Karl Marx: A Biography

3 i^8 KARL MARX: A BIOGRAPHY

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 Intro-
duction '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 super-
ficial 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