The People's Marx. Abridged Popular Edition of the Three Volumes of Capital.

Edited by Julian Borchardt. Translated by Stephen L. Trask. First edition in English. Small 8vo. vii, [1], 284, [2] pp. Original blue printed wrappers, yapp edges (spine faded, otherwise a near fine, notably fresh copy). London, Bradford, Manchester, International Bookshops Limited.

The first English translation of the German social democrat Julian Borchardt's (1868-1932) hugely successful and widely translated 'Gemeinverständliche Ausgabe' or 'Popular Edition' of Das Kapital, originally published in Berlin in 1919, a collection of excerpts from all three volumes of Kapital, with a preface and a substantial supplement titled 'The Essence of Marx's Theory of Crises' by Borchardt, but containing no further explanatory notes or commentary to the main body of text. 

The title for the present English translation - The People's Marx - was not drawn from the original German title and had also confusingly also been used for the first English translation of the Gabriel Deville abridgement of the first volume of Kapital, published in New York in 1900.

In his preface, Borchardt made no disguise of the great challenge presented by tackling Marx's revered but widely unread magnum opus, in so doing providing a rationale for the continued relevance of such abridgements and summaries: 

"Whoever wishes to read Marx's Capital, encounters a superabundance of difficulties. We may, indeed, go further, and say that it is quite incomprehensible for the layman. And the majority of mankind are composed of laymen. In the first place there is the enormous size of the work - not less than 2200 large printed pages filling three volumes. Who can be expected to read this, if he be not a specialist in political economy, and if he have professional business to attend to?" (p. iii).

The identity of the translator Stephen L. Trask unfortunately remains obscure to this cataloguer. The English edition was printed by the left-wing publisher's International Bookshops Limited who issued translations by the likes of Karl Kautsky and original English works by James Ramsey MacDonald and the pacifist Theodora Wilson Wilson, amongst others, during the early 1920s.

Stock Code: 245154