Soft Shell, Hard Core: On the 150th Anniversary of the Publication of Karl Marx’s Capital, Vol. 1

Isaac Deutscher once told the following story about reading Capital:

I was relieved to hear that Ignacy Daszynski,1 our famous member of parliament, a pioneer of socialism, … admitted that he too found hard a nut. “I have not read it,” he almost boasted, “but Karl Kautsky has read it. I have not read Kautsky either, but Kelles-Krauz, our party theorist, has read him, and he summarized Kautsky’s book. I have not read Kelles-Krauz, either, but … Herman Diamond, our financial expert, has read Kelles-Krauz, and he has told me all about it.”2

Deutscher’s anecdote illustrates the fate of Karl Marx’s most important work, Das Kapital. Since then, the summaries and their contexts of origin have changed, as well as why and who wrote them and what they focus on—but the original still often sits unread on the shelf. But which original actually? Continue reading “Soft Shell, Hard Core: On the 150th Anniversary of the Publication of Karl Marx’s Capital, Vol. 1”