Is Marx’s ‘Capital’ a Revolutionary Text? Yes and No.

When you put out into the world a new edition of Karl Marx’s Capital, a book that calls forth passionate debate as few others do, you should expect pushback. Our new English edition of volume one, the first in half a century, has gotten some, mostly taking issue with our front matter. Whereas the previous English versions framed Marx’s text — substantially, though not exclusively — in terms of his radical vision of historical progress and the revolutionary commitments that went along with it, ours does not. We focus much more on the theoretical stakes of the book, and this has been seen as “weird.”

The writer Vijay Prashad, for example, claimed on X that our Capital has a “social democratic orientation that is fixated on debates in the U.S. academy. … Marx as the communist vanishes.” Others on social media have echoed Prashad’s response. But the person who used the W-word to describe our work was, in fact, a U.S. academic. Writing in The New York Times, James Miller maintained that it was “weird” of us to point out how Marx tries to evoke the strangeness of capitalism while saying little about his notion of progress. For, of the two things, the latter one mattered more to Marx, particularly in Capital — or so Miller contended. Miller did not actually cite evidence from Capital to support this claim, relying instead on a letter in which Marx conspired to “trick” a liberal newspaper into running a review of his book. Poor sales had left Marx frustrated; hence he wanted coverage even from a “small paper by and for pigs,” as he put it. His plan entailed presenting Capital in such a way that it would appear to align with a bourgeois house sensibility he hated. In this context of high-spirited scheming and bitter disappointment, Marx instructed his friend Friedrich Engels to pitch the book as one that reinforces “the liberal doctrine of ‘progress.’”

Miller gave his readers little information about the circumstances of the letter, and when he quoted its line about the liberal doctrine of progress, he dropped both the term “liberal” and the scare quotes Marx put around the word “progress,” thereby encouraging people to see the line as an earnest attempt by Marx to express the core of Capital. But the key question here isn’t how one should cite correspondence. A new edition of a classic work provides an occasion to rethink the ideas we bring to it, so let us ask: What is the relation between Marx’s particular belief in historical progress — and his revolutionary commitments too — and the first volume of Capital, his masterpiece of economic and social theory?

“Philosophers have only interpreted the world in different ways; the point is to change it.” Thus reads Marx’s famous 11th “thesis on Feuerbach.” Chiseled into his imposing gravestone in Highgate Cemetery, London, it also greets you when you enter the 18th-century palace that is the central administrative building at the Humboldt University of Berlin. These words come from a manuscript that Marx wrote in the mid-1840s but decided not to publish; it appeared some 40 years later, after his death.

While it certainly doesn’t run counter to Marx’s thought, this aphorism isn’t exactly representative of it either — for two reasons. First, the sentence sounds like a call to do philosophy only in order to guide political action directly. But if this were indeed Marx’s guiding principle, what do we make of the fact that he spent much of the next decades contravening it: sitting in libraries, copying endless quotations, writing and rewriting drafts of an unfinishable economic treatise with a pronounced philosophical component? The fruit of all this labor, his massive Capital project, tells you how capitalism works — not how to abolish it. Second, the sentence gives you the impression that philosophers, if properly oriented, could actually change the world. But another famous aphorism of Marx’s from the mid-1840s reads: “The weapons of criticism cannot replace the criticism of weapons.” Marx always knew that there was only so much philosophizing could do.

Around this time, Marx came to believe that capitalism was doomed, and he did what he could to hasten its demise. Together with his collaborator, Friedrich Engels, he wrote The Communist Manifesto in 1848, explaining why capitalists had forfeited their right to rule over their work force and exhorting “proletarians of all countries” to “unite.” Soon after it was published, insurrections broke out across Europe, and Marx moved from Brussels to Cologne, Germany, to agitate for the revolutionary cause as a journalist. When the newspaper he edited was shut down in 1849 — its last issue appearing in red ink, the color the radical left had come to identify with — he relocated to England. As a stateless émigré in London, where he spent the rest of his life, Marx corresponded with revolutionaries on multiple continents, penned hundreds of articles for the progressive New-York Daily Tribune, and eventually helped found the International Working Men’s Association, or First International. Marx served as its corresponding secretary, and in that capacity he held lectures for members, devised policies, and produced policy statements. He strategized in different directions, entertaining the hope that, in Britain at least, revolutionary change toward a society of associated producers might be possible without revolution.

