Page:Karl Kautsky - Frederick Engels - 1899.djvu/27

 questions of the day and the defense of the Marx-Engels theory against attacks and misunderstandings. Besides all these tasks Engels carried on special investigations of historical methods which he had already earlier begun, and which demanded that he enter into a study of almost every sphere of knowledge.

Engels looked upon the completion of the legacy of Marx as the first and most important of these duties. First he took up the third edition of the first volume of "Capital," which was enlarged and revised according to statements left by the author, as well as provided with notes. It appeared at the close of 1883.

In the summer of 1884 Engels published his work on the "Origin of the Family, of Private Property and the State," in which he carried out what Marx himself had planned. He gave to the public the investigations of Morgan, and at the same time enlarged upon them. Morgan, in his pre-historic studies, had arrived at the same materialistic conception of history which Marx and Engels had reached in their historical investigations. The orthodox knowledge of the time sought to suppress Morgan as they had previously tried to do with Marx. It was necessary not only to save him from threatened oblivion, but also to fill in the historical gaps in Morgan's investigations; to fit these into the frame of the Marx-Engels materialistic conception of history and to blend in one uniformly developed series the pre-historic and historic. Nothing less than this is accomplished in the little book of 146 pages.

A year later followed the second volume of "Capital," which treated of the process of the circulation of capital. The first volume explained the process by which value and surplus value are produced. The second volume was an exposition of the different forms of circulation of capital. It was shown that by every circulation the capitalist sold the produced value and surplus value, in order with the proceeds—after the deduction of what he consumed—to again buy means of production, and labor power, and to allow the production of new value and surplus value. The third volume, which we look for in 1888, will treat of the whole process—the forming of price from value, the apportionment of surplus value into its different constituent parts, land rent, profit, interest, etc.

Along with this completion of the Marxian legacy went a lively journalistic activity, if one dare use this word of so fundamental and well thought out productions as those of