1. Translator's Note to 1891 edition: It must be remembered that this
2. That is the "common" people as distinct from the "noble" and
3. As stated by Engels in the Introduction, the series of articles on
4. "Sell" is not a very exact expression, for serfdom in its purity did
* "By classical political economy, I understand that economy
(Karl Marx, Capital, Vol.I, p.93f.)
[FootNotes]
[Introduction]
[Chapter 3 "By What Is the Price of A Commodity Determined?"]
[Chapter 4 "By What Are Wages Determined?"]
[Chapter 5 "The Nature and Growth of Capital"]
[Chapter 6 "Relation of Wage-Labor to Capital"]
[Chapter 7 "The General Law That Determines the Rise and Fall of Wages and Profits"]
Text from the Marx/Engles Archive
was written over 40 years ago. Today the class struggle in
Switzerland, and especially Belgium, has reached that degree of
development where it compels recognition from even the most
superficial observers of political industrial life.
"clerical" (or "religious") people. Originating in feudal times in
the rank of freeman and town-burgher the "commons" or "citizens"
(burgher, burghers, citizen, citizens, or bourgeois) formed the
starting-point of the bourgeoisie". - Ed.
"Wage-Labor and Capital" remained incomplete; the pamphlet is
confined almost exclusively to a consideration of the first "great
division": the relation of wage-labor to capital. - Ed.
not involve any relations of buying and selling between serf and the
lord of the manor, the tributes of the former to the latter
consisting in labor and in kind. It is evident that Marx here
uses the word 'sells" in the general sense of alienation . --
Translator.
which, since the time of W. Petty, has investigated the real
relations of production in bourgeois society, in
contradistinction to vulgar economy, which deals with
appearances only, ruminates without ceasing on the materials
long since provided by scientific economy, and there seeks
plausible explanations of the most obtrusive phenomena for
bourgeois daily use, but for the rest confines itself to
systematizing in a pedantic way, and proclaiming for
everlasting truths, trite ideas held by the self-complacent
bourgeoisie with regard to their own world, to them the best of
all possible worlds."
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