Engels on Marx's 'Capital' (opening)
Socialist Organiser1983 1983-03-10Read it in the scan (PDF), scan page 11 →
Reader report 22 Oct 2026. Not a Socialist Organiser article: Frederick Engels's review of Volume One of Marx's Capital, written in March 1868 for the Demokratisches Wochenblatt (nos. 12 and 13, 21 and 28 March 1868), reprinted by SO for the centenary of Marx's death in an older translation and abridged (the cuts are marked '...' in print). SO set it across the whole of page 11, which the machine split into three parts: this is part 1 of 3. The machine text below is uncorrected; read the complete text in the Marxists Internet Archive translation: Engels, review of Capital for the Demokratisches Wochenblatt, 1868 (MIA).
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And week were o pue year we lobe care special ones of arande Marxism n Marx's critics and opponents. S lONG as there have een capitalists and work ers on earth, no book has appeared which is of as much importance for the workers as the one before us. The relation between capital and labour, the hinge on which our entire present system of society turns, is here treated scientifically for the first time Political economy up to now has taught us that labour is the source of all wealth and the measure of values, so that two objects whose production has cost the same labour-time possess the same value and must also be exchanged for each other, since on the average only equal values are exchangeable for one another.
At the same time, however; it teaches that there exists a kind of stored-up labour which it calls capital; that this capital, owing to the auxiliary sources contained in it, raises the productivity of living labour a hundred and a thousandfold, and in return claims a certain compensation which is termed profit or gain. As we all know, this occurs in reality in such a way that the profits of stored-up dead labour become ever more massive, the capital of the capitalists becomes ever more colossal, while the wages of living , labour constantly decrease, and the mass of workers living solely on wages grows ever more numerous and poverty-stricken.
How is this contradiction to be solved? How can there remain a profit for the capitalist if the worker gets back the full value of the labour he adds to his product? And yet this should be the case, since only equal values are exchanged.
Surplus value from unpaid labour' On the other hand, how can equal values be exchanged, how can the worker receive the full value of his product, if, as is admitted by many economists, this product is divided between him and the capitalist?. . Economics up to now has been helpless in the face of this contradiction and writes stutters embarrassed meaningless phrases. Even the previous socialist critics of economics were unable to do more than emphasise the contradiction; no one has solved it, until now at last Marx has traced the process by which this profit arises right to its birthplace and has thereby made everything clear.
In tracing the developclaim the utilisation of this wealth and these productive forces for the whole of society - instead of as today for a monopolist class.