Page:Karl Marx - Wage Labor and Capital - tr. Harriet E. Lothrop (1902).djvu/13



pamphlet first appeared in the form of a series of leading articles in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, beginning April 4, 1849. The text is made up from lectures delivered by Marx before the German Workingmen's Club of Brussels in 1847. The series was never completed. The promise "to be continued," at the end of the editorial in Number 269 of the newspaper, remained unfulfilled in consequence of the precipitous events of that time: the invasion of Hungary by the Russians, and the uprisings in Dresden, Iserlohn, Elberfeld, the Palatinate, and in Baden, which led to the suppression of the paper on the nineteenth of May, 1849. And among the papers left by Marx no manuscript of any continuation of these articles has been found.

Wage-Labor and Capital has appeared as an independent publication in several editions, the last of which was issued by the Swiss Coöperative Printing Association, in Hottingen-Zurich, in 1884. Hitherto, the several editions have contained the exact wording of the original articles. But since at least ten thousand copies of the present edition are to be circulated as a propaganda tract, the question necessarily forced itself upon me, Would Marx himself, under these circumstances, have approved of an unaltered literal reproduction of the original?

Marx, in the forties, had not yet completed his criticism of political economy. This was not done until toward