Franz Heilgendorff
The questionable thesis of a progressive popularization in Capital and its consequences
Apart from the first book1, Marx's Capital remained unfinished. However, it seems to have become a commonplace to understand Marx's main work as a torso, which in turn determines the perspective of reception right up to popularizing introductions. It assumes that Marx did not understand himself and left behind a work that is anything other than "a completed, coherent theory that has been thought through to its conclusion" (Bruschi et al. 2012, 13). In particular, the "New Marx Reading" following Hans-Georg Backhaus (1969) directs the focus to the first three chapters, because this new approach is "particularly clear" there (Heinrich 2005b, 11). The questions that preoccupy and often divide readers of Capital revolve around the following points: "What is value all about, and where exactly does it come from? Is Capital also a history of capitalism? Why does Marx begin his analysis with commodity?" (Bruschi et al. 2012, 13) However, this openness is deceptive. Instead of leading into the analysis of actuality, it indulges in "late scholastic conceptual fiddling" (Backhaus 1997, 71), because its premises are vicious.
What is concealed in these at first glance innocuous questions is the discussion about Marx's logical-historical method in the first chapters (cf. Haug 2004). The supposed new beginning is thus rather the end point of a discussion of the 1950s and 60s, in which the reflection on the categorical presentation in Capital served as the starting point for debates on scientific theory and politics, which in both East and West were based on a criticism of dogmatic distortions. One of its results is the current broad acceptance of the discourse of Marx's "logical method" (Arthur 2004, Elbe 2010, Fineschi 2008, Hoff 2009, Kirchhoff and Reutlinger 2006, Moseley and Smith 2014). It is an expression of the shifts in the West German reading of Marx that have emerged since the 1960s and the underlying crises in the workers' movement, which, as in Lukács's time (1923), placed the question of Marx's method at the center. In West Germany in particular, this was linked to a critique of fetishism and the attempt to explain how the "fraudulent agreement between capital and organized labour" could come about (Marcuse 1970, 14). The fact that Marx's concept of fetishism had received little attention until then was attributed, among other things, to the fact that Marx had never published a final version of his theory of value. Instead, it and Marx's method had to be reconstructed proceeding from fragments. Hans-Georg Backhaus and Helmut Reichelt in particular reproach Marx for the fact that Capital is determined by a barely comprehensible presentation resulting from a popularizing concealment of the method.
Following on from this, Marx's work is now described as a "huge theoretical torso" (Heinrich 2005a), whereby "a 'fourth draft' of Capital" can even be discovered in his late letters (Heinrich 2013, 142). This common starting point of a "reconstruction" of Marx's critique of economics makes it possible to join together originally antagonistic Marx readings under the name "New Marx Reading", such as the Hegelians Backhaus and Reichelt with anti-Hegelians like Michael Heinrich. Such contradictions explain the current retreat into philology and the capitulation to social reality in the debate outlined above. They are based, at least in part, on fatal errors that have seeped into the reading of Marx with the terms "torso" and "popularization". In particular, the thesis of popularization is disputed with an extremely questionable interpretation of passages from letters and the preface to the first edition, which on closer inspection proves to be untenable and the criticism of which will be provided below. But this alone would make criticism too easy. For the semblance that "every interpreter criticizes every other interpreter for not having 'fully grasped' the doctrine of values" (Backhaus 1997, 71) is deceptive. Rather, it is about eminently political questions of the history of the labor movement and ultimately about how and what can be learned from Marx's Capital for the analysis of the present.
The argument of popularization, the offshoot of which is the current dichotomy of "workers' movement Marxism" vs. "new Marx reading", originally served as a basis for criticizing distribution-theoretical, objectivist and otherwise distorted readings of Capital in Marxism-Leninism and the anti-Hegelianism of political economy. The disregard and ossification of Marx's critique into objective laws was not merely the product of external circumstances, but was inherent in his work itself and ultimately due to "popularization". With this, Marx would have obscured his form-analytical concept of value and abandoned the (Hegelian) dialectic. It is not that Marx "flirted" (23/27) with the Hegelian mode of expression that makes the presentation in Capital difficult to understand, but rather Marx's "reduction" of the "'dialectical method of development'" (Backhaus 1997, 17). This is attributed to his attempts at popularization, which then resulted in a "caricature of dialectics" (44) that made Capital difficult to understand. However, this polemic did not only refer to distortions and widespread anti-Hegelianism, but also to concrete economic issues such as the role of the law of value in the construction of socialism. In the real socialist countries, it was mainly economists who dealt with Marx's theory of value and the role of the market in socialism. As in 'bourgeois' economics, the theory of value was in danger of being reduced to a quantitative problem of distribution, in which the social form side played only a subordinate role (see, for example, Vascós González 2009).
