If the first volume of Capital became a scripture, the second became a quarry. Marx never finished it. He left a heap of manuscripts - some fair copies, most fragments, the earliest written before Volume One was drafted and the latest broken off by illness - and after his death in 1883 it fell to Engels to make a book of them, first published in German in 1885 and revised in 1893. Engels was candid about what he had done, and his candour is the right place to begin. He describes the difficulty of producing something connected and as complete as possible while keeping it exclusively the author's work rather than the editor's, and states exactly how far his hand went: changing the style only where Marx would have changed it himself, and interpolating connecting sentences only where absolutely necessary. No other volume comes to us so visibly through a second mind. Its subject is the circulation of capital - not the hidden abode of production where Volume One found the secret of surplus value, but what happens to that value afterwards: the metamorphoses of capital, turnover time, fixed and circulating capital, and, in the closing part, the reproduction schemes that show how the total social product must divide if the system is to reproduce itself at all. It is the least read of the three and the most consequential in ways its readers rarely notice, because the arguments in its driest chapters became, half a century later, the theoretical charter of an entire economic order. Translated by I. Lasker. New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.
