The Response to the First Volume of Capital (1867)

In a letter to Ludwig Kugelmann, dated 11 February 1869, Marx blamed the ‘cowardice of the experts, on the one side, and the conspiracy of silence of the bourgeois and reactionary press, on the other’ for the limited circulation of the first volume of Capital.^{[5] [6] However, by the autumn of 1871 the first edition had been sold out, and in the postface to the second edition, dated 24 January 1873, Marx replied to two Russian commentaries on his work: Nikolai Ivanovich Sieber’s book, David Ricardo’s Theory of Value and Capital in Connection with the Latest Contributions and Interpretations? and a review by Illarion Ignat’evich Kaufman, ‘Karl Marx’s Point of View in his Political-Economic Critique’, which we have translated for this volume as Document 1.}

Kaufman struggled in his review with the relation between science and philosophy, arguing that Marx imposed Hegelian terminology on a work that in fact adopted the scientific approach of the biological sciences. In his postface to the second edition of Capital, Marx translated part of Kaufman’s descrip­tion of his research method in order to show that, despite Kaufman’s aversion to dialectics, what he actually depicted in his review of Capital was nothing other than the dialectical method of analysis once it had been shorn of the mystifying influence of Hegelian idealism. Marx regarded the dialectical move­ment of concepts, discovered through historical and logical analysis, as forms of thought reflecting the development of the real world. All of the ensuing doc­uments in this volume elaborate the issues first raised by Kaufman's review and Marx's response, with the methodological relation between Marx and Hegel as a continuous theme.

Apart from its theoretical importance, the first volume of Capital also had a profound effectupon the tactics of German Social Democracy, encouraging the struggle for a normal (eight-hour) working day and the development of trade­unionist politics.

As long as labour is a commodity, it is subject to the laws of supply and demand, and the only means of improving its situation is the reduction of supply and the increase of demand. To the extent that that is at all possible, it can be done through a solid trade-union organisation and a short normal working-day. Those are the goals that the workers must initially set themselves.^[7]

This comment comes from one of Kautsky's earliest economic essays, entitled ‘Rodbertus' Capital’, which defended the originality of Marx's theories against accusations of plagiarism arising from posthumous publication of Rodbertus's fourth ‘Social Letter' to Kirchmann.^[8] Kautsky had no difficulty in demonstrat­ing Rodbertus's ahistorical method, his legalistic (i.e. idealistic) approach to political economy, and his nationalistic notions of how capitalism might be ‘regulated' in order to avoid periodic crises.

At the same time, Kautsky's essay revealed the limitations of his own (and by extension Social Democracy's) grasp of Marx's categories at that time, and the tendency to confuse them with Lassallean terminology. In one passage, for instance, Kautsky wrote: ‘The lack of planning of today's mode of production and the circumstance that the working class does not receive the full product of its labour make possible the economic crises'.^{[9] [10] An end to this confusion only came in 1891, when Marx's ‘Critique of the Gotha Programme' and its Lassallean influences was published in Die Neue Zeit.w}

One of the most important early commentaries on the first volume of Cap­ital came in 1907 when Otto Bauer marked the fortieth anniversary of its pub­lication with his essay ‘The History of a Book’ (see Document 2). Bauer was writing in the aftermath of the revisionist controversy of 1898-1903, during which time revolutionaries within the Second International were forced onto the defensive by Bernstein’s attempt to convert Social Democracy into a party of reform within the framework of bourgeois parliamentary democracy.

Perhaps under the influence of Marx’s notes on the method of political eco­nomy - available today as the introduction to the Grundrisse but first published by Kautsky in Die Neue Zeit in 1903 as the ‘Introduction to a Critique of Political Economy’i² - Bauer made an important advance beyond previous expositions of Capital by noting its links with the categories of Hegel’s Science of Logic:

The great fact underlying Hegel’s logic, as well as his criticism of Kant, is the natural sciences. Hegel, too, does not fail to recognise their empir­ical character, and he has no doubt ‘that all our knowledge begins with experience’; but he characteristically calls the empirical ‘the immediate’, and the logical conceptual processing of the experience, the ‘negation of an immediately given’. Behind the immediate, Hegel looks for the true and the real. He finds the true and the real in the ‘realm of shadows, the world of simple essentialities, freed of all sensuous concretion’. In Existence [Dasein], the determinacy [Bestimmtheit] - the concrete empir­ical qualitative condition [Beschaffenheit] - is one with Being [Sein]; but only if this condition is sublated [aufgehoben], posited as indifferent, only then do we get to pure Being, which is nothing but quantity. But quantity [Quantum], to which an existence or a quality is bound, is meas­ure [Maβ]. Measure is the concrete truth of being; in it lies the idea of essence [Wesen]. ‘The truth of being is essence. Being is the immediate. Since the goal of knowledge is the truth, what being is in and for itself, knowledge does not stop at the immediate and its determinations, but penetrates beyond it on the presupposition that behind this being there still is something other than being itself, and that this background con- ^{[11] [12] stitutes the truth of being.' That background, that essence of being, is measure; we get to it by positing the determinations of being as indiffer­ent, when we turn from qualitatively determined existence to pure being as pure quantity.}

Bauer called Hegel's terminology ‘strange' and ‘mystical-sounding', but he went on to show that Hegel's categories were essential for understanding the logic of Marx's Capital:

Marx certainly imitates Hegel's method. He also looks behind the ‘appear­ance of competition' for the true and real. And he also wants to find behind immediacy the truth of being - by sublating the qualitative determination of being in its empirical existence, positing it as indiffer­ent and turning to being as pure quantity. Thus, in the famous opening chapters of the first volume of Capital, the concrete commodities are stripped of their determination (as a frock, or 20 yards of linen) and posited as mere quantities of social labour. In the same way, the con­crete individual labour is deprived of its determination and regarded as a mere ‘form of manifestation' of general social labour. Thus, even economic subjects, these men of flesh and blood, eventually lose their apparent existence and become mere ‘organs of labour' and ‘agents of production', one the embodiment of a certain quantity of social cap­ital, the other the personification of a quantity of social labour-power. The quantity, to which existence or quality is bound as Hegel's measure, is here social labour. It is the essence of economic phenomena, which, as Hegel said, not only passes through its determinations - let us recall Marx's account of the circulation of capital, which makes the same value assume the ever-changing forms of money, commodity, money, money capital, productive capital, commodity capital! - but also rules them as their law. Social labour becomes finally - and it would be an enticing task to develop this idea in detail - what Hegel calls substance, absolute activity-of-form [Formtatigkeit], absolute power, from which all accidents emerge.

Though Bauer, under the influence of the neo-Kantianism then prevalent in Vienna's intellectual circles, added that ‘Hegel's ontology today looks like a hardly understandable aberration after Kant's critique of reason', he was suf­ficiently versed in classical German philosophy to realise that ‘we should not regard as a meaningless coincidence the fact that Marx owes his logical training to Hegel'.

Bauer returned to methodological issues in response to capitalism’s develop­ment into the new phase of imperialism, which dragged humanity into world war a few years later. He rightly felt that Marxists could not merely defend Marx’s revolutionary heritage but also had to rediscover his use of Hegel’s dia­lectical method in order to apply it to the new circumstances of economic and political life. In June 1910, Bauer wrote a review of Rudolf Hilferding’s book, Finance Capital: A Study of the Latest Phase of Capitalist Development, in which he agreed with Kautsky’s description of it as ‘a continuation of Marx’s Cap­ital’.^{[13] [14] [15] Marxist economics had made little progress since Karl Marx’s death, mainly because ‘orthodox’ Marxists had been preoccupied with defending Cap­ital against revisionism. In the meantime, a new world had arisen, and the former presentations of the developmental tendencies of capitalism no longer sufficed. Bauer concluded that ‘the gaps resulting from this situation have now finally been filled at least in part. Rudolf Hilferding’s Finance Capital gives us what we have long needed’?4}