We've just passed the anniversary of the publication of the first volume of Capital, on September 14, 1867. This gigantic and enthralling work has been a resource for critics, intellectuals, activists, politicians, economists, the curious and the obsessed ever since. Produced over years of work by Karl Marx, subsidized by the unhappy labours in Manchester of his brilliant friend and interlocutor Friedrich Engels, the book contains astonishingly rich analyses of the commodity, of trade, of early capitalism. It weaves together Marx's philosophical heritage from German Idealism and Hegelianism in particular, with his interest in the history of socialism and his reading in British political economy. But though Marx went on to work on (though not in his own lifetime finish) the later volumes of the project, he also was keen to revise the first volume. Indeed, of course, one can argue that the unfinished status of Vols. II and III was due to his recursive mode of scholarship going back to Volume 1. In fact anyone doing serious intellectual work finds that moving on to the next stage of that work causes one to want to revise the first iteration.
Just in the last few days I found myself reading Italo Calvino's essay 'Why Read the Classics?' and so it made me smile to find Marcello Musto invoking it to think about Capital. One way of thinking of a classic, Calvino suggested, was that it 'relegates current events to the status of background noise'. A book like Capital remains indispensable, gathering new generations of readers and speaking to the crises and needs of the bad new times.
Here is Musto writing on why Marx continued revising Volume I, published at Jacobin:
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