With recourse to the preliminary work on and various editions of Capital, the social-theoretical moment then moved to the center of the West German debate following Alfred Schmidt, Marcuse, Adorno and others in the course of the student movement. Convinced that the methodological structure of Capital was "in truth" based on "Hegel's magnitude of logic" (Schmidt 1968, 32) and that the majority of discussions about Marx could be clarified "purely philologically" (33), the resulting "reconstructions" lost sight of actuality. It was replaced by methodological reflection on the basis of the theory of value, from which it emerges for Reichelt, building on the above authors, that Marx did more than "flirt" with Hegel (1974, 75f; 2008, 100, 194ff), whereby he attributes the problematic reception of the theory of value to the fact that Marx - in the context of an assumed progressive reduction of dialectics and the "hiding" (30/207) of his method - "postulates an objective value without being able to justify it in more detail" (2008, 200).
Backhaus's concern, on the other hand, was, among other things, that the transition to the analysis of the value-form as a dialectical, i.e. "necessary transition is no longer intelligible" (1997, 43). The consequence, he argued, was that the "doctrine of the value-form" was only seen as a "'dialectical' ornament" (44) of the previous sections and that the sections on the fetish character and Marx's theory of money were misinterpreted (45). His conclusion, based on Marcuse, is that if Marx had followed Hegel and presented "the development of exchange value value-form" as a "dialectical 'movement' from immediate 'being' through 'essence' to mediated 'existence', in such a way that 'immediacy is abolished and posited again as mediated existence'", the "pseudodialectical movement of pseudodialectical contradictions" resulting from popularization could have been avoided (ibid.). In this sense, Marx's abstraction of value is criticized by the "New Marx Reading" as tending to be naturalistic and as a relapse into the quantitative, distribution-theoretical questions of classical economy. In contrast, it claims that with its "new" form-analytical approach to Marx, it understands the substance of value as socially determined (e.g. Heinrich 2006, 202ff), which threatens to be lost through its popularization.
The problems of the Marx discussion, united under the label of the "new Marx reading", thus arise from "ambivalences", "flaws" or "inconsistencies" inherent in the work, with particular attention being paid to Marx's concept of value and labor (Backhaus and Reichelt 1995). This negative approach, which unspokenly recognizes as a work only that which forms a coherence free of contradictions, leads to its dissolution into manuscripts that have to be reconstructed philologically and compete with each other. It is then succinctly stated that Marx could still "provide suggestions, but nothing more" (Lindner 2013, 396).
The resulting reading is no longer able to understand the changes made by Marx as a learning process and to learn something about the analysis of actuality from them. Instead of gaining a progressive side to the incompleteness of Capital, it is chalked up as a failed attempt at popularization that sets a philology in motion that can no longer find its way to actuality.
