Материал: Karl Marx_ A Biography ( PDFDrive )

advantage that they are an artistic whole and that is only attainable

through my habit of not letting them be printed until they lie before me complete.180

Marx was in a particular hurry to finish as 'the thing weighs on me like a mountain'; also his friends - Liebknecht, for example - were spreading oversimplified versions of his ideas; and, as ever, Marx was haunted by the idea of not being able to complete his work before a revolutionary outbreak.181

In February 1866, being seriously ill and under pressure from Engels, Marx at last agreed to complete volume one before drafting out the others. 'If I had enough money, that is more > - 0 , for my family and if my book were ready, it would be a matter of complete indifference to me whether I was thrown on the scrap heap today or tomorrow.' And he continued with the following report on his progress:

As far as this 'damned' book goes, this is the situation: it was ready at the end of December. The discussion of ground rent alone is, in its present form, almost book length. I went to the museum in the day and wrote at night. I had to work through the new agricultural chemistry in Germany, especially Leibig and Schonbein, who are more important for this thing than all the economists put together and also the enormous material that the French have given us since I was last occupied

the child smooth after so many birth pangs. But then once again the carbuncle broke it off. .. .182

By November 1866 he was able to send off the first batch of manuscript and the following April the whole was at last completed. Marx insisted on going to Germany himself with the manuscript and tactfully informed Engels of his clothes and watch that needed to be redeemed from the pawnshop before his trip. Engels sent by return the halves of seven £5 notes: the other halves, as was their usual practice, followed when Marx telegraphed the safe arrival of the first batch. Marx sailed for Hamburg in mid-April, proved to be one of the few passengers who kept upright in the storm, and deposited his manuscript in Meissner's safe. Since there was a possibility of printing the manuscript immediately (the printing was eventually done by Wigand who had published so much Young Hegelian material in the 1840s), Marx decided to stay on in Germany and went to Hanover at the invitation of Dr Kugelmann, a former member of the Communist League and now a much respected gynaecologist, with whom Marx had been in correspondence since 1862. Marx described him as 'a

fanatical adherent of our doctrine and our two persons. He bores me sometimes with his enthusiasm which is the opposite of his cold style in medical matters. But he understands, and he is upright, reckless, unselfish, and - what is most important - convinced.'183

While in Hanover, Marx was amused to be invited by a messenger from Bismarck to 'put his great talents to the service of the German people'.184 Two years previously Marx had received a similar invitation, transmitted via Lothar Bucher, to write financial articles for the Prussian Government's official journal. Marx subsequently published his correspon-

The crossing from Hamburg to London, was . . . in general fair. Some hours before London a German girl whom I had already noticed for her military stance, explained to me that she wanted to go on the same evening to Weston Supra Mare and did not know how to deal with her large amount of luggage. The situation was all the worse since on the sabbath helpful hands are few in England. I got the girl to show me the railway station that she had to go to in London; her friends had written it on a card. It was the North Western, which I too would have to pass by. So, as a good knight, I offered to drop the girl off there. Accepted. On thinking it over, however, it occurred to me that Weston Supra Mare was South West of London whereas the station that I would pass by and that the girl had written on her card was North West. I consulted the Sea Captain. Correct. The upshot was that she was to be set down in quite the other end of London from myself. Yet I had committed myself and had to put a good face on it. At two o'clock in the afternoon we arrived. I brought la donna errante to her station where I learnt that her train left only at eight in the evening. So I was in for it and had to kill six hours with mademoiselle walking in Hyde Park, sitting in ice-cream shops, and so on. It came out that she was called Elisabeth von Puttkamer, Bismarck's niece, with whom she had just spent some weeks in Berlin. She had the whole army list with her. . .. She was a spirited, cultured girl, but aristocratic and black and white to the tip of her nose. She was not a little astonished to learn that she had fallen into 'red' hands. I comforted her, however, with the assurance that our rendezvous would pass off without 'loss of blood' and saw her off safe and sound to the place of her destination. You can imagine what an uproar this would cause with Blind or other vulgar democrats - my conspiracy with Bismarck.""

Whether the meeting was really pure chance or a 'plant' is impossible to say.

