TRANSCRIBER'S INTRO


This etext version of CAPITAL, A Critique of Political Economy by Karl 
Marx was translated from the Third German Edition by Samuel Moore and 
Edward Aveling, Marx's son-in-law.  It was edited by Frederick Engels, 
Marx's Doctor Watson.  The changes made by Engels in the fourth (1890) 
German edition have been incorporated. 

Why read Marx's Capital? What possible connection is there between "post 
industrial" America and a book published in 1867? What does this book 
have to do with the crash of the peso, and the slow-motion collapse of 
the U.S. "middle class?" Don't we need new approaches to solve our 
unprecedented problems?

Capital is not a cookbook for socialist transformation, nor a utopian 
blueprint for economics under a socialist system. It is a systematic 
study of the underlying dynamics of capitalism.

Ernest Mandel, in his introduction to Capital, explains that the 
capitalism that Marx studied wasn't as fully developed as capitalism is 
today, and so "in that sense, contrary to a generally accepted belief, 
Marx is much more an economist of the twentieth century than of the 
nineteenth. Today's Western world is much nearer to the `pure' model of 
Capital than was the world in which it was composed."

On December 16, 1928, the great Soviet film maker Sergei Eisenstein 
wrote to his friend Leon Moussinac:  "The `proclamation' that I'm going 
to make a movie of Marx's Das Kapital is not a publicity stunt.  I  
believe that the films of the future will be found going in this 
direction (or else they'll be filming things  like `The Idea of 
Christianity' from the bourgeois point of view)!"  He was still talking 
about doing the film into 1930, but by then the immediate needs of the 
first five year plan made his project look a bit stylized and academic. 
The authorities stopped the film from being made. 

Maybe it was for the good.  Film might not be the interactive medium 
that Marx's Capital demands.  But now we have hypertext, and multimedia! 
We can do it now! We can present the dialectic of the critique of 
capitalism interactively, make it live, in a way never before possible! 
We can juxtapose text, cartoons, film, still and diagrams, at the user's 
command, to breath life into Capital! 

This etext of Capital is the first step in the project.  Would you like 
to participate?  Email me at bschultz@igc.apc.org.

In Struggle, 

Bert Schultz 

4 March 1995