Page:Karl Marx - Wage Labor and Capital - tr. Harriet E. Lothrop (1902).djvu/9



this volume are presented two of the earlier writings of Karl Marx, with a special “Introduction” to each by Frederick Engels.

The first, entitled Wage-Labor and Capital, was translated for us by Dr. Harriet E. Lothrop, of Boston, from the standard German edition prepared by Engels in 1891. This is the only complete English edition of it that has yet appeared, and its accuracy was doubly secured by a critical comparison of its every sentence with the German text, made at the request of the translator by Herman Simpson, of New York, who also added footnotes wherever comment seemed needful. In the performance of their respective task, both kept in mind the all-important consideration, that in the works of Marx, as in all works, truly scientific, the exact expression is an essential factor and should not, therefore, be sacrificed to “literary style” in its transfer from one language to another.

To those who are already acquainted with Marx’s later essay on Value, Price, and Profit, this much earlier one on Wage-Labor and Capital will no doubt seem somewhat familiar. Still more familiar will both appear to the industrious reader of Capital. And for obvious reasons. In both are already promulgated, briefly yet comprehensively, the fundamental economic truths