Letter to Friedrich Engels, June 27, 1867

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To Engels in Manchester

[London,] 27 June 1867

Dear Fred,

The 2 half £5-notes received with kindest thanks. With respect to the address, use Borkheim. He knows my situation, though with as much concealment as I consider necessary in his regard. I would even like him to know that you are lending me money. But you must write and tell me when the money is to be sent to him. I do not see why I should involve yet a 3rd philistine.

The Fenians should be delivered to you today.

I was so very pleased by your lines of yesterday, and that requires no further elaboration from me.

Sheet 20 [of the first volume of Capital] was the latest to reach me. It will probably run to 40 or 42 sheets in all. I've not as yet received any corrected proofs after the ones already sent you. On your departure send me back those which are in your possession.

Regarding the objection that you mentioned the philistines and vulgar economists will infallibly raise (they forget, of course, that, if they reckon paid labour as wages, they are reckoning unpaid labour as profit, etc.), it amounts, in scientific terms, to the following question:

How is the value of the commodity transformed into its price of production in which

1. the whole of the labour appears paid for in the form of wages;

2. the surplus-labour, however, or the surplus-value, assumes the form of an addition to the price, and goes by the name of interest, profit, etc., over and above the cost-price (= price of the constant part of capital + wages).

Answering this question presupposes:

I. That the transformation of, for example, the value of a day’s labour-power into wages or the price of a day’s labour has been explained. This is done in Chapter V of this volume.

II. That the transformation of surplus-value into profit, and of profit into average profit, etc., has been explained. This presupposes that the process of the circulation of capital has been previously explained, since the turnover of capital, etc., plays a part here. This matter cannot therefore be treated prior to the 3rd book (Volume II is to contain books 2 and 3). Here it will be shown how the philistines’ and vulgar economists’ manner of conceiving things arises, namely, because the only thing that is ever reflected in their minds is the immediate form of appearance of relations, and not their inner connection. Incidentally, if the latter were the case, we would surely have no need of science at all.

Now if I wished to refute all such objections in advance, I should spoil the whole dialectical method of exposition. On the contrary, the good thing about this method is that it is constantly setting traps for those fellows which will provoke them into an untimely display of their idiocy.

By the by, Para. 3: ‘The Rate of Surplus Value’, which was the last one you had in your possession, is immediately followed by the Para.: ‘The Working Day’ (struggle for the reduction of working time), whose argument demonstrates ad oculus to what extent those bourgeois gentlemen comprehend the source and nature of their profit in practice. This is also shown in the Senior case, where your bourgeois assures us that his whole profit and interest derive from the last unpaid hour of labour.

Kindest regards to Mrs Lizzy.

Your

K. M.

You must stop over for a few days here on your journey home.

Apropos. I judged it in every way imprudent to take Mr Meissner into my confidence regarding my private circumstances.

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Dear Fred,

The children send you their best thanks.

I have written to Meissner today that the ‘Leipzig’ method cannot continue in this fashion. I've had nothing since Monday. The proofs have been reaching me most irregularly throughout, so that I am for ever being interrupted in other work and am for ever kept quite pointlessly on tenterhooks. Having perhaps received 1 sheet in a whole week, on Saturday evening I at last get a successor which is too late for me to send off. I have written to Meissner that Wigand must send a minimum of 3 sheets on certain agreed days, but that he is always welcome to send more at anytime.

If I get 13th and 14th sheets of the corrected copy in time, you shall have them on Sunday. I would have liked you to see my dressing-down of Senior and my introduction to the analysis of the working day before your departure. Incidentally, the section on the ‘Working Day’ occupies 5 printed sheets, which do, of course, contain predominantly factual material. To show you how closely I have followed your advice in my treatment of the appendix, I'll now copy out for you the divisions, sections, headings, etc., of same appendix.

The Form of Value

I. Simple Form of Value

§ 1. The two poles of the expression of value: relative form and equivalent form of value.

a. Inseparability of the two forms.

b. Polarity of the two forms.

c. Relative value and equivalent, both being but forms of value.

