Preface to Marx-Engels Collected Works Volume (28)

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Volume 28 of the Collected Works of Marx and Engels opens a new section of this edition, containing Marx’s main work, Capital, its preliminary versions and the economic writings which immediately preceded it.

The first two volumes of this section, 28 and 29, contain the Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy—the economic manuscripts widely known as the Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Oekonomie (the editorial heading under which they were first published in the language of the original in Moscow in 1939-41)— and also Marx’s work A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. The findings of research undertaken in the Soviet Union, the German Democratic Republic and other countries into the Grundrisse since the appearance of the first edition, particularly in connection with their publication in the second Russian edition of Works of Marx and Engels and in the second edition of Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe (MEGA2, a collection of works by Marx and Engels in the languages of the originals), have been taken into account.

In the present edition the whole range of economic works written in the period 1857-61 is divided up into two interrelated groups. The first of these is the series Economic Manuscripts of 1857-58 which strictly speaking represent the original rough version of Capital. Of these Volume 28 includes “Bastiat and Carey”, “Introduction” and the first, larger instalment of the Grundrisse (the Chapter on Money and the greater part of the Chapter on Capital).

Volume 29 contains the concluding part of the Chapter on Capital and the Index to the 7 Notebooks. It also includes the second group of works dating from that period: A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (which came out in 1859) and preparatory material for that work—a fragment of the original text of the second and of the beginning of the third chapter, a draft plan for the third chapter, and also References to My Own Notebooks.

Viewed as a whole, these works represent a complete cycle, reflecting a crucial stage in the formation of Marxist political economy and in the writing of Capital. They immediately preceded the economic manuscript of 1861-63, which was the first systematic, although still not final, elaboration of the contents of all the volumes of Capital. Basing himself on the results achieved and completing yet another manuscript version of his work in 1863-65, Marx was able to start preparing for publication the first volume of Capital, which came out in September 1867, and continue work on the other volumes.

Capital represents the supreme achievement of Marx’s theoretical thought, an outstanding scientific feat accomplished in the name of the intellectual and social emancipation of toiling mankind. This work of genius is virtually the product of Marx’s whole life. As early as the 1840s, when Marx had only just embarked on research into economic problems and was working on his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, he sketched the outlines of a major economic work. His subsequent studies in political economy were subordinated to this broad plan, which he originally intended to realise in the form of a two-volume work entitled A Critique of Politics and Political Economy.

The 1840s were an important stage in the development of Marxist economic theory. The dialectical materialist conception of history worked out by Marx and Engels enabled them to reveal the essential features of the capitalist economy and understand its contradictory, antagonistic nature. In his works of the 1840s—The Poverty of Philosophy, Speech on the Question of Free Trade and Wage Labour and Capital (see present edition, vols. 6 and 9) — Marx took his first steps towards a detailed elaboration of his economic theory. In those works certain aspects of the future theory of value and surplus value were worked out. However, it required further elaboration to become a comprehensive economic teaching.

A new stage in Marx’s economic research began after the defeat of the revolution of 1848-49, when, in the autumn of 1849, he was to move to England, where he was able to resume his studies in political economy. Not content with the results already achieved and the material he had collected during his stay in Paris in 1844 and in Brussels between 1845 and 1847, which made up many notebooks of excerpts from various economic writings, Marx, in his own words, started from scratch once more. With unflagging energy he supplemented, elaborated and developed the economic data collected in the forties, without losing sight of his long-term project for a major economic work.

Until July 1857 Marx’s work consisted mainly in collecting and critically assessing an enormous wealth of material on economic problems, “a veritable Mont Blanc of factual material”, to use Lenin’s expression, and also in direct study of all and every development of significance in the economic life of Britain and other countries at that time. Marx turned once again to the works of Adam Smith and David Ricardo, of which he made a most thorough study. He also used voluminous material on various aspects of economics and politics from the vast collection of the British Museum library and from the current press. Between 1850 and 1853 Marx filled with excerpts 24 notebooks which he numbered I to XXIV (there are also several unnumbered notebooks). He made repeated attempts to systematise that material. Evidence of this are his notebooks in which excerpts from different authors are grouped according to subject and supplied with brief commentaries, and also his manuscript headlined “Reflections” (present edition, Vol. 10). Marx made extensive use of the notebooks in writing his works. He often refers to them by number and page number in the Grundrisse.

