Papers > By author > Zarembka Paul

In 1891, Engels wrote in his “Introduction” to a new edition of Marx's Wage-Labor and Capital that the criticism of political economy by Marx was already completed “toward the end of the fifties”. I find this astonishing. This asserts that, for Engels, Marx's theoretical work after 1859 was nothing more than elaboration, filling in details, that sort of thing. It says that Marx learning Russian and studying Russian developments had no particular importance. It says that there was no impact on Engels' understanding of his friend Karl Marx when the latter wrote him in 1870 that the most important work published since Engels' own Condition of the Working Class in England was Flerovsky's Condition of the Working [Peasant] Class in Russia. It underlines why important changes that Marx instructed to be included for editions of Capital after French edition of 1872-75 were ignored by Engels. It would even say that Volumes II and III of Capital written after 1859 were not consequential elaborations of earlier work, even with Engels' personal work in publishing editions of these two volumes.

Aided by Engels' 1891 statement, it can be more clearly understood, but not accepted, why major slippages occurred between what Marx wrote in the French version of Volume I and what Engels decided to include or not include from Marx's explicit instructions for the German 3rd edition, relying upon the French. Consequences are felt to this day as changes are still not included, in spite of Marx's instructions. This proposal offers to provide the needed elaboration.