ABSTRACT
Less than a year after the fall of the Paris Commune, Karl Marx embarked on two major, detailed revisions of Capital, one in German and one in French. These were the last of the editions he would prepare personally, and both reflected what Marx had learned about everyday working-class realities from his week-to-week, month-to-month activity in the International Workingmen’s Association from 1864 to 1872. In the second German edition of 1872, and especially in the French edition, ‘entirely revised by the author’, which appeared from 1872 to 1875 in the form of ten centime pamphlets, Marx made Capital more nuanced and readable than it had been before. The second German edition put Marx’s theory of commodities and money in a far brighter, clearer light, and the ensuing French edition, Le Capital, did the same for Marx’s theory of capital accumulation. In nearly a thousand places, Marx clarified and amplified his account of the factors which make working-class life inherently precarious: the falling rate of employment, the growing mass of ‘relative surplus labour’, and the oscillations of the business cycle. Yet few of these enhancements have been noticed, since they were omitted by Engels in the editions which have since become standard.