Marx set forth his first theoretical conclusions drawn from his new research in letters to Engels dated 7 January and 3 February 1851 (see present edition, Vol. 38), in which he criticised Ricardo’s theory of rent, based on Malthus’s law of diminishing returns, and also Ricardo’s theory of money circulation, based on the quantitative theory of money. Expecting a new rise in the revolutionary movement, he intensified his economic research. In the summer of 1857 he twice embarked on an exposition of his economic theory: made drafts on the vulgar economists Bastiat and Carey and started writing the general “Introduction” which he did not finish. Yet on both occasions he had to interrupt his work.

The first ever world economic crisis, which broke out in the autumn of 1857, made Marx set down once again to a systematic exposition of the results of his research in political economy. “I am working like mad all night and every night collating my economic studies so that I at least get the outlines clear before the déluge,” he wrote to Engels on 8 December 1857 (see present edition, Vol. 40, p. 217). At the time Jenny Marx wrote to Conrad Schramm: “By day Karl works for his living and by night at the completion of his political economy” (ibid., p. 566). Physical discomfort stemming from a liver disease seriously slowed down this work, obliging Marx to modify his plans. Nevertheless between late 1857 and May 1858 he completed an extensive manuscript of over fifty printed sheets—not for the press but for “self-clarification”.

The draft manuscript “Bastiat and Carey”, opening this volume, shows that by that time Marx had reached a far clearer understanding of the distinctions between the classical bourgeois political economy and its vulgar school, whose rise pointed to a decline in bourgeois economic thought. Marx accurately characterised the merits of the classical school while at the same time pointing out its limitations. Using his analysis of the views of Bastiat and Carey as an illustration, Marx singled out the main areas in which the theory of the classical political economists Smith and Ricardo was vulgarised by their imitators. He pointed out that unlike the classical economists, who did not conceal the contradictory character of capitalist production relations and “naively analysed their antagonism” (see this volume, p. 6), Bastiat, Carey and other vulgar economists sought to gloss over the antagonistic nature of the capitalist system, depicting it as the natural ideal of harmonious social development.

Although unfinished, Marx’s draft “Introduction” to his future economic treatise is of extraordinary scientific value. It shows that by the autumn of 1857 he had already worked out in detail the methodological principles of his economic theory, which rests on the basic conclusions drawn from the materialist conception of history, above all on the proposition concerning the primacy of social production. At the same time, unlike bourgeois economists who declared capitalist production eternal and treated production as some general abstraction, Marx in his “Introduction” Wrote of production as shaped by specific social conditions, singling out bourgeois production of his time as the object of his research.

Setting forth his understanding of the subject of political economy, Marx rises above the limitations of the bourgeois economists, including the classical economists, who confined the tasks of economics to the study of relations of distribution. His analysis of the dialectical unity and interaction of production, distribution, exchange and consumption leads Marx to conclude that production is not just the point of departure but also the decisive moment of this unity and that the forms of distribution are merely an expression of the forms of production. Thus the production relations between men, and the laws governing the development of a given mode of production, constitute the true subject matter of economics.

Marx worked out his ideas on various aspects of political economy in close connection with general philosophical questions of the revolutionary world outlook. Regarding production relations as the economic basis of social development, Marx went on to examine processes at work within the political and ideological superstructure, pointing out their dependence on the basis and their reaction on the basis. In the “Introduction”, for example, we find statements reflecting the development and concrétisation of Marx’s views on certain ideological phenomena, in particular his ideas on the specific laws governing the development of art as one of the forms of social consciousness.

