Karl Marx: A Biography

3 I 8 KARL MARX: A BIOGRAPHY

feel the whole pressure and hastiness of our situation and that, I think,

is one of the principal causes of her ill health.'^1 "

V. 'CAPITAL'

In the summer of 1861 , with the Vogt affair at last behind him, Marx
began to work in earnest on the '3rd chapter' on Capital in General. For
a year progress was very slow, though Marx considered that he had
managed to popularise his style. By April 1862 he felt in a position to
tell Lassalle that his book would not be ready for two months and added
revealingly: 'I have the peculiar characteristic that when I see something
that I have written out four weeks later, I find it unsatisfactory and
re-work the whole thing. In any case the work doesn't lose anything
thereby.'^154
Two months later he was 'working like the devil',^155 not on the third
chapter, but on the history of economic theory - and particularly theories
of surplus-value - that he wished to add to the chapter on Capital just as
he had added a historical account of theories of money and circulation
to the Critique of Political Economy. He was padding his work out as 'the
German wretches measure the value of a book by its cubic content'.^156 It
was Marx's usual practice when domestic worries disturbed his concen-
tration - and 1862 and 1863 were among the most troubled years of
Marx's life - to turn to the historical part of his work. By the end of the
summer he was getting depressed and expressed the wish to Engels to
engage in some line of business: 'Grey, dear friend, is all theory and only
business is green. Unfortunately, I have come too late to this insight.'^157
He reread Engels' Condition of the Working Classes in England and was
filled with nostalgia for the past: 'How freshly, passionately and boldly is
the matter dealt with here, without learned and scientific considerations!
And even the illusion that tomorrow or the day after history will bring
to light the result gives the whole a warmth and lively humour, compared
with which the later "grey in grey" is damned unpleasant.'^158 A few years
later he told one of his daughters that he felt himself to be 'a machine
condemned to devour books and then throw them, in a changed form,
on the dunghill of history'.^159 By the end of 1862 he told Kugelmann
that 'the second part is now at last finished', though with the inevitable
qualification that this was 'apart from the copying out and final polishing
for the printer'. It would contain, he continued, 'only what was intended
as the third chapter of the first part, i.e. "Capital in General" It is
(together with the first bit) the quintessence, and the development of
what follows would be easy to complete, even by others, on the basis