production in order to augment the profits of those who own the major means of production) must lead to periodic discharge in huge social and economic convulsions.

Following the social explosion initiated in the Western world by May ’68 in France, the severe generalized recession of 1974–5119 has confirmed Marx’s basic analysis. Capitalist growth cannot but be uneven, disproportionate and unharmonious. Expanded reproduction necessarily gives rise to contracted reproduction. Prosperity inexorably leads to over-production. The search for the philosopher’s stone which would enable market economy (i.e. private property, i.e. competition) to coincide with balanced growth, and mass consumption to develop apace with productive capacity (despite the capitalists’ drive to force up the rate of exploitation) – this search will go on as long as the system survives. But it will be no more crowned with success than that which has already been conducted for more than 150 years. The only possible remedy for economic crises of over-production and social crises of class struggle is the elimination of capitalism and class society. No other solution will be found, either in theory or in practice. This awe-inspiring prediction made by Marx has been borne out by empirical evidence ever since Capital was written. There is no sign that it will be contradicted by current or future developments.

ERNEST MANDEL

Translator’s Preface

The three volumes of Capital form a single integral work. As Ernest Mandel explains in his introduction, the later volumes extend, if they do not wholly complete, the theoretical depiction of the capitalist mode of production which Marx embarked upon with Volume 1.

The Pelican Marx Library Capital has therefore been planned and executed as a coherent new edition. Though Volumes 2 and 3 have a different translator from Volume 1, Ben Fowkes and myself have each been able to read the other’s work and give advice. On virtually all technical points and matters of terminology, Volumes 2 and 3 follow the lead given in Volume 1.

As far as the style of writing is concerned, the differences to be found between the later volumes and Volume 1, while in some part inevitably reflecting the preferences of the translators, are due to a far greater extent to differences in the original texts. Volume 1 of Capital, which Marx himself prepared for the press – and revised after its first publication – is palpably presented to the public as a work of science that is also a work of world literature. Hence not only the splendid rhetoric of many well-known passages, but also the copious references to the works of classical antiquity and Renaissance Europe.

Volumes 2 and 3 follow much more in the wake of the less purple passages of Volume 1. Their content is to a far greater extent technical, even dry; and Volume 2, above all, is renowned for the arid deserts between its oases. From the scientific point of view, this is all quite contingent; but it has caused many a non-specialist reader to turn back in defeat. As translator, I have tried to ease the passage as best I could by rendering Marx’s prose into as straightforward and contemporary an English as possible. Translator’s footnotes and cross-references are designed with the same end in view. But though it is not hard for a new translator to improve on previous editions, I certainly could not claim to have made the later volumes of Capital easy reading. Happily, the reader of the present edition also has Ernest Mandel’s introduction as a guide, and this will come to the rescue, I am sure, at many a tricky point.

DAVID FERNBACH

NOTE

In compiling the editorial footnotes, indicated by asterisks etc., the translator has derived much assistance from the Marx-Engels-Werke (ME W) edition of Capital.

Note

In this edition numbered footnotes

are those of the original text.

Those marked by asterisks, etc., are

the translator’s.

Preface

It was not an easy job to prepare the second volume of Capital for publication, and particularly in such a way that it appeared not only as an integrated work, as complete as possible, but also as the exclusive work of its author, and not its editor. The task was made more difficult by the large number of versions, most of them incomplete. Only one of these, Manuscript IV, had been completely prepared for publication, though even here the greater part had been made obsolete by drafts of a later date. The main body of the material, if it was fully worked out in content, in the main, was not so in its language. It was composed in the idiom that Marx customarily used in preparing his summaries: a negligent style, colloquial and often coarsely humorous expressions and usages, English and French technical terms, frequently whole sentences and even pages in English. This is the expression of ideas in the immediate form in which they developed in the author’s head. Alongside particular sections that were worked out in detail, there were others, equally important, that were only sketched in outline. The material for factual illustration had been assembled, but hardly arranged, let alone worked up.