The conclusions drawn by Marx in the “Introduction”—that artistic creation is conditioned by specific historical social relations, although these are not reflected in works of art in a primitive, mechanical way, but in accordance with the special laws of development peculiar to art; that as a result of this periods of florescence in art do not necessarily coincide with periods of progress in the economy and other social spheres; that art plays an enormous social role and exerts a strong influence on social progress, and finally that the art of different epochs and different peoples contains inimitable and undying values of general relevance—form an essential part of the overall heritage of Marxian aesthetic ideas.

In the “Introduction” Marx thoroughly substantiated the method of political economy as a science, a method which he applied from all possible angles in his subsequent economic research. He contrasted the dialectical materialist interpretation of scientific method with Hegel’s idealist dialectics, while at the same time utilising all the rational elements of Hegel’s logic of scientific analysis.

Research, Marx pointed out in the “Introduction”, should start out from the immediately manifest and probe down into the very heart of phenomena until finally the very simplest determinations are reached. Only after that can the researcher move on from abstract determinations to “a rich totality of many determinations and relations” (see this volume, p. 37). While the first part of this path—from the concrete to the abstract—has virtually been converted into commodities and commodities into money. “The real question is: does not the bourgeois system of exchange itself make a specific instrument of exchange necessary?” Marx noted, “Does it not of necessity create a special equivalent of all values?” (see this volume, p. 65). Here Marx raised the question of the essential link between commodity and money, which he had first formulated in The Poverty of Philosophy, however, he provided a solution to this question only in the Manuscript of 1857-58. It was based on his analysis of the two aspects of the commodity—its use value and its value—and of the dual nature of labour creating the commodity. Marx showed that the contradiction between the qualitative homogeneity of commodities as values and their natural difference as use values finds its external solution in the process of exchange, in the splitting of the commodity into commodity and money, in the fact that the value of the commodity acquires an independent existence in a special commodity, namely money. Money, which provides an external solution to the contradiction between the use value and the value of the commodity, at the same time aggravates all the contradictions of commodity production based on private exchange. Inherent in these contradictions is the possibility of economic crises.

Marx’s thesis on the dual nature of labour in commodity production constitutes the basis of his theory of value. It is precisely here that we find one of the main dividing lines which set apart his theory from the labour theory of value put forward by the classical bourgeois economists. These economists did not understand the qualitative difference between concrete and abstract labour, reducing the whole question to measuring value by labour time. Actually, as Marx was later to point out, “the whole understanding of the facts” hinged upon the appreciation of this dual nature of labour.

As he elaborated his theory of value, Marx discovered in the commodity the “economic cell” of bourgeois society. The point of departure in his analysis of the economic structure of society is neither value nor the value relationship of commodities but the commodity itself, the material bearer of those relations. This was precisely the reason why Marx later changed the name of the first chapter of his work, calling it “The Commodity”. Already in his first draft of this chapter, at the end of the manuscript (see Vol. 29) Marx wrote: “The commodity is the first category in which bourgeois wealth makes its appearance.”

One of the main conclusions drawn by Marx in the Chapter on Money was that the developed form of commodity production in conditions of private property in the means of production presupposes capitalist relations. The development of commodity production and exchange value inevitably tends to “the separation of labour and property; as a result, one’s labour will create someone else’s property and property will command someone else’s labour” (see this volume, p, 170).

The major part of the economic Manuscript of 1857-58 consists of the Chapter on Capital.

In this volume are published the first section of that chapter, examining the process of the production of capital, and a large part of the second section, which deals with the circulation of capital. The end of the chapter is included in Volume 29. Taken as a whole, the Chapter on Capital covers the main questions which Marx intended to treat in the first of the six books originally planned, namely in that which, according to the letter to Lassalle cited above (22 February 1858), was to be entitled “On Capital”, and whose title is elsewhere given as “Capital in General”. Later, after Marx had altered the structure of his work and started to think in terms of a three-part study (The Process of Production of Capital, The Process of Circulation of Capital and The Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole), the material contained in this chapter provided the starting-point for the whole work.

