1891 Introduction to Karl Marx’s Wage-Labor and Capital

An introduction written by Engels to the new single-volume edition of Marx’s Wage-Labor and Capital, which he himself proofread. Written in April 1891, first published in the Supplement No. 109 of Vorwärts on May 13, 1891, subsequently published with the separate edition of Wage-Labor and Capital in Berlin in 1891.

At the end of the 19th century, in order to further propagate Marxism and resist the erosion of workers’ movement by various erroneous currents, Richard Fischer, the then Secretary of the Executive Committee of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, wrote a letter to Engels on February 20, 1891, informing him that the Executive Committee of the Party had decided to reprint Marx’s The Civil War in France and Wage-Labor and Capital and Engels’ Socialism: Utopian and Scientific and asked Engels to write an introduction. In Engels’ view, Marx’s Wage-Labor and Capital, completed around 1849, “contain[ed] expressions and whole sentences which, viewed from the standpoint of his later writings [that had theoretically matured after 1859] appear inexact, and even incorrect”. In order to meet the need of using “exclusively for the purpose of propaganda”, it was necessary for the new edition to make “few changes and additions which are necessary” “to bring it into harmony with [Marx’s] new point of view”. Engels wrote this introduction in order to give a clear explanation of the new edition.

The main contents of the 1891 Introduction to Karl Marx’s Wage-Labor and Capital are as follows: First, Engels defined Marx’s mature economic works from the perspective of theoretical development. He pointed out that “Marx, in the ’40s, had not yet completed his criticism of political economy. This was not done until the end of the fifties. Consequently, such of his writings as were published before the first instalment of his Critique of Political Economy was finished, deviate in some points from those written after 1859, and contain expressions and whole sentences which, viewed from the standpoint of his later writings, appear inexact, and even incorrect.” Second, Engels criticized classical political economy with concrete empirical analysis, and revealed the essence of “economic system of our present-day capitalist society”. He pointed out that as soon as the economists applied this determination of value by labor to the commodity “labor”, they had driven straight into an insoluble contradiction, and classical political economy had run itself into a blind alley. Marx pointed out in his criticism that what the economists had considered as the cost of production of “labor” was really the cost of production, not of “labor,” but of the living laborer himself, and what this laborer sold to the capitalist was not his labor but labor-power. In Engels’ view, Following this line of thought, that is, taking the value of “labor-power” as the starting point, Marx finally solved the problems that “the best economists” could not solve by starting from the value of “labor”, and thereby revealed the essence of the capitalist mode of production and demonstrated the possibility and necessity of realizing “a new social order” “in which the class differences of today will have disappeared”.

1891 Introduction to Karl Marx’s Wage-Labor and Capital is an important document in the history of the development of Marxism. In this introduction, Engels criticized the limitations of classical bourgeois economics, and revealed the inherent contradictions and essence of capitalist economic system with a large number of conclusive empirical analyses, and clarified the scientificity of Marx’s economic doctrine, which furnished the toiling masses with a path of thinking and an easy-to-understand model for understanding Marx’s economic doctrine and its transcendence of classical political economy.