The myth of a popularizing decline in the various editions of 'Capital'
The following quote from Backhaus' Dialectic of the Value-form is an example of what is problematic about the Marx philology following Backhaus and Reichelt:
On December 9, 1861, Marx [informed] Engels of his decision to write the planned work in "generally intelligible" terms. This communication proves two things - firstly, that the "popularized dilutions" noted by Horkheimer already affected the text Zur Kritik der politischen Ökonomie, and secondly, that they even extended to the much-vaunted "method": "My text is progressing, but slowly. [...] It is, however, becoming much more popular and the method much more hidden than in Part I." (30/207) This is not the place to describe the circumstances that prompted Marx to shelve the almost finished text in mid-November 1858 and to work on a new, popularized version, which was then subjected to further popularization in Capital. (Backhaus 1997, 13)
What at first glance appears to be a secure connection does not stand up to scrutiny. The aim was not to popularize "the dialectic of the beginning" (ibid.), which Backhaus uses to reconstruct Marx's method. What was to be popularized was a hitherto planned second part, which was to form the continuation of the first volume, published in 1859 as Zur Kritik der politischen Ökonomie (On the Critique of Political Economy) (see also 30/703). Further confusion arises from the last sentence, which apparently refers to the original text: Marx had no intention at the time (autumn 1858) of popularizing the Urtext and the "unfolding of the dialectical principle of 'commodity at all'" (1997, 13) that Backhaus assumed it contained. The quotation (30/207) is about the section on "Capital", and this should not be reworked, but worked out at all. In addition, Marx did not simply shelve the original text in favour of a popularized version. The fact that a new text in the form of Zur Kritik (November 1858) could emerge so quickly from the original text (end of October 1858) is explained in the appendix to the MEGA by the fact that the manuscripts of the first volume grew excessively and Marx therefore interrupted his labor in order to finish the chapters on "The Commodity" and "Money". The intention was therefore not to produce a new, popularized version, but a fair copy of the original text.
It is impossible to say whether any methodological changes were made to the original text in the course of the fair copy, and if so what, because the relevant parts have not survived. Backhaus' presentation of a "simplification", which is deeply "questionable" and "misleading" (1997, 12), is therefore itself questionable. Reichelt continues to pass on this presentation and thanks Backhaus in the preface to the new edition (2001) of his dissertation (1970) for drawing his attention to this passage from the letter (30/207), which was omitted there. Proceeding from this, Reichelt writes: "shortly after the publication of the text Zur Kritik der politischen Ökonomie in 1859, Marx wrote to Engels that the sequel would be 'much more popular and the method much more hidden (than in Part 1)'" (Reichelt 2001, 7). For those who want to learn something about Marx's "hidden" method, this means that one must "turn to the voluminous rough draft of Capital, or the original text of 'Zur Kritik ...'". (Reichelt 2008, 195) Reichelt thus perpetuates Backhaus's myth by insisting on the aspect that - with negative connotations - Zur Kritik and thus Das Kapital had a different methodology and form of presentation than planned. In the statements referred to, Marx is of course referring to the planned presentation of Capital and the capitalist production process, not to the concept of value in the first sections. ^[Reichelt is well aware of this, but refers the discourse on "hiding the method" back to Marx's concept of value (ibid., 200)].
That the contexts are different is clear from the correspondence already published at the time. A letter from Marx to Kugelmann dated December 28, 1862 is particularly revealing (III.12, 296f; 30/639f):
The second part2 is [...] finished [...]. It is the continuation of volume I [...]. It includes [...] only what should form the third chapter [...], namely "Capital in general". [...] In the first booklet [...] the mode of presentation was very unpopular. [...] This part is easier to understand because it deals with more concrete relations. Scientific attempts to revolutionize a science can never be actual popular.
In addition, Marx writes to Lassalle "shortly after the publication" of Zur Kritik regarding the second part (15.9.1860, III.11, 161; 30/565):
Your praise of my book [= Part 1, On Critique] has pleased me [...]. [...] Form will be somewhat different, more popular to some degree. Not at all out of any inner urge on my part, but for once this 2nd part has a directly revolutionary task, and then the relations [...] are more concrete.
The use of Marx's reflections on popularization in relation to the beginning of Capital is therefore based on a quid pro quo. Marx is always concerned with the chapter on Capital, not with the concept of value, as Reichelt and Backhaus imply.
Apart from these letter passages, Marx's preface to the first edition serves as evidence (23/11). The sentence in question is: "As far as the analysis of the substance of value and the value-magnitude is concerned, I have popularized it as far as possible." (23/11) At first semblance, this seems to substantiate the discourse of popularization. A closer look reveals that here, too, the quote has been taken out of context. It is about an argument between Marx and Lassalle (cf. also the footnote in 23/11), against the background of which the second passage cited as proof of popularization can now also be correctly classified. That there was indeed a need for an improved presentation becomes clear if one takes the subsequent footnote seriously, in which Marx accuses Lassalle of misrepresenting him. At the same time, however, Marx expresses a certain appreciation when he writes that even Lassalle had not understood him correctly. He had already expressed this consideration to Kugelmann earlier, saying that there must be "something defective in the first presentation [...], especially the analysis of commodities" (31/534). What was deficient in Lassalle's eyes can be found in a letter to Marx, and it can be assumed that Marx was guided by this in what he 'popularized'.
