His ideas have transformed the study of economics, history, geography, sociology and literature. Nevertheless, within one hundred years of his death half the world's population was ruled by governments that professed Marxism to be their guiding faith. Whether he would recognise them as such is quite another matter. Stalin, Mao, Che, Castro - the icons and monsters of the modern age have all presented themselves as his heirs. "The history of the twentieth century is Marx's legacy. Sorge that 'our success is still greater in Russia, where Kapital is read and appreciated more than anywhere else'" (PMM). He was wrong: the edition sold out quickly and in 1880 Marx was writing to his friend F. Giving his imprimatur, the censor, one Skuratov, had written 'few people in Russia will read it, and still fewer will understand it'. "By an odd quirk of history the first foreign translation of Das Kapital to appear was the Russian, which Petersburgers found in their bookshops early in April 1872. Sorge that 'our success is still greater in Russia,
The historical-polemical passages, with their formidable documentation from British official sources, have remained memorable and, as Marx (a chronic furunculosis victim) wrote to Engels while the volume was still in the press, 'I hope the bourgeoisie will remember my carbuncles all the rest of their lives'." The Athenaeum reviewer of the first English translation (1887) later wrote: 'Under the guise of a critical analysis of capital, Karl Marx's work is principally a polemic against capitalists and the capitalist mode of production, and it is this polemical tone which is its chief charm'.
It was in fact the summation of his quarter of a century's economic studies, mostly in the Reading Room of the British Museum. "Marx himself modestly described Das Kapital as a continuation of his Zur Kritik de politischen Oekonomie, 1859. First editions, a complete set of Marx's polemical masterpiece of political economy, of which only the first volume was published in his lifetime the rest were seen through the press by Engels.
0 kommentar(er)
