of capitalist production. As Trotsky put it, when Stalin suddenly “discovered” that the formulas also “apply to a socialist society,” “Marx's formulas,” Trotsky wrote, “deal with a chemically pure capitalism which never existed and does not exist anywhere now. Precisely because of this, they revealed the basic tendency of every capitalism but precisely of capitalism and only of capitalism.”

2) Appearance and Reality

Volume II of CAPITAL was published posthumously, in 1885, by Marx's lifelong collaborator, Frederick Engels. This posthumous publication hit a blank wall in the Second International. It seemed to pass by both the reformists and the revolutionaries within the International. In fact, the greatest revision came from the revolutionary martyr, Rosa Luxemburg. As for Karl Kautsky, the theoretical leader of the Second International, he wrote sophomoric essays on Volume II. The sole exception to this common obtuseness was Lenin. It was not because Lenin was “smarter” than Kautsky that he knew how “to apply” the concepts Marx developed in Volume II to the actual development of the Russian economy. In Russia, the question whether capitalism could develop without foreign markets was not the theoretical question it was in Germany, where imperialist expansion was conquering new markets daily. In backward Russia, which could not successfully compete for the world market, there arose a whole school of theoreticians, the Narodniki (Populists) who maintained that “since” capitalism could not exist without a market, and “since” Russia had come too late on the historic scene to secure one, Russia could “therefore” skip capitalism and go directly from the mir (peasant commune) to communism. Lenin hit out against them theoretically and practically. He combined both attacks in a most profound study of The Development of Capitalism in Russia. It cleared the ground for Marxism.

“The real barrier of capitalist production,” Marx concludes, “is capital itself. It is the fact that capital and its self-expansion appear as the starting and closing point, as the motive and aim of production; that production is merely production for capital, and not vice versa, the means of production mere means for an ever expanding system of the life process for the benefit of the society of producers.”24 In opposition to this he points to the fact that “the realm of freedom does not commence until the point is passed where labor under the compulsion of necessity and external utility is required. In the very nature of things it lies beyond the sphere of material production in the strict meaning of the term.”25

The constant revolutions in production, and the constant expansion of constant capital, writes Marx once again, necessitate, of course, an extension of the market. But as he has explained over and over again, both theoretically and practically, the enlargement of the market in a capitalist nation is limited by the fact that the worker is paid at value. This is the supreme manifestation of his simplifying assumption that the worker is paid at value. In Volume III, we see that this is the innermost cause of crisis—that in production, not in the market, labor creates a value greater than it is itself. The worker is a producer of overproduction. It cannot be otherwise in a value-producing society, where the means of consumption, being but a moment in the reproduction of labor power, cannot be bigger than the needs of capital for labor power. That is the fatal defect of capitalist production. On the one hand, the capitalist must increase his market. On the other hand, it cannot be larger.

The crisis that follows is not caused by a shortage in “effective demand.” On the contrary, it is the crisis that causes a shortage in “effective demand.” The worker employed yesterday is unemployed today. A crisis occurs not because there has been a scarcity of markets. As we saw in theory, and as 1929 showed in practice, the market is largest just before a crisis. From the capitalist viewpoint, however, there is occurring an unsatisfactory distribution of “income” between recipients of wages and those of surplus value or profits. The capitalist decreases his investments and the resulting stagnation of production appears as overproduction. Of course, there is a contradiction between production and consumption. Of course, there is “inability to sell.” But the inability to sell manifests itself as such because of the fundamental antecedent decline in the rate of profit, which has nothing whatever to do with inability to sell.

Marx considered the theory of the declining rate of profit to be the “pons asini” of the whole political economy, that which divides one theoretic system from another. The classical political economists felt it, but they couldn't understand it, because they could not conceive that the capitalist system, which they considered not a historical, transitory system, but a permanent one, had something in its vitals that would doom it. When Marx showed that decline in the rate of profit was due to the fact of the relative ever-smaller use of living labor, which is the only source of surplus value, to ever-greater use of machines, the capitalist pointed instead to the mass of products and hence the mass of profits. They thought thereby to forget the fall of the rate. Even some Marxists considered that the tendency for the decline in the rate of profit had so many counteracting tendencies in the mass of profits from mass production and in imperialist expansion that it was central to no one’s, not even Lenin’s, thinking before 1929. Only then people began to see that this was not theory but reality. They then began to look for solutions everywhere except in the reorganization of the process of production itself by the laborer himself.