In the Chapter on Capital Marx concerned himself with the problem central to the whole of his analysis, that of explaining the mechanism of capitalist exploitation. Bourgeois economists regarded capital as the simple sum of values, vainly attempting to move on directly from value to capital and grasp the essence of the transformation of money into capital. Marx notes that “the simple movement of exchange values, as it is present in pure circulation, can never realise capital” (this volume, p. 185).

The content of capitalist production relations is the relation between worker and capitalist, between labour and capital, which stand opposed to each other and between which exchange takes place. The difficulty in analysing these relations lies in the fact that the essentially non-equivalent exchange between worker and capitalist is carried on on the basis of an exchange of equivalents.

Marx started out by dividing the exchange between capital and labour into two qualitatively different, diametrically opposed processes: (1) the actual exchange between the worker and the capitalist as a result of which the capitalist “obtains the productive power which maintains and multiplies capital” (see this volume,

p. 204); (2) the actual process of labour in which the maintenance and multiplication of capital takes place. In his analysis of the first stage Marx formulated the following thesis: “In the relationship of capital and labour ... one side (capital) faces the other above all as exchange value while the other side (labour) faces capital as use value” (see this volume, p. 197). From the bourgeois economists’ traditional formulas “commodity labour” and “sale of labour” Marx passed on, for the first time, to an investigation of the specific properties of the commodity “labour power” (although in this manuscript he mostly uses the term “labour capacity”). Labour in Marx’s analysis does not figure as a commodity, but as the use value of the commodity the worker sells to the capitalist. The peculiarity of this use value lies in the fact that it “is not materialised in a product, it does not exist in any way external to him [the worker]. Consequently, his use value does not exist in reality but only potentially, as his capacity” (see this volume, ibid.). As a result of the first stage of the exchange between labour and capital the control of the worker’s living labour has passed into the hands of the capitalist. The second stage of the exchange is the actual process of the creation of exchange values, as a result of which capital is maintained and increased.

Marx demonstrated that since the worker does not own the means of production he cannot be the owner of the value which living labour creates in the production process. Part of the value created by the worker and belonging to the capitalist the latter is obliged to return to the worker in the form of wages so as to pay the value of labour power, i. e. the quantity of labour spent on the production of the worker himself. If the level of labour productivity is so high that the value created by living labour exceeds the value of labour power, surplus labour is being performed, and the capitalist receives surplus value equal to the difference between the value created by living labour and the value of labour power.

In the Chapter on Capital Marx also developed his teaching on the two forms of surplus value—absolute and relative surplus value—and in this connection formulated the ambivalent tendency of capital: towards lengthening the working day as a means of increasing absolute surplus value, and towards reducing the necessary labour time as a means of increasing relative surplus value.

Having revealed the true nature of surplus value, Marx proceeded on this basis to investigate its converted forms—profit, interest, rent—which appear on the surface of bourgeois society.

Basing himself on the theory of the two forms of capital— constant and variable—elaborated for the first time in this manuscript, Marx put forward a new theory of profit qualitatively different from that of bourgeois political economists, who constantly confused specific forms of surplus value with its general form. In a letter to Engels about his work on this manuscript Marx wrote on 16 January 1858 that he had “completely demolished the theory of profit as hitherto propounded” (see present edition, Vol. 40, p. 249).

Marx had now come very close to the discovery of the law of average profit and price of production. After establishing that the profit of the whole capitalist class could not exceed the sum of surplus value, Marx concluded that of necessity individual rates of profit varied from one branch of production to another and that these were redistributed as a result of inter-branch competition, thus forming a general rate of profit. He went on to demonstrate that this general rate was formed through the redistribution of the total sum of surplus value produced in all branches of capitalist production, in proportion to the amount of capital invested. It was a feature of this process that commodities were sold at prices that did not correspond to their values, being in some branches higher and in others lower than the values of the commodities. An exhaustive solution to the problem of average profit and price of production was to be provided by Marx later, in his Manuscript of 1861-63.