Lassalle identifies two core problems: firstly, in relation to Hegel, that Marx's presentation "has the defect of its merits. It is [...] written like the most beautiful chapters of Hegel's Phenomenology." (11.09.1860, III.11, 152) It is not only this that makes Marx's Zur Kritik difficult to understand, but above all the presupposed "most intimate familiarity with the systems and history of natural economics". (ibid.) The references to Hegel could still be tolerated, but the "second condition is [...] an almost too magnitude imposition for the public" (ibid.). This leaves only the national economic content as the object of popularization, which also seems plausible in view of the significantly reduced proportion of economic theorists in the first edition of Capital. This also harmonizes with the move away from the 6-book plan and the decision to present the history of theory in a separate volume. Thus, if we leave aside the untenable thesis of a decline from presentation to presentation and instead ask about "Marx's learning process" (cf. Haug 2005a), we can actually learn something for the analysis of reality and about Marx's relationship to Hegel, as well as about how Marx's method 'hides' itself.
A double error in the determination of Marx's relation to Hegel, or why Hegel could be of great service to Marx
This is exemplified by the derivation of the substance of value, which has changed in the various editions, and by the way in which Marx overcame the problems of representation through research, i.e. through progressive learning. Looking at the learning process also helps to answer Reichelt's question, namely "how Hegel's logic contributes to finding a solution to inner-economic questions" (2008, 198).
In the first edition, Marx identifies the basic problem facing the analysis of value in relation to the inversions of the simple value-form: In the equation of two commodities, at first sight, only the formation of the category of exchange value is possible and a reflection of its quantitative determination (II.5, 639). Proceeding from two individuated commodities, the problem arises that the insight of Marx's research process is obscured, namely that the commodity form of labor products "reflects back to people the social characters of their own labor as objective characters of the labor products themselves, as social natural properties of these things" (23/86), i.e. the problem of fetishism and the content-form relationship, which is also Backhaus's concern (1997, 34, 43). Proceeding from two commodities, there would also be no necessary transition to value-form analysis, for the common would only be a comparative third, "the caput mortuum of abstraction" (Hegel, W 8, 231). Marx is thus confronted with the question of what the architecture of a presentation looks like which, reflecting the actual life of the material in an ideal way, runs from the analysis of the commodity to the further value-forms and finally to the capitalist production process, i.e. from the abstract to the concrete. Or, as Marx put it in Fetscher's study edition of the first chapter of the first edition of Capital, which set the "New Marx Reading" on track: "The crucial thing, however, was to discover the inner necessary connection between value-form, value-substance and value-size, i.e. to prove, in ideal terms, that the value-form springs from the concept of value." (Fetscher 1966, 240; II.5, 43)
Ideally speaking, this succeeds if what appears in exchange value can be determined as a general (social) relation. In practical terms, this means that each individual commodity must be exchangeable with all others, i.e. "wheat has multiple exchange values instead of just one" (23/51). In the first edition, however, this problem is at best partially overcome in the starting point of the exchange value of wheat (II.5, 18f), when Marx, tending to identify value and exchange value, continues that the exchange value of wheat must be distinguishable from "its various modes of expression" (II.5, 19). (II.5, 19). What Marx writes here is a (reflexive) logical impossibility: how is exchange value supposed to distinguish itself from itself? In the second edition, Marx realized this error and wrote instead: exchange value "must therefore have a content distinguishable from these different modes of expression" (II.6, 71). If Marx is allowed a learning process, then not only the second, but above all the posthumous third and fourth editions show that he succeeds in correcting these errors. In the fourth edition, he proceeds even more determinately from many different exchange values, which are the expression of a "distinguishable content" (23/51). Leaving aside the justified doubts3 as to whether these innovations actually come from Marx, this starting point now enables a dialectical development in which Marx's intellectual analysis or, in Hegel's words, "external reflection" (Hegel, W 5, 16, 456) of commodity, which prepares the analysis of the value form, refers to a general social relation: "Exchange value can only be the mode of expression, the 'form of appearance' of a content that can be distinguished from it." (23/51)