The printing went slowly and, although Marx was able to correct the

3 i 8 K A R L M A R X : A B I O G R A P H Y

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first proof sheet on 5 May, his forty-ninth birthday, he had to return to London in mid-May. It was a return that he feared: 'the debts there are important and the Manichees are waiting "insistently" for my return. Then there is the family moaning, the inner collisions, the rush, instead of being able to approach my work fresh and untroubled.'186 Throughout the summer Marx continued to be worried by his creditors and only had time to correct the proofs sheet sent to him by Meissner. He forwarded them regularly to Engels for his opinion. (It is interesting to note that Marx had not shown any of his drafts to Engels before they were sent to press.) Engels considered that some of the more abstract first part bore 'the trace of the carbuncle'.187 He also wished that Marx had introduced many more subtitles and had had his excursuses printed in a different type. Although the sharpness of the dialectical development was improved in Capital, Engels found the Critique of Political Economy easier to grasp.

Marx's letter to Engels on completing Capital, Volume One. The text reads:

2 Uhr Nacht, 16 Aug. 1867

Dear Fred,

Eben den letzten Bogen (49.) des Buchs fertig korrigiert. Der Anhang - Wertform kleingedruckt, urnfafit i'/4 Bogen.

Vorrede ditto gestern korrigiert zuriickgeschickt. Also dieser Band ist fertig. Blofi I)ir verdanke ich es, da(S dies moglich war! Ohne Deine Aufopferung fur mich konnte ich unmoglich die ungeheuren Arbeiten zu den 3 Banden machen. I embrace you, full of thanks!

Beiliegend 2 Bogen Reinabzug.

Die 15 £ mit bestem Dank erhalten. Salut, mein lieber, teurer Freund! Dein

K. Marx

Translation:

August 16, 1867, 2 o'clock in the night

Dear Fred,

I lave just finished correcting the last galley proof (49th) of the book. The appendix, on the form of value - is in small print and takes up i'/4 galleys.

'I"he Preface likewise was corrected and sent back yesterday. So this volume is finished. It is you alone that I have to thank for this being possible. Without your sell-sacrifice for me, I could never possibly have accomplished the enormous labour for the three volumes. I embrace you, full of thanks!

Enclosed are two corrected galley proofs. I got the £ 15. Many thanks.

(ireetings, my dear, beloved friend. Yours

K. Marx

3 i 8 K A R L M A R X : A B I O G R A P H Y

His opinion must have improved, for Marx wrote soon after that 'your

satisfaction up till now is more important to me than anything that the rest of the world may say of it'.188 By the end of August the last galley

was sent off and Marx wrote jubiliantly to Engels: 'To you alone I owe it that this was possible: Without your sacrifice for me I could not have got through the enormous labours of the three volumes. I embrace you, full of thanks!"89 In the third week of September 1867 Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1, Book 1: The Production Process of Capital appeared in an edition of 1000 copies.

Volume One of Capital is by no means the indigestible and virtually unreadable book that it has the reputation of being. It consists of two very distinct parts. The first nine chapters are, indeed, of an extremely abstract theoretical nature, whereas the reset of the book contains a description of the historical genesis of capitalism which is at times extremely vivid and readable.

The first nine chapters contain what Marx called in his 1857 Introduction 'the general abstract definitions which are more or less applicable to all forms of society'.190 It is not only this abstract method that makes these chapters difficult; there is also the Hegelian cast of the book. In his Afterword to the second German edition of the book Marx explained that he was employing the Hegelian dialectic of which he had discovered the 'rational kernel' inside the 'mystical shell' by 'turning it right side up again'.191 He even, as he said in the same Afterword, went as far as 'coquetting with modes of expression peculiar to Hegel'. A third factor which makes the beginning of Capital difficult is the fact that the concepts used by Marx are ones quite familiar to economists in the mid-nineteenth century but thereafter abandoned by the orthodox schools of economics. Since the third quarter of the nineteenth century, economists in Western Europe and America have tended to look at the capitalist system as given, construct models of it, assuming private property, profit and a more or less free market, and to discuss the functionings of this model, concentrating particularly on prices. This 'marginalist' school of economics has no concept of value apart from price. To Marx, this procedure seemed superficial for two reasons: firstly, he considered it superficial in a literal sense, in that it was only a description of phenomena lying on the surface of capitalist society without an analysis of the mode of production that gave rise to these phenomena. Secondly, this approach took the capitalist system for granted whereas Marx wished to analyse 'the birth, life and death of a given social organism and its replacement by another, superior order'.

In order to achieve these two aims, Marx took over the concepts of the 'classical' economists that were still the generally accepted tool