All the while, Marx never abandoned the view that such change would be fundamentally enabled by material circumstances: He saw definite limits to what we now call consciousness-raising efforts. Yet he did not waver in his commitment to Wissenschaft, or the most rigorous systematic scholarship. The ultimate point of this scholarship may have been to help “win” the world. You could draw on its findings in your organizational efforts or programmatic writings, as Marx drew on those of Capital in his searing 1875 response to the platform put forward by Germany’s Social Democratic Party, known as his “Critique of the Gotha Program.” But in order to change the world, it was crucial to truly understand it. Just as true understanding might make “the birth pangs” of the new society “shorter and milder,” to borrow a phrase from Capital, so misunderstanding could lead you to revolt in the wrong place or time, or against the wrong thing. And the likelihood of misunderstanding was great, because the capital system was much more than a mode of production. It was a vast, incredibly complex “social-economic formation” that was developing rapidly.

From 1848 until 1858, Marx hoped that each new crisis would topple capitalism. After the system emerged from the severe economic crisis of 1857-58 stronger than it had been, his ever-evolving outlook evolved further. Capital’s internal tensions made for vulnerabilities, but its capacity to adapt to the very pressures it created for itself shouldn’t be underestimated. Whatever else he does in the first volume of Capital (1867), the only one to appear during his lifetime, Marx definitely does not underestimate the staying power of capitalism.

Consider the book’s claims about automation, which, for Marx, competition essentially forces capitalists to pursue. In his account, automation has to imperil capitalist profit-making, since surplus value is produced by living human labor, and since automation creates masses of underemployed people without the means needed to consume the things machines make. Yet in Capital Marx keeps showing how capital manages to turn to its advantage the potentially destabilizing “misery” it not only “produces” but, according to him, “requires.” In some places, machines drive down the cost of human labor-power to a level where the latter can be employed less expensively than the former. Some of the European workers “thrown out onto the street” by automation emigrate to the colonies, which advances colonization and, in turn, leads to greater supplies of inexpensive raw materials, which fortifies the capital system at home. And so on.

Marx looks for silver linings in automation and sometimes finds them. If, in his view, the machine-system drains all the intellectual content from the labor of most people, it also forces workers to take on new tasks, because the machines change so rapidly. So even as it ruins minds, the system might actually promote a certain well-rounded development. However, when it comes to technological “progress,” a word Marx often uses with some irony, Capital does not simply offer scattered on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand scenarios. It can leave you with the sense that, owing in no small part to such progress, a necessary condition for postcapitalist human flourishing, the end of capitalism isn’t at hand. And the analysis the book gives of capitalism’s peculiar genius for self-reproduction extends far beyond what it has to say about automation.

From its first appearance, some readers hoped Marx’s book would be the key to the worker revolution that hadn’t managed to happen otherwise. Engels, who edited and introduced the original English translation, was one such reader. For more than a century, a reputation grew up around Capital, established by Engels and others, that it is first and foremost a revolutionary book, perhaps the revolutionary book — the book to bring about the anti-capitalist revolution. In the introduction to the first English translation, for example, Engels ties the “inevitable social revolution” in England directly to reading Capital, thereby presenting the book, in effect, as a direct means to a revolutionary end.

So, is Marx’s Capital a revolutionary text? Yes and no.

Broadly speaking, it was written within a revolutionary frame. But if “revolutionary text” means that the book describes oppressive conditions for one specific group; if it means that it shows the oppressors to be a mostly unified front; if it means that it claims relief is coming for the oppressed; if it means it tells you how this relief can be achieved; if it means, further, that it exhorts to action to overcome oppression; and if it means that, through spelling out the oppressive conditions, dividing the antagonists into two clear sides, promising relief, offering an effective plan, and calling the oppressed to action, that it promises the end will in fact be achieved and totally achieved — then no, Capital is not a revolutionary text.

Let’s call these criteria, strung together, the “revolutionary formula.” It isn’t the only one that exists, but it has left an imprint on global struggles. The Communist Manifesto is the classic expression of it. The famous first phrase, “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles,” is bookended by the even-more famous final phrase, mentioned above: “Proletarians of all countries, unite!” The revolutionary formula presents history moving toward emancipation, and plans for and calls for immediate and total action on that basis; the text calls upon its readers to “fight for the achievement of the immediately present objectives and interests of the worker class.”