What Marx is describing, in his analysis of what he calls “the general contradiction of capitalism,” is (1) the degradation of the worker to an appendage of a machine; (2) the constant growth of the unemployed army; and (3) capitalism’s own downfall because of its inability to give greater employment to labor. Since labor power is the supreme commodity of capitalist production, the only source of its value and surplus value, capitalism’s inability to reproduce it dooms capitalism itself. As we saw from the beginning, Marx’s critique of capitalist society was based primarily on the perverse, inverted relation of dead to living labor at the point of production, and extended to the surface of society where the fetishism of commodities made the relations between people assume “the fantastic form of the relations between things.” Now, in Volume III, he says the very existence of commodities, and especially of commodities as products of capital, “implies the externalization of the conditions of social production and the personification of the material foundation of production, which characterize the entire capitalist mode of production.” Over and over again, Marx categorically asserts that since all labor under capitalism is forced labor, Plan can be nothing but the organization of production under the domination of the machine. As he told Proudhon from the first, to try to bring order into the anarchy of the market of a society based on the factory Plan, could only mean subjecting society to “one single master.” Marx warned then: not to see the plan inherent in the activity of the revolutionary proletariat must force one to pose an external factor to do the planning. He dismissed, with great contempt, Proudhon's Plan to do away with exchange. In “Unravelling the Inner Contradiction,” Marx shows that in capitalism’s “disorder is its order.”

Proudhon was neither the first nor the last of the Planners, as our age knows much better than Marx’s. Planning is not limited to idealists. The abstract materialist who views technological development outside of the class relationship also slips back into considering the capitalistic factors of production as mere factors of any social form of production. That is why Marx created new categories to describe the manner in which machines and labor unite under a capitalistic economy. Marx developed his analysis of capitalist production in opposition to all Planners—abstract materialist as well as idealist.

In Volume I of CAPITAL, the nature of the cooperative form of the labor process is held out in sharp contrast to the hierarchic structure of capitalist control. In Volume II, Marx isolates the capitalist nation and analyses it as a unit: ". . . we must not follow the manner copied by Proudhon from bourgeois economics, which looks upon this matter as though a society with a capitalist mode of production would lose its specific historical and economic characteristics by being taken as a unit. Not at all. We have in that case to deal with the aggregate capitalist.”26

As we saw, the whole of Volume II is built, not on individual, private capital, but on aggregate, national capital. In Volume III,

Marx returns to the creative plan of the workers as the plan “most adequate to their human nature and most worthy of it”: “Just as the savage must wrestle with nature in order to satisfy his wants, in order to maintain his life and reproduce it, so civilized man has to do it, and he must do it in all forms of society and all possible modes of production. With his development the realm of natural necessity expands, because his wants increase; but at the same time the forces of production increase by which these wants are satisfied. The freedom in this field cannot consist of anything else but of the fact that socialized man, the associated producers, regulate their interchange with nature rationally, bring it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by some blind power; that they accomplish their task with the least expenditure of energy under conditions most adequate to their human nature and most worthy of it. But it always remains a realm of necessity.

“Beyond it begins that development of human power which is its own end, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can flourish only upon the realm of necessity as its basis. The shortening of the working day is its fundamental premise.”27

Thus we see that it isn’t only the young Marx but the mature Marx to whom the creative role of labor is the key to all else. It isn’t only that this creative plan of the workers, in opposition to the authoritarian Plan of the capitalist, permeates all three volumes of CAPITAL. It is that the actual necessity of revolt will arise out of the fact that capitalism, as conditions, activity, and purpose, is destroying society. The only force which can overcome this necessity therefore is a freedom which in itself and for itself inseparably combines objective conditions, subjective activity and purpose. In the Grundrisse Marx said that, once the productive process “is stripped of its antagonistic form,” “the measure of wealth will then no longer be labor time, but leisure time.”28 The free time liberated from capitalist exploitation would be for the free development of the individual's powers. The conception of freedom that the young Marx had when he broke from bourgeois society as a revolutionary Hegelian remained with him throughout his life.

Essentially Marx said what he wanted to say. This is true not only of Volumes II and Ill, which Engels edited with scrupulous care and presented exactly as Marx had written, but even Book IV, with the structure of which Karl Kautsky did tamper when he published it as Theories of Surplus Value. The reason is that Volume I, published by Marx is not only, as he put it, a whole in itself. It is the whole.

He reorganized29 the last part, “Accumulation of Capital,” in order to show (1) where Volumes II and III (including Theories of Surplus Value as Book IV of Volume Ill) belong logically: (2) how they are dialectically connected with Volume I; and (3) what is the law of motion of capitalism in general and the dialectic of his analysis in particular. The “Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation” thus ends with the two absolute opposites—capital accumulation and the revolt of the workers headed for a clash and at the same time going in opposite directions—the first to its collapse, the second creating “the new passions and forces” for reconstructing society on new, socialist-humanist beginnings.

