Das Kapital - Publication

Publication

Capital, Volume I (1867) was published in Marx’s lifetime, but he died, in 1883, before completing the manuscripts for Capital, Volume II (1885) and Capital, Volume III (1894), which friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels edited and published as the work of Karl Marx. The first translated publication of Capital: Critique of Political Economy was in Imperial Russia, in March 1872. It was the first foreign publication; the English edition appeared in 1887. Despite Tsarist censorship proscribing "the harmful doctrines of socialism and communism", the Russian censors considered Capital as a "strictly scientific work" of political economy the content of which did not apply to monarchic Russia, where "capitalist exploitation" had never occurred, and was officially dismissed, given "that very few people in Russia will read it, and even fewer will understand it"; nonetheless, Karl Marx acknowledged that Russia was the country where Capital "was read and valued more than anywhere." The Russian edition was the fastest selling. 3,000 copies were sold in 1 year while the German edition took 5 years to sell 1,000 (15 times slower).

In the wake of the global economic collapse of 2008-9, Marx's Capital was purportedly in high demand in Germany. In 2012, Red Quill Books released "Capital: In Manga!", a comic book version of Volume I which is an expanded English translation of the wildly successful 2008 Japanese pocket version "Das Kapital" Manga de Dokuha.