Preface

Italy, March 1878

A profound feeling of sadness struck me, studying Capital, when I thought that this work was, and who knows how much longer it would remain, entirely unknown in Italy.

But if that is, I then said to myself, I want to say that my duty is to work for all people, so that this would no longer be. And what to do? A translation? Phew! That wouldn’t help at all. The people who can understand the work of Marx, such that he has written, certainly know French, and can make use of J. Roy’s beautiful translation, fully reviewed by the author, who says it even deserves to be consulted by those who speak the German language. It’s a very different group of people for whom I must work. It’s divided into three categories: the first is composed of workers gifted with intelligence and of a certain education; the second, composed of young people who came out of the bourgeoisie, and have embraced the cause of labor, but who for now don’t have the set of studies or the sufficient intellectual development to understand Capital in its original text; the third, finally, composed of the youngest in schools, still of pure heart, who I can compare to a beautiful nursery of still tender plants, but who will bear the best fruits, if transplanted into fertile soil. My work must therefore be an easy and brief summary of Marx’s book.

This book represents the new true, which completely demolishes, crushes, and disperses to the winds a secular edifice of mistakes and lies. It is all a war. A glorious war, and by the power of the enemy, and by the even greater power of the captain, who undertook it with great quantities of the newest weapons, tools and machinery of every sort, which his genius had known how to portray from all the modern sciences.

My work is a great length shorter and more modest. I must only guide a crowd of willing followers along the shortest and simplest path to the temple of capital; and to tear down that god there, so that all can see with their own eyes and touch with their own hands the elements of which it is composed; and to rip off the vestments from the priests, so that all can see the hidden stains of human blood, and the cruelest weapons, with which they go about, every day, sacrificing an ever-growing number of victims.

And with these intentions I prepare to work. Meanwhile Marx can fulfill his promise, giving us the second volume of Capital, which will deal with The Process of Circulation of Capital (book II), and with The Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole (book III), and the fourth and final volume which will explain A History of Economic Theories.

This first book of Capital, originally written in German and afterwards translated into Russian and into French, is now briefly summarized in Italian in the interests of the cause of labor. May the workers read it and think about it carefully because in it is contained not only the story of The Development of Capitalist Production, but also The Martyrdom of the Worker.

And finally, I will also appeal to a class highly interested in the fact of capitalist accumulation, i.e. to the class of small property holders. How is it that this class, once so widespread in Italy, shrinks more and more every day? The reason is very simple. Because since 1860 Italy has set course with more alacrity down the path, which all modern nations must necessarily travel; the path that leads to capitalist accumulation, which has reached that classic form in England, which Italy wishes to reach along with all other modern nations. May the small property holders meditating on these pages about the history of England reported in this book, meditating on capitalist accumulation, increased in Italy by the usurpations of big property holders and by the liquidation of ecclesiastical and state property, shake off the torpor that oppresses their minds and hearts, and once and for all persuade themselves that their cause is the cause of the workers, because they will all inevitably be reduced, by modern capitalist accumulation, to this sad condition: either sell themselves to the government for a loaf of bread, or disappear forever within the dense rows of the proletariat.