ABSTRACT
Among the four classics discussed in this book, Marx’s Capital is the only one that was not originally written in English. The first German edition of Capital, Volume I, was published in 1867. The complete work was intended to be divided into four ‘books’ but three volumes. Marx, however, did not complete them in a publishable form during his life time. From a mass of handwritten manuscripts, Marx’s close collaborator and friend Frederick Engels published the ‘books’ II and III in two separate volumes, Volumes II and III of Capital, in 1885 and 1894 respectively. The intended fourth ‘book’ or the third volume was published in 1905-10 by Karl Kautsky. It was entitled Theories of Surplus Value and had three separate volumes of its own. This clearly shows that Marx had intended a much more substantial editing of his manuscripts, which could not be achieved by others.1 The first volume of Capital deals primarily with ‘the process of production of capital’ and is divided into eight parts: (i) commodities and money; (ii) the transformation of money into capital; (iii) the production of absolute surplus-value; (iv) the production of relative surplus-value; (v) the production of absolute and relative surplus-value; (vi) wages; (vii) the process of accumulation of capital; and (viii) primitive accumulation. And in Marx’s own words:
1 In a letter to Engels dated 13 February 1866, Marx wrote: ‘Although finished, the manuscript, gigantic in its present form, could not be made ready for publication by anybody but me, not even by you’ (quoted in Hollander 2008: 2-3).