§ 2. The relative form of value.

a. The relation of equality.

b. Value-relations.

c. Qualitative content of the relative form of value implied in value-relations.

d. Quantitative determination of the relative form of value implied in value-relations.

e. The relative form of value considered as a whole.

§ 3. The equivalent form.

a. The form of direct exchangeability.

b. Quantitative determination not contained in the equivalent form.

c. The peculiarities of the equivalent form.

a. First peculiarity: use-value becomes the form of appearance of its opposite, value.

b. Second peculiarity: concrete labour becomes the form of appearance of its opposite, abstract human labour.

c. Third peculiarity: private labour takes the form of its opposite, namely, labour in its directly social form.

d. Fourth peculiarity: the fetishism of the commodity-form more striking in the equivalent form than in the relative value-form.

§ 4. The form of value or independent manifestation of value = exchange value.

§ 5. Simple form of value of the commodity-- simple manifestation of the contradictions it contains within itself between use-value and value.

§ 6. Simple form of value of the commodity =simple form of an object as commodity.

§ 7. Relationship between commodity-form and money-form.

§ 8. Simple relative form of value and individual equivalent form.

§ 9. Transition of the simple into the expanded form of value.

II. Total or Expanded Form of Value

§ 1. The endless series -of relative expressions of value.

§ 2. Sequential determination implied in the expanded relative form of value.

§ 3. Defects of the expanded relative form of value.

§ 4. Expanded relative form of value and specific equivalent form.

§ 5. Transition to the general form of value.

III. The General Form of Value

§ 1. Altered character of the relative form of value.

§ 2. Altered character of the equivalent form.

§ 3. Concurrent development of relative form of value and equivalent form.

§ 4. Development of the polarity between relative form of value and equivalent form.

§ 5. Transition from the general form of value to the money-form.

IV. The Money-Form

(The following on the money-form is simply for the sake of continuity — perhaps barely half a page.)

§ 1. How the transition from the general form of value to the money-form differs from the previous transitions in the development.

§ 2. Transformation of the relative form of value into the price form.

§ 3. The simple form of commodity is the secret of the money-form.

You may sprinkle sand on this!

Your
K. Moro

Don’t forget to drop a line to Borkheim before you depart, so that no ‘misunderstanding’ is possible.

Regarding the English translation [of Capital], I am trying to track down a fellow in London who will pay decently, so that both Moro as translator and I as author get our due. If I am successful, Mrs Lizzy shall also receive her share (you must in that case allow me that pleasure — but the bird is not yet in the hand) in the form of a London dress. I have some expectations, as Mssrs Harrison et Co. are most desirous to study the book in English. Eccarius has, of course, told them that he is a humble Pupil of mine — (his critique of Mill has impressed them hugely, they having previously been believers in Mill) — and that the Prophet Himself is just now having the quintessence of all wisdom published, that is printed, in Germany.

I am quite sickened by the report on the Fenians. These swine boast of their English humanity in not treating political prisoners worse than murderers, street-thieves, forgers and pederasts! And this O'Donovan Rossa, what ‘a queer fellow’, because as a felony convict he refused to grovel before his worst enemies! A queer fellow indeed! Incidentally, would even the Prussians have been capable of acting in a more bureaucratic fashion than these emissaries of the weeping willow, that Knox (read ox) and Pollock (bull-dog), who naturally accept the evidence given by the subordinate ‘warder’ as unimpeachable. But if you don’t believe the warders, you have the word of Wermuth, the chief of police!

Mrs S O'Donovan Rossa has written the ‘International’ a very flattering and very graceful letter on her departure for America.

The fury of that Bismarck-oracle, the Norddeutsche, at Stanley’s and Derby’s statements about the Luxemburg Treaty has quite cured my nausea. That jackass Brass calls it an innovation! Palmerston has laid down once and for all the principle that common treaties impose only the right and not by any means the duty of intervention for any state. And if that were not so, whatever became of the obligations which England assumed at the Congress of Vienna with regard to Poland, in respect of both Prussia and Russia, and France ditto?