There are theoreticians who are willing to say that the analysis holds for Russia, but not in the exceptional soil of America. If it wasn’t the American frontier that made America different, it was the American pragmatic character; and if not that, it is that the American workers “aren't class conscious.” Be that as it may, the economists now do give Marx credit for understanding “history.” Some even admit that economic theory has indeed been running a losing race with history, except in the case of Marx. One has even gone so far as to “admire” Marx for his “idea of theory” and his ability to transform historic narrative into “historic raisonne.”30 But none have the slightest conception that Marx's “idea of theory” is as profound as it is only because he had broken with the bourgeois conception of theory and placed the worker in the center of all his thinking. There is no other source for social theory.

It isn't that Marx “glorified” workers. It is that he knew what is their role in production. Just as history has not discharged theory from its mission of criticizing existing society, so the workers, on whose back all the exploitation occurs must—to straighten up to the height of men—throw all this off their backs and therefore can criticize it and overcome it and see ahead.

It isn't that Marx vilified capitalists and their ideologists. It is that he knew their role in production and how limited, therefore, their outlook. Because they were satisfied, they couldn’t grasp all of reality, and therefore their ideology was false.

Marx, when he began, didn't know all the implications of his materialistic conception of history. Thus, although he saw the mode of production as determinant for ideology, he thought all that needs to be done to demonstrate the bankruptcy of bourgeois thought is to show that the bourgeoisie can no longer be scientific and that with the development of the class struggle their economic science has become “vulgar” and their ideologists “prize fighters.” He, on the other hand, would show the decline, and then the workers as changing the world which had long had its interpreters. It was only in the 1860’s, that he changed the very structure of CAPITAL and placed theories at the end of all volumes. As we saw, it was in that period that he gave the explanation that what was written first was put last because that is the ordinary way a theoretical work develops. That is to say, as an intellectual he needed to clear his own mind first. Only then comes the creative part with the workers themselves not only as activists but as thinkers. Thus, in the same way in which the “Primitive Accumulation of Capital,” was placed at the end of Volume I, so the “History of Theory” (or, Theories of Surplus Value, as Kautsky renamed it) was put at the end of Volume III, that is to say, at the end of the entire work.

This is the outline of work as Marx set it down when Volume I was going to press:
Book I: Process of Production
Book II: Process of Circulation (both of these books were intended as Volume I, but only Book I was published by Marx during his lifetime)
Book III: Forms of the Process as a Whole
Book IV: History of Theory

The entire work had been completed when the first Volume went to press. After the second edition of CAPITAL, Volume I, Marx reworked Volume II. It is the last piece of work we have from his pen. If there is any truth at all to the incomplete state in which Volumes II and III were published, it is the exact opposite of what is implied by those who are so anxious to stress the incomplete state of the manuscripts. Marx himself tells us how he. intended to change the manuscripts, or rather the extent to which he would have changed them, had he lived to edit them himself. He says, in his letter to Danielson, the Russian translator of Volume I, not to wait for Volume II:31 “First of all I would under no circumstances consent to publish the second volume before the present English industrial crisis has reached its limit ... it is necessary scrupulously to follow the present development of events to their full maturity before you are in a position ‘to utilize’ these facts ‘productively,’ I mean ‘theoretically’ . . . .

“Meanwhile—strikes and disturbances everywhere.

"Secondly a tremendous mass of material received by me not only from Russia but also from the United States, etc., gives me a pleasant excuse to continue research instead of definitively working over for publication.

“The United States at present have overtaken England in the rapidity of economical progress, though they lag behind in the extent of acquired wealth; but at the same time the masses are quicker and have greater political means in their hands to resent the form of a progress accomplished at their expense. I need not prolong the antitheses.”

It is clear that Russia and America were to play the role in Volumes II and III that England played in Volume I. Lenin filled it out for Russia. In their attitude to Automation, the American workers are concretizing this for America.

Marx removed the question of value from a dispute among intellectuals and transformed it into a question of the struggle of the proletariat for a new society. The material and the ideal were never too far apart.32 He best summarized his own social vision when he defined the new social order as a society in which “the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all,” and that never again would the rights of the State be counterposed to that of the individual. Human freedom is the principle toward which he worked and his philosophy can be most fittingly called a New Humanism.

There was no difference between Marx the Hegelian and Marx the revolutionary, nor between Marx the theoretician and Marx the practical organizer. He finished CAPITAL and turned to the Paris Commune not merely as “activist” and “materialist” but as idealist. As we saw, he himself summed up most profoundly the fact that the ideal is never far from the real when he wrote that the Communards “have no ideals to realize but to set free the elements of the new society.”