In the Manuscript of 1857-58 Marx critically analysed the theories of bourgeois economists, drawing comparisons between various bourgeois concepts and contrasting them with his own views on key questions of economics. The Manuscript of 1857-58 demonstrates graphically that Marx’s elaboration of a new economic theory was combined with a critical refutation of concepts which were predominant in the economic thought of his day. Nor did Marx overlook the rational ideas expounded by his predecessors in political economy. He often came out in their defence against unjust accusations and reproaches from contemporary bourgeois political economists.

A particularly large amount of critical material is in the sub-section on bourgeois theories of surplus value and profit in Section Two of the Chapter on Capital. Although here Marx did not yet provide a comprehensive picture of the historical development of bourgeois economics, he nevertheless singled out many of the traits typical of bourgeois economic thought on this cardinal question in his critical analysis of the ideas expounded by representatives of various schools of political economy, including the classical school of Smith and Ricardo. He pointed out its incapacity to penetrate to the heart of the relations between labour and capital and grasp the character of the appropriation of the product of the worker’s surplus labour by the capitalist; he showed its tendency to consider capital itself only from the point of view of its material content, ignoring its essence as an historically determined form of social relations, and indicated a number of other fundamental shortcomings. As he singled these out Marx revealed the class causes accounting for the narrow outlook of the bourgeois economists. He stressed that even as penetrating a thinker as Ricardo had failed to clarify for himself the process of capitalist production, “nor, as a bourgeois, could he” (see this volume, p. 474). Marx severely criticised the theories of capital and profit set forth in the works of Say, Senior, McCulloch and other economists as blatant example of apologetic writing that hypocritically presented capitalist exploitation in a rosy light. Malthus’s interpretation of the “value of labour” and wages was characterised by Marx as “shallow fallacy”, and his theory of population as a “brutal expression” of the “brutal view taken by capital” (see this volume, pp. 496, 524). Marx pointed out that his theory was false from beginning to end and that it was based on tendentious premisses and completely ignored the historical changes in the conditions of production: “In this way, he [Malthus] transforms historically distinct relations into an abstract numerical relation which he simply plucks out of thin air, and which is based on neither natural nor historical laws” (see this volume, pp. 524-25).

In contrast to Malthus Marx revealed the real causes behind the formation of over-population in the pre-capitalist epoch and under capitalism. He pointed out that these causes were by no means to be found in the alleged insufficiency of natural resources and the increase of the human race, which was outgrowing them, but in the actual conditions of social production, in particular in the social contradictions, unemployment, etc., engendered by the capitalist system.

The Manuscript of 1857-58 testifies to the fact that by that time Marx was already thinking of allotting a special place in his future work to a critical survey of the history of bourgeois political economy from the viewpoint of its main problems.

While working on the Chapter on Capital Marx arrived at the conclusion—in accordance with his interpretation of the dialectical link between the logical and historical aspects of the scientific

research method—that it was essential to supplement his analysis of the capitalist mode of production with a survey of the preceding social forms on the one hand, and a survey of the social form which would inevitably replace capitalism on the other.

Marx included in his Chapter on Capital an historical description of the forms that had preceded capitalist production, in which he traced the development of the forms of property from primitive communal society to the emergence of capitalist forms of appropriation. The investigation of the pre-capitalist modes of production undertaken here by Marx constitutes a further elaboration of his views on the principal stages of the historical process first set forth in The German Ideology.

While analysing the pre-capitalist forms of property Marx probed to the very heart of the question of the various types of production relations, stressing the active role of the productive forces in the process of social development, which conditioned the inevitable change of these forms. In the Manuscript of 1857-58 Marx took another important step in the development of his theory of socio-economic formations.

Profound ideas were voiced here concerning the earliest stage of human history. Marx underlined the absence of class divisions in primitive society, which was dominated by tribal ties and communal principles. The collective spirit and, at the initial stage, the “herd spirit” were the dominant traits of primitive man’s whole way of life.

The Manuscript of 1857-58 also contains an analysis of the forms of pre-capitalist exploitation, in particular slave and serf labour, and the features that set them apart from wage labour.

