Karl Marxs CAPITAL Introductory Essay By A. D. LINDSAY Master of Balliol College, Oxford LONDON OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS HUMPHREY MILFORD OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS AMEN HOUSE, E. G. 4 LONDON EDINBURGH GLASGOW LEIPZIG NEW YORK TORONTO MELBOURNE CAPETOWN BOMBAY CALCUTTA MADRAS SHANGHAI HUMPHREY MILFORD PUBLISHER TO THE UNIVERSITY Impression of First edition, 1925 Printed in Great Britain PREFACE I OWE much in the preparation of this book to Mr. Beers Karl Marx, Sein Leben und Seine Lehre, and to Mr. G. W. Portuss Marx and Modern Thought, published for the Workers Educational Association in Australia. How much I have been helped in Chapters III and IV by M. Elie Halevys La Formation du Radicalisms Philosophique will be evident to all who know that great work. Though I differ widely from Mr. H. W. B. Joseph, I have been greatly helped by his demonstration in Karl Marxs Theory of Value of the indefensibility of doctrines often ascribed to Marx. But above all I wish to acknowledge my debt, for their discussion and criticism, to those to whom the lectures from which this book has been made were first delivered the Glasgow audiences meeting under the auspices of the Independent Labour Party and the Workers Educational Association and in par ticular to Mr. John McLure and to Mr. D. Kennedy of the Glasgow Independent Labour Party. My references throughout are to the English translation of Marxs Capital, but in the quotations from Marx I have in many passages made my own corrections in that translation. A. D. L. BALLIOL COLLEGE, OXFORD. CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 9 I. Marx and Hegel 15 II. Economic Determinism …27 III. The Labour Theory of Value . - S3 IV. Marxs account of Surplus Value and of theCollective Labourer …81 V. Marx and Rousseau … .109 INDEX 126 INTRODUCTION THIS small book is intended, as were the lectures in which it first took form, to be an introduction to the study of Marxs Capital. It is not meant to be a substitute for such study. It is the fate of all great books tp get bcdleA-down and served up cold in text-books, which purport to tell exactly what the great book comes to, as though a mans conclusions were worth very much apart from the way in which he arrived at them. We must all have had the experience, after reading even appreciative books about great authors, of going back to the authors themselves and finding how much more there is in them than their commentators lead us to expect. Marxs Capital is obviously a book of historical importance, and any one who reads it impartially will find it greater and far more illuminating than most critics of Marx would like us, or most Marxian writers allow us to believe. There are two ways in which it is indefensible to treat a great book, ways which seem nevertheless to characterize much of what is said of Marx in this country the way of uncritical condemnation and the way. of uncritical praise. There are some books on Marx in which are collected all his inconsistencies and nothing else, as though there was nothing in Marx but inconsistencies. Such books give the impression that Marx was one of the most muddle-headed, idiots that ever lived. On the other hand, some of his interpreters seem to have given up the belief in the verbal insgiratipn of scripture for the belief in the verbal inspiration of Capital and try to maintain that there are no inconsistencies in Marx at all. 2535 61 B io Introduction Wemight surely be prepared, without having read a word of Marx, to reject both these extreme views. Mere inconsistent thinking has never made history as Capital has made it. But no man who has brought about a great revolution in thought has ever been without inconsistencies. The original thinker is too much occupied in trying to express the creative thought which is welling up in him to trouble himself about getting it all straightened out. There are always parts of his work which he has taken over as they stood from other people…