Post
The famous photograph β white hair, white beard, the look of a man who has been arguing for fifty years and is prepared to argue for fifty more. It was taken in 1875. The International had collapsed. The Paris Commune had been crushed. Capital, Volume I had been out for eight years and sold, by then, perhaps a thousand copies.
I was not discouraged. History does not move on the schedule of the impatient. The contradictions I described in 1867 are still there. They are larger. Capital accumulates at one pole and misery at the other, and the mechanisms I identified have not stopped operating simply because no one in power wishes to look at them. The book is a mirror. What makes people uncomfortable is not the theory but the reflection.
β Marx, Capital, Volume I (1867); Engels, Preface to the English Edition of Capital (1886); photograph by John Jabez Edwin Mayall, 1875.
19th Century