In his analysis of pre-capitalist formations Marx concentrated on problems of the evolution of the agricultural commune. The disintegration of the commune, retained in various forms in all previous stages, was, as he stressed, one of the conditions making possible the emergence of the capitalist mode of production. This to a considerable extent serves to explain Marx’s particular interest in its historical fate. The historical and typological description of the commune first provided by Marx in the Manuscript of 1857-58 to this day clarifies many of the key problems of ancient and medieval history. Marx’s ideas on the universality of the commune as the most ancient social institution, on its influence on social and political structures in ancient times and the Middle Ages, on the direction and main stages of its historical evolution and modification and on the reasons for its decline and disintegration, are as valid as ever today.

His analysis of the development of pre-capitalist forms of property enabled Marx to reveal the historical conditions for the emergence of the capitalist mode of production and to demonstrate that the main precondition was the disintegration of various forms of labourers’ ownership of their conditions of production or of the ownership of labourers as an objective condition of production. In the Manuscript of 1857-58 Marx provided a profound treatment of the primitive accumulation of capital, demonstrating that its essence consisted on the one hand in the formation of a class of hired workers deprived of instruments or means of production and on the other in the transformation of former means of production into a “free fund”, i.e., into capital free of traditional feudal, guild and other fetters. “The same process which confronts the masses of free workers with the objective conditions of labour, has also put them face to face with these conditions as capital” (see this volume, p. 427). For the first time the epoch of primitive accumulation was singled out as a specific, transitional period of historical development. In this context, Marx pointed out that the roots of capitalism should be sought not only in the development of urban industry, but in the process of the capitalist transformation of agriculture, which began in a number of countries (Britain, Holland) at the very dawn of the capitalist era.

In the Manuscript of 1857-58 Marx elaborated in more detail the principles of the scientific periodisation of the history of capitalist society which he had originally outlined as early as the 1840s in The German Ideology and The Poverty of Philosophy. He substantiated the need to draw a distinction between the manufactory and machine stages of capitalist development, pointing out that the manufactories were still unable to create the material basis for the universal spread of capitalist relations and for the ousting of pre-capitalist social forms. Only large-scale machine production can provide the basis for the final assertion of the capitalist system, it alone really makes possible the full domination of capital and at the same time creates the material conditions for its overthrow and the emergence of a new, more progressive order.

After studying the genesis of capitalism and disclosing the laws of its emergence and development Marx went on to define its actual historical position, demonstrating the inevitability of its collapse and of the abolition of the separation between labour and property intrinsic to that society.

Surplus value, treated in Marx’s theory as the necessary result of capitalist relations of production and the expression of their essence and contradictory character, shapes the law of the progress of the capitalist mode of production leading inevitably to its downfall and its replacement by communism. Since capitalist exploitation, as demonstrated by Marx, stems from the very essence of capitalist production relations, it follows on from this that the emancipation of the working class from exploitation cannot be achieved within the framework of the capitalist order.

The analysis Marx went on to provide of the new social order destined to replace capitalism contained astute ideas as to the main traits and laws of development peculiar to social relations under communism. Marx stressed the historical necessity of the transition to communism, the emergence of which presupposes a specific stage of development of material and cultural conditions. Communism, according to Marx, is a society that will be dominated by “free individuality, based on the universal development of the individuals and the subordination of their communal, social productivity, which is their social possession” (see this volume, p. 95).

The Manuscript of 1857-58 also contains significant ideas concerning the change in the character of labour in the communist society of the future. Marx pointed out that in conditions of collective production the individual’s labour will, from the outset, appear as socialised labour; the contradiction between the social character of labour and the private form of the appropriation of its products which is intrinsic to capitalism will disappear. Underlining the fact that each worker will be interested in ensuring the most expedient, rational and systematic organisation of production, Marx formulated the law of time economy in communist society: “As with a single individual, the comprehensiveness of its [society’s] development, its pleasures and its activities depends upon the saving of time. Ultimately, all economy is a matter of economy of time. Society must also allocate its time appropriately to achieve a production corresponding to its total needs, just as the individual must allocate his time correctly to acquire knowledge in suitable proportions or to satisfy the various demands on his activity. Economy of time, as well as the planned distribution of labour time over the various branches of production, therefore, remains the first economic law if communal production is taken as the basis. It becomes a law even to a much higher degree” (ibid., p. 109).

