11
Afterword to the Second German Edition (1873)
to touch a subject in reality foreign to them, was but imperfectly concealed, either under a parade
of literary and historical erudition, or by an admixture of extraneous material, borrowed from the
so-called “Kameral” sciences, a medley of smatterings, through whose purgatory the hopeful
candidate for the German bureaucracy has to pass.
Since 1848 capitalist production has developed rapidly in Germany, and at the present time it is in
the full bloom of speculation and swindling. But fate is still unpropitious to our professional
economists. At the time when they were able to deal with Political Economy in a straightforward
fashion, modern economic conditions did not actually exist in Germany. And as soon as these
conditions did come into existence, they did so under circumstances that no longer allowed of
their being really and impartially investigated within the bounds of the bourgeois horizon. In so
far as Political Economy remains within that horizon, in so far, i.e., as the capitalist regime is
looked upon as the absolutely final form of social production, instead of as a passing historical
phase of its evolution, Political Economy can remain a science only so long as the class struggle
is latent or manifests itself only in isolated and sporadic phenomena.
Let us take England. Its Political Economy belongs to the period in which the class struggle was
as yet undeveloped. Its last great representative, Ricardo, in the end, consciously makes the
antagonism of class interests, of wages and profits, of profits and rent, the starting point of his
investigations, naively taking this antagonism for a social law of Nature. But by this start the
science of bourgeois economy had reached the limits beyond which it could not pass. Already in
the lifetime of Ricardo, and in opposition to him, it was met by criticism, in the person of
Sismondi.
2
The succeeding period, from 1820 to 1830, was notable in England for scientific activity in the
domain of Political Economy. It was the time as well of the vulgarising and extending of
Ricardo’s theory, as of the contest of that theory with the old school. Splendid tournaments were
held. What was done then, is little known to the Continent generally, because the polemic is for
the most part scattered through articles in reviews, occasional literature and pamphlets. The
unprejudiced character of this polemic – although the theory of Ricardo already serves, in
exceptional cases, as a weapon of attack upon bourgeois economy – is explained by the
circumstances of the time. On the one hand, modern industry itself was only just emerging from
the age of childhood, as is shown by the fact that with the crisis of 1825 it for the first time opens
the periodic cycle of its modern life. On the other hand, the class struggle between capital and
labour is forced into the background, politically by the discord between the governments and the
feudal aristocracy gathered around the Holy Alliance on the one hand, and the popular masses,
led by the bourgeoisie, on the other; economically by the quarrel between industrial capital and
aristocratic landed property - a quarrel that in France was concealed by the opposition between
small and large landed property, and that in England broke out openly after the Corn Laws. The
literature of Political Economy in England at this time calls to mind the stormy forward
movement in France after Dr. Quesnay’s death, but only as a Saint Martin’s summer reminds us
of spring. With the year 1830 came the decisive crisis.
In France and in England the bourgeoisie had conquered political power. Thenceforth, the class
struggle, practically as well as theoretically, took on more and more outspoken and threatening
forms. It sounded the knell of scientific bourgeois economy. It was thenceforth no longer a
question, whether this theorem or that was true, but whether it was useful to capital or harmful,
expedient or inexpedient, politically dangerous or not. In place of disinterested inquirers, there
were hired prize fighters; in place of genuine scientific research, the bad conscience and the evil
intent of apologetic. Still, even the obtrusive pamphlets with which the Anti-Corn Law League,
led by the manufacturers Cobden and Bright, deluged the world, have a historic interest, if no
12
Afterword to the Second German Edition (1873)
scientific one, on account of their polemic against the landed aristocracy. But since then the Free
Trade legislation, inaugurated by Sir Robert Peel, has deprived vulgar economy of this its last
sting.
The Continental revolution of 1848-9 also had its reaction in England. Men who still claimed
some scientific standing and aspired to be something more than mere sophists and sycophants of
the ruling classes tried to harmonise the Political Economy of capital with the claims, no longer to
be ignored, of the proletariat. Hence a shallow syncretism of which John Stuart Mill is the best
representative. It is a declaration of bankruptcy by bourgeois economy, an event on which the
great Russian scholar and critic, N. Tschernyschewsky, has thrown the light of a master mind in
his “Outlines of Political Economy according to Mill.”
In Germany, therefore, the capitalist mode of production came to a head, after its antagonistic
character had already, in France and England, shown itself in a fierce strife of classes. And
meanwhile, moreover, the German proletariat had attained a much more clear class-consciousness
than the German bourgeoisie. Thus, at the very moment when a bourgeois science of Political
Economy seemed at last possible in Germany, it had in reality again become impossible.
Under these circumstances its professors fell into two groups. The one set, prudent, practical
business folk, flocked to the banner of Bastiat, the most superficial and therefore the most
adequate representative of the apologetic of vulgar economy; the other, proud of the professorial
dignity of their science, followed John Stuart Mill in his attempt to reconcile irreconcilables. Just
as in the classical time of bourgeois economy, so also in the time of its decline, the Germans
remained mere schoolboys, imitators and followers, petty retailers and hawkers in the service of
the great foreign wholesale concern.
The peculiar historical development of German society therefore forbids, in that country, all
original work in bourgeois economy; but not the criticism of that economy. So far as such
criticism represents a class, it can only represent the class whose vocation in history is the
overthrow of the capitalist mode of production and the final abolition of all classes – the
proletariat.
The learned and unlearned spokesmen of the German bourgeoisie tried at first to kill “Das
Kapital” by silence, as they had managed to do with my earlier writings. As soon as they found
that these tactics no longer fitted in with the conditions of the time, they wrote, under pretence of
criticising my book, prescriptions “for the tranquillisation of the bourgeois mind.” But they found
in the workers’ press – see, e.g., Joseph Dietzgen’s articles in the – antagonists stronger than
themselves, to whom (down to this very day) they owe a reply.
3
An excellent Russian translation of “Das Kapital” appeared in the spring of 1872. The edition of
3,000 copies is already nearly exhausted. As early as 1871, N. Sieber, Professor of Political
Economy in the University of Kiev, in his work “David Ricardo’s Theory of Value and of
Capital,” referred to my theory of value, of money and of capital, as in its fundamentals a
necessary sequel to the teaching of Smith and Ricardo. That which astonishes the Western
European in the reading of this excellent work, is the author’s consistent and firm grasp of the
purely theoretical position.
That the method employed in “Das Kapital” has been little understood, is shown by the various
conceptions, contradictory one to another, that have been formed of it.
Thus the Paris Revue Positiviste reproaches me in that, on the one hand, I treat economics
metaphysically, and on the other hand – imagine! – confine myself to the mere critical analysis of
actual facts, instead of writing receipts
4
(Comtist ones?) for the cook-shops of the future. In
answer to the reproach in re metaphysics, Professor Sieber has it: