Marx’s core task was to explain the expansion of capital in the aggregate, what he called “social capital,” as distinct from individual capitals. The fun that he had with fables about Mr Moneybags ran second to the delight he took in mocking writers who represented capitalism from the standpoint of “our friend Robinson” Crusoe. Capitalists got workers to produce exchange values. Crusoe, the complete homo faber, made nothing but use values for himself. He has provided for himself before Friday arrives. That approach equated the operations of the capitalists’ system with its ideological mask as individualism.[65] Capital, for Marx, was a social relationship before it was anything else. Marx created fables to convey actual relationships: the Robinsonards treated Defoe’s fiction as the model for reality. The real-life captains of industry were imprisoned in the iron cage of capital’s expansion, not marooned on an island.

No more than the meanest child labourer could escape from her travails by wishing herself into a Dickensian plot is the capitalist able to choose the circuits of capital around which he must chase a fortune:

If social capital experiences a revolution in value, it may happen that the capital of the individual capitalist succumbs to it and fails, because it cannot adapt itself to the conditions of this movement of values. The more acute and frequent such revolutions in value become, the more does the automatic movement of the now independent value operate with the elemental force of a natural process, against the foresight and calculation of the individual capitalist.[66]

The excitement that Marx brings to his account of the accumulation of capital is possible because of the space he accepts between tendential laws and entrepreneurship, fate and risk-taking, or what he calls “a Faustian conflict between the passion for accumulation, and the desire for enjoyment.”[67] Marx used story-telling to illuminate this reality.

Polyvocalism: Bakhtin found “laughter” and “polyglossia” to be of “decisive importance” in making “possible the genre of the novel.”[68] Capital is heir to both qualities, contributing to their enrichment. The tonal range in the laughter has been indicated. Now it is time to illustrate how Marx creates dialogue to convince his audience that the story he is relating represents their actual conditions.

In a chapter examining the labour-process, Marx grappled with the puzzle at the center of the expansion of capital, and therefore the most difficult concept to explain. He had to get across how capitalists paid their workers the full value of their capacity to add value, while at same time paying those labourers less than the total value of the commodities they produced. Marx restated his case in the negative by falling into conversation with a capitalist “friend” who has failed to turn a profit. This unhappy fellow has been offered no more for the cotton that his operatives have spun than the fifteen shillings it cost him to have them produce it.

Unlike Mr Peel, this capitalist cannot lay the blame for his unhappiness on the absence of the capitalist relations of production. What has gone wrong? His failure to profit leaves him staring “in astonishment” before he gathers his knowledge of “vulgar economy” to exclaim:

“Oh, but I advanced my money for the express purpose of making more money.”

After the capitalist has entered his first plea, Marx has assumed the voice of a judge from on-high:

The way to Hell is paved with good intentions, and he might just as easily have intended to make money, without producing at all.

The loser now

threatens all sorts of things. He won’t be caught napping again. In future he will buy the commodities in the market, instead of manufacturing them himself.

We have heard from the capitalist again, but in the third person. Marx reappears to ask and state the obvious, also in the third person:

But if all his brother capitalists were to do the same, where would he find his commodities in the market? And his money he cannot eat.

Next, the capitalist “tries persuasion”:

“Consider my abstinence; I might have played ducks and drakes with the 15 shillings; but instead of that I consumed it productively, and made yarn with it.”

The capitalist has returned in his own colloquial voice. This time Marx addresses his remarks to some unseen third party:

Very well. And by way of reward he is now in possession of good yarn instead of a bad conscience; ... Let him therefore console himself with the reflection that virtue is its own reward.

This verdict is no comfort to the appellant, who “becomes importunate”:

He says: “The yarn is no use to me; I produced it for sale.”

Marx gives more unwelcome advice from the stance of a disinterested commentator:

In that case let him sell it, or still better, let him for the future produce only things for satisfying his personal wants ...

This interchange continues the switch between direct speech and commentary. The capitalist gets no more satisfaction from Dr Marx than he has from the market. Small wonder the capitalist “friend” now “gets obstinate,” flinging forth rhetorical questions:

“Can the labourer, merely with his arms and his legs, produce commodities out of nothing? Did I not supply him with the materials, by means of which, and in which alone, his labour could be embodied? And as the greater part of society consists of such ne’er do-wells, have I not rendered society incalculable service by my instruments of production, my cotton and my spindles, and not only society but the labourer also, whom in addition I have provided with the necessities of life? And am I to be allowed nothing in return for all this service?”

Where will this eloquence get him? Marx no longer speaks either to his “friend” or as a remote adjudicator, but to the reader of Capital:

Well, but has not the labourer rendered him the equivalent service of changing his cotton and spindle into yarn? ... The capitalist paid to the labourer a value of 3 shillings, and the labourer gave him back an exact equivalent in the value of 3 shillings, added by him to the cotton: he gave him value for value.

Marx has spoken as the author of Capital rather than as the author of this fable within Capital.

Our friend, up to this time so purse-proud, suddenly assumed the modest demeanour of his own workman and exclaims: “Have I myself not worked? Have I not performed the labour of superintendence and of overlooking the spinner? And does this labour, too, create value?” His overlooker and his manager try to hide their smiles.

Marx assumes that readers who have reached this point in his analysis will realise that the tasks that the capitalist claims to have performed himself were done by his smirking employees. The smiles that Marx hopes that his fable will provoke in his readers are here brought to the surface by this silent chorus of overseers. Even without having read a line of Capital, those foremen know that their disciplining of labour time differs qualitatively from its application by labourers in the creation of additional values. By this stage, not even the capitalist can keep a straight face:

Meanwhile, after a hearty laugh, he re-assumed his usual mien.

Though he chanted to us the whole creed of the economists, in reality, he says, he would not give a brass farthing for it. He leaves this and all such like subterfuges and juggling tricks to the professors of Political Economy, who are paid for it.

Throughout, Marx has been using his “friend” to express his own scorn for those professors. Marx had reached that valuation from his critiquing of their “subterfuges and juggling tricks.” The capitalist, on the other hand, is sprouting what passes for common sense among his kind:

He himself is a practical man; and though he does not always consider what he says outside his business, yet in his business he knows what he is about.[69]

Marx leaves us with the capitalist at his own assessment. Marx knows otherwise. The anecdote would never have been possible had the capitalist known what he was about “in his business.” After all, he has failed to realise a profit.

The sole author of all these words has been Dr Marx. Yet, not all the views expressed are his.[70] The capitalist speaks in his own defence only to convict himself. His offence is not that he has exploited his workers, but that he has failed to do so.

Marx has subverted the Socratic dialogue by having his “friend” arrive at the truth about surplus value through rehearsing the conditions of his existence as a personification of capital. Instead of Marx’s presenting himself as a Socratic interlocutor, he confronts the capitalist with the steps that have led to his failure to profit.

The humour that Marx has built throughout the passage depends on the instability in the speaking positions of both Marx and his friend. Marx is, by turns, reporter, judge, and critic of political economy. The capitalist appears astonished, threatening, persuasive, importunate, obstinate, modest, laughing. Despite his dodges and masks, his performance has had but one theme. Unlike Shylock, he demands only “My ducats,” caring not for his daughter, justice, religion or the law.

Marx has reproduced in his analysis of capital, the Babel of voices in a stratified society. He has orchestrated the voices of his “friend,” but also interpreted them by putting his pleas for profit into their context of capitalist exploitation. Marx has not only put them into his friend’s mouth, but has made his version of the logic of capital accumulation speak through his creature. The ventriloquism is from off-stage, with both Marx and the capitalist taking turns as its mouthpieces.

Abstinence: One strand in the capitalist’s claim for a profit was “his abstinence.” This justification provided Marx with life-long opportunities for mocking the professorial subterfuge that profit is the reward that the capitalist earns for his not having spent his money on consumer goods:

It has never occurred to the vulgar economist to make the simple reflection, that every human action may be viewed, as “abstinence” from its opposite. Eating is abstinence from fasting, walking, abstinence from standing still, working, abstinence from idling, idling, abstinence from working, &c.[71]

The unhappiness that the capitalist must undergo for the sake of “abstinence” becomes too much for Marx to bear:

The simple dictates of humanity therefore plainly enjoin the release of the capitalist from this martyrdom and temptation, in the same as that the Georgian slave-owner was lately delivered, by the abolition of slavery, from the painful dilemma, whether to squander the surplus-product, lashed out of his niggers, entirely in champagne, or whether to reconvert a part of it into more niggers and more land.[72]

The more honest supporters of abstinence as a claim on profit had to admit that the children of these self-deniers had no right to inherit their fathers’ fortunes because the offspring had foregone none of the pleasures.[73]

The Mirror Image: Because Marx recognised that capital is a social relationship, he sought images to convey that multi-sidedness. The mirror and reflection were two obvious tropes, yet too obvious to satisfy:

It is a sign of crudity and lack of comprehension that organically coherent factors are brought into haphazard relation with one another, i.e., into a simple reflex connection.[74]

As we have seen, Marx extended his rejection of reflection to history. In The Eighteenth Brumaire, revolutionaries recognise themselves only after they have donned the “drag” to appear as some historical other. Similarly, he argued that petty-bourgeois thinkers do not reflect the thinking of shop-keepers. Their relationship is the active one of the intellectuals’ not proceeding in their theoretical practices further than the shopkeepers do in business.

Yet the mirror could be a more acceptable figure of speech if used as a simile rather than a metaphor:

Money ... reads all prices backwards, and thus as it were mirrors itself in the bodies of all other commodities (Emphasis added.)[75]

The distancing that Marx has achieved here by the use of the conditional will not serve in all cases. A looking glass cannot convey human behaviour as the “real, sensuous activity” that Marx took as the root of his materialist dialectics:

The chief defect of all previous materialism ... is that things, reality, sensuousness are conceived only in the form of the object, or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively.[76]

Marx needed an active processing agent for his imagery. Here, the Soviet translation came closer: “Money ... depicts itself,” rather than “mirrors itself.”

Better still, the eye let Marx represent the active aspect of the relationships between people and objects. The eye was available as the apposite figure of speech only because of what had happened with the actual eye in history:

The eye has become a human eye, just as its object has become a social, human object – an object made by man for man.[77]

Under capitalism, the use value of the eye undergoes a transformation parallel to that experienced by all the objects created by humankind. While use values are becoming exchange values, the eye is being re-made into the sense mechanism that most stimulates desire for them.

The crucial case, and the hardest to represent, is that of the commodity form, the workings of which the untutored eye cannot discern:

From the mere look of a piece of money, we cannot tell what breed of commodity has been transformed into it. In their money-form all commodities look alike.[78]

Marx infuses this conceptual connection between commodities and money into an evocation of urban energy of which Balzac or Dickens would have been proud:

The busiest streets of London are crowded with shops whose show cases display all the riches of the world, Indian shawls, American revolvers, Chinese porcelain, Parisian corsets, furs from Russia and species from the tropics, but all of these worldly things bear odious, white paper labels with Arabic numerals and then laconic symbols ￡. s. d. This is how commodities are presented in circulation.[79]

From this description, Marx moves to a sensuous image in which “the prices” become the “wooing glances cast at money by commodities.”[80]

Commodities create a mirror-effect when their differences, real or apparent, are perceived by potential consumers. The contrast between a castle and the adjoining cottage becomes a source of desire for a bigger house:

A house may be large or small; as long as the surrounding houses are equally small it satisfies all social demands for a dwelling. But let a palace arise beside the little house, and it shrinks from a little house to a hut. The little house shows now that its owner has only very slight or no demands to make; and however high it may shoot up in the course of civilization, if the neighbouring palace grows to an equal or even greater extend, the occupant of the relatively small house will feel more an more uncomfortable, dissatisfied and cramped within its four walls.[81]

The contrasts are reflected through the eye, that is to say, received into the brain. By exciting consumption, the eye holds a mirror to the production-consumption of commodities.

To learn to expand one’s needs through the perception of contrasts in the use values we already possess did not come into the world with capitalism. Rather, the proliferation of use values into ever more exchange values was able to build on a process at the heart of hominisation:

In a certain sense, a man is in the same situation as a commodity. As he neither enters into the world in possession of a mirror ... a man first sees and recognises himself in another man. Peter only relates to himself as a man through his relation to another man, Paul, in whom he recognises his likeness. With this, however, Paul also becomes from head to toe, in his physical form as Paul, the form of appearance of the species man for Peter.[82]

The mirror-phase is limited neither to infancy nor to the origins of our species, but acquired a vast domain with the spread of capitalist relations.

Neither money nor commodities is alive. Yet, it is integral to Marx’s picture of the capitalist world that they appear to be so. A carpenter fashions wood into a table. As soon as he offers this everyday thing for sale, “it steps forth as a commodity, [and] is changed into something transcendent.” Marx has to explain how a physical object acquires the imperceptible qualities of the social relationship between capital and wage-labour. He again turns to the experience of sight:

... light from an object is perceived by us not as the subjective excitation of our optic nerve, but as the objective form of something outside the eye itself. But, in the act of seeing, there is at all events, an actual passage of light from one thing to another, from the external object to the eye. There is a physical relation between physical things. But it is different with commodities. There, the existence of the things qua commodities, and the value-relation between the products of labour which stamps them as commodities, have absolutely no connexion with their physical properties and with the material relations arising therefrom. There is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things.[83]

The fetishism of commodities is the knot that must be untied to unravel the secret of the expansion of capital, and hence to follow its exposition through the plot of Capital.

Conclusion

Most socialists have not been Marxists, or aspired to be. It is lunacy of a high order to insist that the only people who will be allowed to participate in the overthrow of capitalism are those who subscribe to this or that version of the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. It is no less true that no one can remain a Marxist without being a socialist. Before Marxism is anything, it is a critique of capitalism. There can be no Marx for the master class. No one who has made peace with that regime of exploitation can use the methods, insights or rhetoric developed by Marx and Engels, not even to explain the longevity of the system that they spent their lives interpreting, in various ways, in order to hasten its end.

As a materialist, Marx had no time for those who approached his writings as sacred texts. As a revolutionary, he would never have judged our understanding of him by our ability to retrieve what he had intended, like some Medieval Schoolman From the standpoints of revolutionary politics and materialist historiography, his test would be whether what he had written conforms to the realities of capitalist development, or to the experiences that socialists had acquired about how to overthrow the state. Only by grappling with those practical ideas can we begin the even more taxing effort needed to create a socialist society.

Further References

Gabriel Egan, Shakespeare and Marx, OUP, Oxford, 2004.

Stanley Edgar Hyman, The Tangled Bank, Darwin, Marx, Frazer and Freud as Imaginative Writers, New York, 1962.

Pamela Hansford Johnson, “The Literary Achievement of Marx,” The Modern Quarterly, New Series, 2, Summer 1947, pp. 239-44.

Giosue Ghisalberti, “Tragedy and Repetition in Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” Clio, 26 (4), Summer 1997, pp. 411-26.

Thomas M. Kemple, Reading Marx Writing, Melodrama, the Market and the “Grundrisse,” Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1995.

Franz Mehring, “Karl Marx and Metaphor,” D. Ryazanoff (ed.), Karl Marx: Man, Thinker and Revolutionist, London, 1927, pp. 95-101.

Michael Paul Rogin, “Herman Melville’s Eighteenth Brumaire,” Subversive Genealogy, The Politics and Art and Herman Melville, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1979, pp. 155-86.

Allen Speight, Hegel, Literature and the Problem of Agency, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2001.

Dirk J. Struik (ed.), The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, New World, New York, 1964.

Dirk J. Struik (ed.), Birth of the Communist Manifesto, New World, New York, 1971.

很好很强大+1

Footnotes

1. Gustave Flaubert, Bouvard and Pecuchet, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1976, pp. 289ff.

2. A recent biographer, Francis Wheen, deplored “the mad circular argument one hears from people who haven’t ventured even as far as page two. ‘Capital is all hooey’. ‘And how do you know it’s hooey?’ ‘Because it’s not worth reading’.” Francis Wheen, Karl Marx, Fourth Estate, London, 1999, p. 299.

3. Karl Marx Frederick Engels Collected Works (MECW), volume 6, Lawrence & Wishart, London, MECW, 1976, p. 487.

The propulsion through the opening section of the Manifesto is so convincing that it can sweep the reader past the warning that Marx had placed above the portal: class struggle can end with “the common ruin of the contending classes.” Marx drew on his knowledge of the Ancient world to deny inevitable progress from any purpose-driven view of history.

Karl Popper’s obsession with his version of historicism blinded him to this contra-teleological strand in Marx, whom he otherwise admired for his humanity and his contributions to social and historical knowledge, The Open Society and Its Enemies, RKP, London, 1966; for Popper’s praise of Marx’s “lasting merit,” see p. 88.

4. MECW, 6, p. 485.

5. Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, Part I, Foreign Languages Publishing House (FLPH), Moscow, pp. 89 and 94.

6. Letter from Helmut Hirsch to Encounter, November 1980, p. 92.

7. Marshall Berman, All that is Solid Melts Into Air, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1982, pp. 102 and 121.

8. Steven Marcus, Engels, Manchester and the Working Class, Norton, New York, 1974, pp. 139, 137 and 108.

9. MECW, 6, p. 174.

10. Georg Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness, Merlin, London, 1971, p. 224.

11. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1954, p. 6.

12. Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” MECW, 11, 1979, pp. 103-4.

13. MECW, 11, p. 112.

14. Margaret Rose, Reading the young Marx and Engels, Croom Helm, London, 1978, pp. 84 & 131.

15. In their correspondence, Engels wrote to Marx of the “Gold*****” in the Australian colonies, 23 September 1851, Henry Mayer (ed.), Marx, Engels and Australia, Sydney Studies in Politics 5, Cheshire, Melbourne, 1964, p. 104.

16. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, NLB, London, 1974, pp. 85-86.

17. Bertell Ollman, Dance of the Dialectic, Steps in Marx’s Method, University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 2003.

18. Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1970, p. 203.

19. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1976, p. 70.

20. MECW, 6, pp, 130-1.

21. This interplay of thinking with doing explains how those children of the bourgeoisie, Marx and Engels, could become proletarian intellectuals. Their case was less remarkable than that of Honore de Balzac (1799-1850), whose sequence of novels, The Human Comedy, Engels described as “a constant elegy to the irretrievable decay of good society; his sympathies are all with the class doomed to extinction.” Yet, as Engels went on to explain, he and Marx admired Balzac above all other contemporary novelists:

his satire is never keener, his irony never more bitter, than when he sets in motion the very men and women with whom he sympathises most deeply – the nobles ... That Balzac thus was compelled to go against his own class sympathies and political prejudices, that he saw the necessity of the downfall of his favourite nobles, and described them as people deserving no better fate ... that I consider one of the greatest triumphs of Realism. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels Selected Correspondence, FLPH, Moscow, 1953, pp. 479-80.

22. MECW, 11. 1979, pp. 187-88.

23. Karl Marx, Capital, I, FLPH, Moscow, 1958, p. 109; Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1976, p. 204.

In 1867, Marx alleged that “The English Established Church, e.g., will more readily pardon an attack on 38 of its 39 articles than on 1/39 of its income.” Capital, I, p. 10; Penguin, p. 92. The stand-alone witticisms in Marx and Engels have a Shavian ring, which leaves one wondering how much George Bernard Shaw learned from them about punch lines.

24. MECW, 6, 1976, p. 178.

25. Capital, I, p. 113; Penguin, p. 208.

26. Capital, I, p. 763; Penguin, p. 929.

27. MECW, 5, 1976, p. 5.

28. MECW, 3, 1975, pp. 175-76. Our appreciation of the complexity of Marx’s comment on religion will be deepened by adding knowledge of medical practices from around 1840 when opiates were not taken merely to put their users to sleep, but to deaden the pain, physical and psychological. Opiates allowed workers to continue their battles for existence, offering comfort, not oblivion, sustenance not slumber. It was in this ambivalent sense that Marx referred to religion as an opiate. An appreciation of the history of pharmacy is but one example of the care that must be exercised when interpreting any text.

A similar point can be made about Nietzsche’s “God is Dead.” The messenger is a madman who at once adds that he has arrived too soon. Anyway, the shocking aspect of his annunciation is not that God is dead, because the death and rebirth of gods are integral to religious thinking, including Christianity. The horror was the subsequent claim that “God remains dead,” leaving humanity without the promise of resurrection, see The Gay Science, New York, Vintage, 1974, p. 181.

29. Bertell Ollman, Alienation, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1976, p. 3.

30. M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, Four Essays, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1981, p. 75.

31. MECW, 3, 1975, p. 291; Karl Marx, Frühe Schriften, I, Cotta-Verlag, Stuggart, 1960, p. 586.

32. H. W. Fowler, A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, Omega, Ware, Herts., 1984, p. 474.

33. MECW, 3, p. 299; Frühe Schriften, I, p. 598.

34. MECW, 3, p. 187.

35. Rose, Reading the young Marx and Engels, p. 141.

36. Capital, II, pp. 105-6; Penguin, II, p. 185.

37. Anitra Nelson, Marx’s concept of money: the God of commodities, Routledge, New York, 1999. Because Nelson is deaf to dialectics, she complains that Marx does not have a concept of money but rather a “theory of the money commodity.” She divides her time between nit-picking and thinking up Marx’s motives. (pp. 92-93). The intentionalist fallacy encouraged her to suppose that she can see into Marx’s thinking, which is the more risible given that she neither gets his jokes, nor is aware that he is being ironical. Her literalism is of a piece with her insensitivity to process. For an astute reading of Marx on money see Suzanne de Brunhoff, Urizen Books, New York, 1976.

38. MECW, 5, p. 24.

39. Notwithstanding this restraint, Marx was not afraid to be robust, as in this sardonic onslaught:

Switzerland is the center of attraction for hysterical virgins over thirty, for the pale buds of the finishing school who are keen on the chaste by so effective love-making of the fleet hunters of the Chamois. In the original agricultural cantons the people live like animals, and are as bovine as their oxen. It is necessary, very necessary, that this last refuge of brutal primitive Germanism, of barbarians of bigotry, of patriarchal naiveté and purity of morals, of agricultural stability and of loyalty to death – available to the highest bidder – should at last be destroyed.

This “birthplace of freedom” is nothing else but the center of barbarism, of brutality, bigotry, hypocritical “purity” ... Internal affairs are exhausted in making cheese, chastity, and yodeling ... abroad, the only claim of the Swiss is that of being hired mercenaries.

Here, the rolling thunder comes with its flashes of ridicule. To strike at his target of hypocrisy, Marx reaches for the directness and rhythms of Luther’s bible. This barrage could be Luther’s excoriating the Papacy.

40. The French Marxist Louis Althusser was but one in a line of commentators to warn those opening Capital to skip those 100 pages, that is, Part I on “Commodities and Money,” until after they had read the next 600. He further advised them to delay reading the 30 pages of Part V, see Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy, NLB, London, 1971, pp. 79-86.

Engels had offered parallel advice on how to approach volumes II and III, Selected Correspondence, pp. 566-68.

41. Capital, I, p. 21; Penguin, p. 104.

42. Capital, I, p. 21; Penguin, p. 104.

43. Capital, I, p. 766; Penguin, p. 933.

44. Capital, I, p. 774; Penguin, p. 940.

45. Karl Marx, Capital, II, FLPH, Moscow, 1957, pp. 284-5; Penguin, II, pp. 359-60.

Many of us have been comforted to learn from Engels that Marx, although adept at algebra, including differential calculus “did not get the knack of handling figures, particularly commercial arithmetic.” Marx kept notebooks on differential calculus. The notion of approaching a result by ever smaller increments without ever reaching that end, that is, asymptotically, appealed to Marx as a means to express the dialectic, the process of change, see Mathematics Manuscripts of Karl Marx, New Park, London, 1983.

46. To dispel the lopsidedness of that judgement, let Hegel also speak in his own defence. Just before the end of his life in 1831, he responded to the debates leading up to the First Reform Bill in the British parliament: “Nowhere more than in England is the prejudice so fixed and so naïve that if birth and wealth give a man office they also give him brains.” “The English Reform Bill,” T. M. Knox and Z. A. Pelczynski, Hegel’s Political Writings, OUP, Oxford, 1964, p. 311.

47. Capital, I, p. 83, Penguin, p. 177.

48. S. S. Prawer, Karl Marx and World Literature, OUP, Oxford, 1978.

The Soviet editions did not provide translations, though the Penguin series does. Working one’s way through the explanatory footnotes is a short course in cultural literacy. Marx advised one militant to learn Spanish, as he had done, by reading Don Quixote. The Moscow editions provided much of the necessary detail, culminating in the Marx-Engels Collected Works from 1975. Dirk Struik’s editing of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts and The Communist Manifesto was exemplary for his commentaries and scholarly apparatuses. The Penguin-New Left Editions from the 1970s also deserve to be consulted, both for their translations and their explanatory notes, which supply translations for Marx’s quotations.

The Penguin editor, Ben Fowkes, missed this jibe at Richard Wagner’s 1849 manifesto, “The Art-Work of the Future”: “Nobody – not even a practitioner of Zukunftsmusik* – can live on the products of the future ....” The asterisked footnote misinterprets Zukunftsmusik as “castles in the air, or dreams which may or may not be realized,” p. 272; The Moscow edition, Capital, p. 169, made no attempt to explain this rare reference to music in Marx, which he repeated in Volume II, Moscow, p. 493.

49. MECW, 5, p. 47.

50. Marx. Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, p. 188.

51. James Buchan, Frozen Desire, Picador, London, 1997, p. 202.

52. Capital, I, p. 83n; Penguin, p. 176n.

53. Capital, I, p. 259n; Penguin, p. 370n.

54. Capital, I, p. 264n; Penguin, p. 375n.

55. Bakhtin, p. 41n.

56. Honore Balzac, Lost Illusions, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1971, p. 641.

57. Capital, I, p. 774; Penguin, p. 940.

58. Capital, I, p. 153; Penguin, p. 254.

59. MECW, 3, p. 324.

60. MECW, 3, p. 307.

61. MECW, 6, 1976, pp. 176, 186-8.

62. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1953, p. 481.

63. Capital, I, pp. 105, 112-13; Penguin, pp. 200 and 205-8.

64. Capital, I, p. 162, Penguin, p. 265; Capital, II, pp. 105-6; Penguin, II, p. 185; Capital, III, pp. 289-91; Penguin, pp. 403-5.

65. Capital, I, p. 76-77; Penguin, pp. 169-71.

66. Karl Marx, Capital, II, FLPH, Moscow, 1957, pp. 105-6; Penguin, II, pp. 185-86.

67. Capital, I, p. 594; Penguin, p. 741.

68. Bakhtin, p, 50.

69. Capital, I, pp. 191-93; Penguin, pp. 298-300.

70. Bakhtin, pp. 48-49.

A disciple of Auerbach’s Mimesis could explicate the structure and texture of Capital to reveal Need to make a comparison with the tropes of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1770). The inclusion of Capital would disturb Auerbach’s categories.

In The House of All Nations (1938), Christina Stead gave a fictional representation of money capital.

71. Capital, I, pp. 596-7n; Penguin, p. 744n.

72. Capital, I, pp. 597-98; Penguin, p. 745.

73. Maurice Dobb, Political Economy and Capitalism, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1944, pp. 137-47

74. Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1970, p. 193.

75. Capital, I, p. 110; Penguin, p. 205.

76. MECW, 5, p. 3.

77. MECW, 3, p. 300.

78. Capital, I, p. 110; Penguin, p. 204.

79. Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, p. 87; Capital, II, p. 103; Penguin, p. 183.

80. Capital, I, p. 110; Penguin, p. 205.

81. MECW, 9, 1977, p. 216.

82. Capital, I, p. 52n; Penguin, p. 144n.

83. Capital, I, pp. 72-73; Penguin, pp. 163-64.

郑重道歉

我发帖的时候全部为英文，没想到完毕后全部自动翻译为中文。各位，对不住了！将就一下！再次致歉！

看原文有助于正确理解作者的思想。