This way of developing the problem and the fact that Marx speaks here of the form of appearance is of course reminiscent of Hegel. However, one does not get any further if Marx and Hegel are paralleled solely in terms of their use of language without looking at the difficulties of analyzing actuality, which are expressed in the changes. Heinrich, for example, concludes from the "form of appearance" in quotation marks and Marx's renunciation of the categories "essence" and "appearance" that the latter wants to "consciously avoid philosophical connections" (2008, 63; cf. also 2006, 222f). This parallelization leads Heinrich to refer uncritically to the first edition (2008, 64), overlooking the fact that the expressions "content" and "form of appearance" solve the representational-logical problem of the first edition, in which value and exchange value were identified and value as a comparative third party remains factually undefined and cannot be developed dialectically.4 The terminological omission and the quotation marks around "form of appearance" are thus explained by the fact that Marx discovers the structure of a general relation in the "content" of the "manifold exchange values", but is not yet able to develop it at this point. This is only possible when the presentation differentiates between value-substance, value-magnitude and value-form. Proceeding from Marx's "struggle for a more catchy version" (Wendt 2018), the transition to value form analysis, which Backhaus criticized, becomes comprehensible as a dialectical necessity. While the presentation in the first edition was still sprawling and contradictory (cf. e.g. II.5, 27f), the new arrangement can be analyzed and a clearer structure can be recognized on the basis of the inserted headings5. At the beginning of the fourth edition is the analysis of the commodity as being use value on the one hand and value on the other. Like the analysis of the dual character of labor, it is external to the intrinsic movement of the object because, following the intellect, it only holds fast the determinations of the object. However, since Marx's approach to actuality does not absolutize it, but critically grasps it in its commodity, this would be insufficient. This means that the presentation must necessarily, as in the section on the "value-form" or "exchange value", "return" (23/62) to the subject's own logic and trace the movement of the "actual contradictions" (23/118) that this presupposed form produces. In the course of the presentation, Marx thus shows the mediation of this immediacy, "that the simple value-form of the commodity is at the same time the simple commodity-form of the labor product, that therefore the development of the commodity-form also coincides with the development of the value-form." (23/76)
The fact that the value of commodity A can only appear in the use value of commodity B has a structural analogy to the categories of thought in Hegel's logic of essence as a relationship of reflection, "expressed in ideal terms" (II.5, 43). This shows that Backhaus' hypothesis of a deficiency results from a reconstruction that ignores this context. He directly subordinates the logic of essence to the analysis of the properties of the commodity and explains that Marx proceeds from the "'empirical' fact of exchange value", which, following Hegel, is supposed to be "'based' on value" (1997, 43). Accordingly, he omits the quotation marks, leading to the misjudgement that Marx carries out an analysis of the essence independent of the "form of appearance" (ibid.), which entails a lack of mediation of the sections. Similarly, Christopher J. Arthur accuses Marx of not adhering closely enough to Hegel's logic of being. In view of the equation of wheat and iron, he accuses Marx of the "notorious 'third thing' argument" (2014, 276). If one takes note of Marx's learning process, this presents itself differently: The fourth edition proceeds not from exchange value, as the first edition did, but from exchange values, and iron and wheat are thus considered examples of many possible value-expressions. In other words, it does not proceed from an individuated representation of an imaginary relationship between two things, as the "let us take further" (23/51) already makes clear, but these are part of the "immense collection of commodities" (23/49). In this way, Marx arrives at the human labor accumulated in use values as the "communal social substance" (23/52). Thus, in the course of the various editions, value is not simply introduced as a name or recognizable as a comparative third, but as the expression of a "social substance" and thus dialectically developable, in that the value derived accordingly as a measure expresses something general that is the same (value-substance), but variable in its magnitude (value-magnitude) and thus form (value-form). Proceeding from here, it could then be discussed whether the resulting unfolding of contradictions leading to money and capital should be interpreted as "forms of practice" (Haug 2005b, 147ff) or as "solution movements of the dialectical contradiction between use value and value" (Wolf 2018, 95ff).
