A NOTE ON TRANSLATIONS

If you wish to read Marx’s masterpiece for yourself, the least intimidating option is Capital: A New Abridgement, edited by David McLellan (OUP World’s Classics), a one-volume collection of the most important chapters. Its extracts from Volume I are in the original English translation of 1887; the translations from Volume II are by McLellan himself; the material for Volume III comes from the anonymous Moscow translation published in 1971.

If you want to plunge straight into a full, unabridged version, I recommend the Penguin Classics edition in three volumes, translated by Ben Fowkes and with an introduction (which you may decide to skip) by Ernest Mandel.

Since no single translation is perfect, I have used various sources for the passages from Das Kapital cited in this book. Some of the quotations are from the Penguin text, some from the World’s Classics, some from the Marx & Engels Collected Works (50 vols, Lawrence & Wishart) – and some are my own.