• 1It wasn't only the Marxists who saw that this division had more theoretic sense than all that political economy has produced on the question of the “market,” After the 1929 crash, some academic economists realized that if they were going to get any distance in understanding the crisis, they would have to understand production better. By 1942, Joan Robinson asserted that with this division of total output into two, and only two major groups, Marx had devised “a simple and penetrating argument.” (Cf. Joan Robinson, An Essay on Marxian Economics, p. 51.)
• 2Theories of Surplus Value, Vol. I, Part II, p. 170, Russian ed.
• 3CAPITAL, Vol. Ill, p. 396. Pelican, p. 455.
• 4CAPITAL, Vol. I, p. 647. Pelican, p. 736.
• 5CAPITAL, Vol. II, pp. 475-6. Pelican, p. 486-7.
• 6Chapter I of V.I. Lenin, The Development of Capitalism in Russia, Russian edition. This chapter has been omitted from the English edition. My translation of this chapter appears in New International, October, November, and December, 1943, available in the Raya Dunayevskaya Collection, on deposit with the Labor History Archives of Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan.
• 7What complicated the argument was that most of her critics were reformists. She, however, attacked both reformists and revolutionaries indiscriminately, and labeled all her critics "epigones."
• 8Page 401, Russian edition.
• 9Theories of Surplus Value, Vol. II, Part II, page 161, Russian edition.
• 10CAPITAL, Volume I, page 810. Pelican, p. 900.
• 11Engels, Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science. A shortened and popular version of it, “Socialism, Utopian and Scientific,” is included in Selected Works, Vol. II.
• 12CAPITAL, Vol. I, p. 842, the Dona Torr, International Publishers edition. Pelican, p. 105.
• 13Nothing is simple these days. In 1931 Russia found out that, although she had complete monopoly of everything including sales, her tractors just couldn't “compete,” that is to say, stand up in production. To buy tractors from Ford meant, however, to pay in gold-standard money at a time when the agricultural crisis in her country made it impossible to have agricultural products to sell to get the money. At another time when she wanted to dump wheat on the international market she found doors closed there. See Part V.
• 14Hegel, “Logic,” Paragraph 81, p. 148.
• 15Letter of July 11, 1868.
• 16CAPITAL, Volume I, page 59. Pelican, p. 142.
• 17CAPITAL, Volume I, p. 708. Pelican, p. 798.
• 18CAPITAL, Volume II, pp. 132-133. Pelican, p. 114.
• 19CAPITAL, Volume III, p. 58. Pelican p. 136.
• 20CAPITAL, Volume III, page 966. Pelican, p. 969.
• 21CAPITAL, Vol. I, p. 647. Pelican, p. 737.
• 22CAPITAL, Vol. I, p. 239. Pelican, p. 324, ftn. 3.
• 23CAPITAL, Vol. Ill, p. 568. Pelican, p. 615.
• 24Grundrisse
• 25CAPITAL, Vol. III, pp. 954-955. Pelican, p. 958-9.
• 26CAPITAL, Vol. II, p. 503.Pelican, p. 509.
• 27CAPITAL, Vol. III, p. 955. Pelican, p. 959.
• 28Grundrisse, p. 596, German only, (see footnote 58). [Pelican, p. 708.]
• 29Originally, Marx had intended to end Volume I with a Chapter VI, entitled, "The Direct Results of the Process of Production," which would have summed up the volume simply and made the transition to Volume II without anticipating its problems and results. Then, both because of health and because of his deepened comprehension of the subject, he rewrote the last part as the "Accumulation of Capital." It was this section, again, which had undergone the greatest revision for the second edition of CAPITAL. The original ending can be found in the Archives of Marx-Engels, Vol. II (VII), both in the original German and in Russian translation. The best way to follow the changes in "Accumulation of Capital," is to get the Dona Torr edition which singles out the changed passages and publishes them separately at the end of the volume. The Kerr edition, which is the standard edition and which has been used here, publishes the French edition as corrected by Marx, but the changes are not singled out.
  Marx's "Accumulation of Capital," in Volume I, anticipates Volumes II and III, in the same manner in which the "Absolute Idea," in Hegel's Science of Logic, anticipates the Philosophy of Nature, and Philosophy of Mind, which ultimately completed his philosophic system. Marx's letter to S. Meyer, April 30, 1867, on his health, says: "I laugh at the so-called 'practical' men and their wisdom. If one chose to be an ox one could of course turn one's back on the agonies of mankind and look after one's own skin. But I should really have regarded myself as unpractical if I had pegged out without completely finishing my book, at least in the manuscript."
• 30Joseph A. Schumpeter, A History of Economic Analysis.
• 31Letter of April 10, 1879; Letters on Capital, Russian edition.
• 32[ed note: pamphlet forget this footnoted, added in from the book]In this Hegel was not as far distant as would appear at first sight. Cf. his: “The idea is not so impotent as merely to have a right or an obligation to exist without actually existing.” Hegel’s Logic, p. 12.