It is true that the form of presentation found in the last edition, in which the qualitatively different material bearers of exchange values are determined as different quantities of something (23/51), is reminiscent of Hegel's determinacies of the Logic of Being in the Encyclopaedia (W 8, 223ff). However, if we intuition the underlying process of change, Marx does not simply apply Hegel's logic, but in his struggle to conceptualize actuality, he encounters contradictions that he resolves by means of a new approach. The concept of value can thus be understood as an expression of a historically specific social problem. The discourse of popularization and the insistence on or dissociation from Hegelian logic obscure this ongoing struggle for a presentation that is committed to the logic of the thing and not the thing of logic.
A comparison of the editions shows that the discourse of a popularization of the dialectic is also factually incorrect. Rather, the presentation finds a more dialectical structure from edition to edition, in that it is founded on the elimination of contradictions. In the process, Marx discovers a relationship of reflection in the progressive-learning mastery of presentation in the material relationship of commodities that enables an "experimental use" (Arndt 2013, 31) of the Hegelian categories. In the conceptual reproduction of the thing, Marx thus has real contradictions as his object, which set their own forms of movement in which they "actualize[s] themselves just as much as they dissolve[s]" (23/119), which is something fundamentally different from applying an "abstract, ready-made system of logic [...]" (29/275). In other words, the starting position of parts of the "New Marx Reading", in which the critique of political economy and Hegel's dialectical method are externally juxtaposed, leads onto the wrong track not only because it is already true for Hegel that the categorical structure of the science of logic does not result from the philosophy of law (Arndt 2016, 185), but also because Hegel "never called the subsumption of a mass of 'cases' under a general principle dialectic". Dialectics is thus "misapplied" and "ideologism goes through" (30/207). Rather, it can be learned that dialectics is not about an instrument to be used at will, but about dialectical thinking as an activity within the framework of an evolving presentation of contradictory actuality. Only the attempt to learn from Marx's mistakes in the critique of reality through its presentation opens up what can be taken from Marx's learning process, documented in dozens of volumes, as methodological experience. However, these possibilities for learning appropriation are closed off to the extent that Marx's work is currently being dissolved into a torso and suggestions and intertextual references are being sought in the fragments.
Literature
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Hegel, "Hegel's Logic of Essence and its Reception and Interpretation by Karl Marx", in: Hegel's "Doctrine of Essence". Hegel-Jahrbuch. Special volume 8, ed. by G. Kruck and A. Arndt Berlin 2016, 181-194
Arthur, Christopher J., The New Dialectic and Marx's Capital, Leiden 2004 ders., "Marx, Hegel and the Value-Form", in: Moseley and Smith 2014, 269-291
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ibid., Dialectics of the Value-form. Studies on Marx's Critique of Economics, Freiburg 1997 DAS ARGUMENT 330/2018 ©
ders. and Helmut Reichelt, "How is the concept of value to be conceived in the economy? On Michael Heinrich: 'The Science of Value'", in: Contributions to Marx-Engels Research, New Series 1995, 60-94
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Footnotes
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From now on, when discussing Capital, I will always refer to the first volume of the MEW edition. ↩
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The subject of the "generally comprehensible" second part mentioned and planned here is the capital relation. What was published in Zur Kritik as Part 1 are the chapters on commodity and money from the original text, written in plain language. ↩
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If one follows Kuczynski, then the changes referred to stem more from Engels' "striving for simplicity and clarity", and the "diction" also "does not correspond to the groping attempts at change in the rest of the sub-chapter" (2017, 13), which is why he deleted them again. According to Kuczynski, if they had been made by Marx himself, there is only the possibility that Marx had noted these changes on a lost piece of paper. However, this says nothing about the quality of the presentation and raises the legitimate question of whether Engels' role, which is considered problematic by the "New Reading of Marx", should not also be assessed in a more differentiated way, as Wendt (2018) suggests. ↩
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Marx writes in the first edition, "What does this equality say? That the same value exists in two different things, in 1 quintal of wheat and also in a quintal of iron." (II.5, 19) ↩
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In the revision of the first edition, Marx probably follows Engels' hint that he should follow Hegel's Encyclopaedia in the presentation of the initially abstract trains of thought, i.e. transform the continuous text into "paragraphs, each dialectical transition emphasized by a particular heading" (31/303). ↩