Introduction to Marx's Capital

This small book is intended, as were the lectures in which it first took form, to be an introduction to the study of Marx's Capital. It is not meant to be a substitute for such study.

It is the fate of all great books to get bcdleA-down and served up cold in text-books, which purport to tell exactly what the great book comes to, as though a man's 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.

Marx's Capital is obviously a book of historical importance, and anyone 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.

Ways of Treating a Great Book

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 all his inconsistencies are collected 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 inspiration of scripture for the belief in the verbal inspiration of Capital and try to maintain that there are no inconsistencies in Marx at all.

Understanding Marx

We might 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...