Introduction

Capital Volume III

Supplement by Frederick Engels

Introduction

The third book of Capital is receiving many and various interpretations ever since it has been subject to public judgement. It was not to be otherwise expected. In publishing it, what I was chiefly concerned with was to produce as authentic a text as possible, to demonstrate the new results obtained by Marx in Marx’s own words as far as possible, to intervene myself only where absolutely unavoidable, and even then to leave the reader in no doubt as to who was talking to him. This has been deprecated. It has been said that I should have converted the material available to me into a systematically written book, en faire un livre, as the French say; in other words, sacrifice the authenticity of the text to the reader’s convenience. But this was not how I conceived my task. I lacked all justification for such a revision, a man like Marx has the right to be heard himself, to pass on his scientific discoveries to posterity in the full genuineness of his own presentation. Moreover, I had no desire thus to infringe — as it must seem to me — upon the legacy of so pre-eminent a man; it would have meant to me a breach of faith. And third, it would have been quite useless. For the people who cannot or do not want to read, who, even in Volume I, took more trouble to understand it wrongly than was necessary to understand it correctly — for such people it is altogether useless to put oneself out in any way. But for those who are interested in a real understanding, the original text itself was precisely the most important thing; for them my recasting would have had at most the value of a commentary, and, what is more, a commentary on something unpublished and inaccessible. The original text would have had to be referred to at the first controversy, and at the second and third its publication in extenso would have become quite unavoidable.

Such controversies are a matter of course in a work that contains so much that is new, and in a hastily sketched and partly incomplete first draft to boot. And here my intervention, of course, can be of use: to eliminate difficulties in understanding, to bring more to the fore important aspects whose significance is not strikingly enough evident in the text, and to make some important additions to the text written in 1865 to fit the state of affairs in 1895. Indeed, there are already two points which seem to me to require a brief discussion.