Marx, in cooperation with Engels, had a long career promoting the revolutionary formula, communicating it to others, organizing around it, and sometimes taking decisive political action based on it. Together Marx and Engels recognized oppressive conditions under capitalist factory owners and the governments that advanced their cause. They decried what they considered false revolutionary parties, such as the Social Democrats, or misguided theorists such as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Ferdinand Lassalle. They gave the oppressed a new-old name, the proletariat — adopted from the Roman civil category proles, the property-less poor who had only their offspring to contribute to the state. They theorized in the late 1840s that this special group would act as the fundamental agent of collective social emancipation, which, furthermore, was close to being achieved. Both men, but especially Marx, spent time studying the social history of Europe, recasting it as the ongoing struggle of oppressed class after oppressed class in a chain reaching back to antiquity.

A lot happened between 1848 and 1872, the nearly quarter century before the last authorized German edition of volume one of Capital appeared. Revolutions on behalf of workers were attempted, and although they had some effects on working conditions, the great triumph evoked in the Manifesto remained elusive. When Marx and Engels put out a revised edition of the Manifesto in 1872, in the preface they marked the arguments to be jettisoned, because they no longer applied. For instance, because industrialization had advanced much farther in the intervening two decades, the proletariat was much more oppressed and much more divided. So much so, they wrote, that “the Manifesto has become a historical document.”

Between 1848 and 1872, between the two editions of the Manifesto, Marx studied economics. He made it a central part of his intellectual life in the mid-1840s, after editing Engels’ article “Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy” (1843) for the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, and after going through Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1820-21), mainly in order to rip its arguments to shreds. But the sections of Hegel’s book on “civil society” were written after a careful reading of Adam Smith, whom Marx now needed to read, too. In London, he spent a huge amount of time poring over government reports on industrial production, ratios of imports to exports, and labor conditions. More than once, he convinced himself that he was pretty much finished with “the whole economics crap,” as he put it in a note to Engels, only to decide that he had to keep going.

In the 1860s and 1870s, when Marx produced most of the Capital project, he was following two tracks: a revolutionary track and a scholarly track, with the balance between the two pursuits and the extent of the exchange between them varying all the time. We believe that aside from a couple of declamatory moments at the beginning and end of the text (“the expropriators are expropriated”), and notwithstanding one or two of Marx’s own characterizations of it (“the most terrible missile hurled at the heads of the bourgeoisie”), Capital belongs much more to the scholarly track than to the revolutionary one. That is why, in the new edition, we spend almost all our editorial energy helping new readers understand the book’s arguments, which are famously difficult.

One of the challenges of Capital, all three volumes, is that it leaves readers confused about the possibilities for political action. On the revolutionary track, Marx kept encouraging people to form parties and workers to fight in the courts and in the streets. He celebrated their rises: “On the dawn of the 18th of March, Paris arose to the thunderburst of ‘Vive la Commune!’” And he rued their falls: “Its martyrs are enshrined in the great heart of the working class. Its exterminators history has already nailed to that eternal pillory from which all the prayers of their priests will not avail to redeem them.”

At the same time, on the scholarly track, there was little room for easy success. Instead, Marx theorized that the historical anomaly, capital, has become an “automatic subject,” which relentlessly pursues accumulation according to its own will, manipulating human populations, capitalists and workers and others, as well as the nonhuman earth, for its purposes. It was important to cut through influential misunderstandings, to be clear about how exactly the basic dynamics of capitalism meant that it would never truly serve the interests of the many, only those of the few. But what this point, one of Marx’s main findings in Capital, implied about revolutionary possibilities in the present was less clear, less than clear.

Don’t take our word for it, and don’t rely on what our critics say either. Read Capital. As we stress in our front matter, the book remains as bracingly relevant an analysis of the capital system and a critique of economistic thinking as it was when Marx first put it out into the world, more than 150 years ago.

And if responses like Prashad’s and Miller’s have made you curious about what our edition actually does, then you may want to turn to the body of it, to the parts beyond our front matter. Look at the parts where we invested the bulk of our energy, at the translation, first of all. We think you will find a Marx depicting the destruction capitalism wreaks in direct, vivid language that comes closer to that of his source text, as in the following passage from chapter eight, on “The Working Day":

We also think you will find the theoretical linchpin of the book, the concept of value, rendered with greater precision and in a more illuminating way than it is in any previous English translation. Look at the annotations, too, where we explain the fundamental philosophical concepts and give plentiful historical context. It’s not for us to say whether we succeeded, but here’s what we set out to do: produce an edition of Capital that makes its analysis as understandable as possible to new readers today.