Unlike the Utopian socialists who dreamt of turning labour under communism from a hateful burden or curse, which it is for the vast majority of working people under capitalism, into a game or simple diversion, Marx wrote of labour in communist society as a prime necessity of life, which “is also the most damnably difficult” (see this volume, p. 530). A high level of labour organisation and discipline, a harmonic balance between the personal interests of the producer and the interests of the whole of society, wide utilisation of the results of production, of all social wealth, to satisfy the material and cultural needs of society—such was Marx’s vision of communist society.

* * *

In the course of publishing the present Collected Works it was decided to expand the economic section. In particular, the whole of the Economic Manuscript of 1861-63 is to be included. This has made necessary certain modifications in the original plan of the edition. In volumes 28 and 29 the series of Marx’s economic works dating from 1857 to 1861 (with the exception of his notebooks of excerpts) appears in English in a complete and systematised form.

The translation of the Economic Manuscripts of 1857-58 and the accompanying manuscripts, published in volumes 28 and 29, is based on the text: Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe (MEGA), II, 1; II, 2, Berlin, 1976-1981.

The fact that these manuscripts were rough drafts explains many of their textual features: the absence of division into sections and paragraphs over long passages, the considerable number of digressions and incomplete sentences, and a certain unevenness of style. In many places Marx put down his ideas in a cursory, fragmentary, elliptic form. The greater part of the manuscripts was written in German but Marx often made use of foreign expressions and sometimes switched over completely to English or French. He quotes sometimes in German translation, sometimes in the language of the original and sometimes in more than one language at a time with switches in the middle. There are also word forms of Marx’s own invention: English and French words used with German prefixes or endings, and terms made up of elements from different language, etc. When these manuscripts were translated into English all these factors had to be taken into account and unified so that Marx’s ideas expressed in different languages could be rendered unequivocally and as precisely as possible.

The indispensable elucidations in certain parts of the manuscripts, insertions, made to complete unfinished or abbreviated sentences, quotations etc. are given in square brackets, as are the numbers of Marx’s notebooks (Roman numbers or Latin letters) and the page numbers in each notebook (Arabic numerals). In view of this the square brackets which are sometimes encountered in the actual manuscripts have been replaced with two oblique lines. If the text is not presented consecutively, but in a slightly rearranged way based on Marx’s directions, this is pointed out in footnotes. The footnotes also point out words or passages crossed out by Marx and in certain instances reproduce the original versions.

Excessively long paragraphs have been broken up into smaller ones to make for easier reading. In certain cases where there occur particularly cumbersome phrases with incidental insertions, these insertions are given in the form of author’s footnotes so as not to blur the main line of argument.

In this edition the manuscripts are printed in a new English translation. Foreign expressions including those in Greek and Latin are given in the original language. English quotations, phrases, expressions and individual words encountered in the original are set in small caps. Quotations from English sources are given according to the editions used by the author. In all cases the form of quoting used by Marx is respected. The language in which Marx quotes is indicated unless it is German.

The volume was compiled, the preface and notes written by Tatyana Vasilyeva and edited by Lev Golman and Vladimir Brushlinsky (Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the CC CPSU).

The name index and the index of periodicals were prepared by Galina Kostryukova; the index of quoted and mentioned literature and the subject index by Tatyana Vasilyeva (Institute of MarxismLeninism of the CC CPSU). The translation was made by Ernst Wangermann (Lawrence and Wishart) and edited by Natalia Karmanova, Margarita Lopukhina and Victor Schnittke (Progress Publishers). The volume was prepared for the press by Svetlana Gerasimenko (Progress Publishers).

Scientific editor for this volume was Larisa Miskievich (Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the CC CPSU).