Preface to Marx-Engels Collected Works Volume (29)

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Volume 29 of the Collected Works of Marx and Engels contains writings belonging to the cycle of Marx’s economic works of 1857-1861. They include: the concluding part of the manuscript of 1857-58—Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft); A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy and preparatory materials to it; two drafts of the Index to the 7 Notebooks; the original text of the second and the beginning of the third chapter of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy; a Draft Plan of the Chapter on Capital and the References to My Own Notebooks. Together with the manuscripts included in Volume 28 of the present edition these writings represent a definite stage in the shaping of Marxist political economy, a highly important preparatory period in the creation of Marx’s main work, Capital.

The concluding part of the economic manuscript of 1857-58, with which the volume begins, embraces the end of the Chapter on Capital, namely the final subsections of Section Two, “Circulation Process of Capital”, and Section Three, “Capital as Bearing Fruit. Interest. Profit. (Production Costs, etc.)”, of which Marx only wrote the beginning. The seventh and last notebook of this manuscript also includes the “Addenda to the Chapters on Money and on Capital”, which are very extensive and significant in content.

This part of the manuscript deals mainly with the circulation of capital. Marx’s novel approach to this problem compared with the way in which it was dealt with by bourgeois economists is manifested first and foremost in his considering production and circulation of capital as a dialectical unity. The functioning of capital, he stresses, represents a continuous movement, a constant transition from one state to another, a variation and change of form. “This change of form and substance is similar to that in an organic body” (see p. 51 of this volume).

In considering the circuit of capital, Marx traces the metamorphoses of its components: fixed capital (value of the instruments of production) and circulating capital (value of the raw materials and labour power). He shows that the first transfers its value to the product in parts, whereas the value of the second is reproduced in die product entirely. Taking these specifics into account, Marx establishes the relation between die time required for circulation and the time required for the production of the commodity, determines the effect of this relation on the rate of surplus value, and reveals other aspects of the law-governed connection between the various phases and forms of the movement of social capital.

In capital’s circuit Marx singles out the exchange between capital and labour power, calling this the “lesser circulation”. It is precisely at this stage that circulation of capital appears as an “exchange of equivalents which is posited in form, but actually supersedes itself, which posits itself as merely formal (the transition of value into capital, where the exchange of equivalents turns into its opposite and, on the basis of exchange, exchange becomes purely formal, AND THE MUTUALITY IS ALL ON ONE SIDE)...” (see p. 63). The very growth of capital, its valorisation, Marx again stresses, takes place in the sphere of exchange between capital and labour power through the appropriation of the surplus value produced by the worker. Exchange is here transformed into “the alienation of his labour” (see p. 64). For this reason Marx regards “lesser circulation” as the decisive link in capital’s circuit, the link which determines all the others, as the substance of the whole process, the basic condition of the existence of the capitalist mode of production.

The specifics of capital’s circuit determine the various ways in which capitalist income is formed and distributed, and the source of all kinds of capitalist income, as Marx proves, is surplus value. In Section Three of the Chapter on Capital Marx endeavoured to sum up the results of his analysis of the transformation of surplus value into profit and other forms of non-earned income (interest, etc.). He formulated here “die 2 immediate laws manifested to us by this conversion of surplus value into the form of profit” (see p. 146). The first of these laws is that the rate of profit is always less than the rate of surplus value. The second law—that die rate of profit tends to decrease—is characterised by Marx as the “most important law” of modern political economy, a law which, “despite its simplicity, ... has never been grasped and still less has ... been consciously formulated” (see p. 133). Marx linked this law with technical progress and the increase in labour productivity, with the change in the organic composition of capital, with the quicker growth of its constant part, which comprises the value of the means of production and the raw materials, in comparison with the variable part, i.e., the part which goes to pay for labour power. This relative increase of the share of constant capital necessarily leads, as Marx shows, to a fall in the rate of profit, although the amount of surplus value constantly increases due to the expansion of capitalist production.

In Marx’s opinion, the tendency of the rate of profit to decrease gives rise, among other things, to the growing discrepancy between the development of society’s productive forces and the bourgeois relations of production, and this discrepancy inevitably leads to economic crises.

His analysis of the transformation of surplus value into profit here, as in other parts of the manuscript where this problem is dealt with, led Marx to the understanding of the law of average profit and the price of production, which regulates the distribution of surplus value between branches of production with different organic composition of capital. However, the study of this process, as well as the investigation of the origin and economic nature of the other converted forms of surplus value (commercial profit, interest, ground rent), was far from being completed in the first version of Capital. Marx continued his analysis of these problems in his subsequent writings and it was in his Economic Manuscripts of 1861-1863 that he achieved the scientific solution of many problems facing him in this connection (see present edition, Vols 30-34).

Marx devoted serious attention in his manuscript to scientific and technical progress and its influence on production. He noted capitalism’s inherent striving not only to constant expansion of production, but also to its technical improvement, to mechanisation and automation and to the application of scientific discoveries and inventions for this purpose. Looking into the future, he pointed out that this tendency leads to increasing transformation of “the production process from the simple labour process into a scientific process, one forcing the powers of Nature into its service and thus setting them to work in the service of human needs” (see p. 86). At the same time Marx revealed the contradictory features in the application of science to production under capitalism. He showed that under capitalism technical progress is subordinated to the interests of increasing absolute and relative surplus value. The results of technical progress frequently turn against the immediate producers, from a means of easing labour technical progress becomes an instrument of its intensification, furthering the subordination of living labour to capital and turning the worker himself into an appendage of the machine. “The activity of the worker, restricted to a mere abstraction of activity, is determined and governed in every respect by the movement of the machinery, not vice versa” (see pp. 82-83).

Capitalist relations with their inherent antagonistic contradictions, Marx stressed, stimulate scientific and technical progress one-sidedly, limiting to a certain degree their harmonious and all-round development and the utilisation of scientific and technical achievements in the interests of all members of society. From the fact that machine production is the true basis of capitalism, Marx writes, “it in no way follows that its subsuming under the social relation of capital is the most appropriate and best social production relation for the application of machinery” (see p. 85). Elsewhere he points out: “Beyond a certain point, the development of the productive forces becomes a barrier to capital, and consequently the relation of capital becomes a barrier to the development of the productive forces of labour” (see p. 133).

The conclusion to be drawn from these arguments is obvious: only the communist system will give full scope to scientific and technical progress, only under the communist system will full development be given to the tendency towards the transformation of science, knowledge into an “immediate productive force” (see p. 92). The application of science to production will really become a lever for satisfying the requirements of the working people and for saving labour time not for the purpose of increasing the capitalists’ profit but for the benefit of society as a whole.

With the establishment of communism Marx linked the elimination of that phenomenon inherent in class-antagonistic social formations which he designated as the alienation of labour. In his economic writings of the time, above all in the Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy, Marx continues to use the concept of “alienation” (in the original “Entäusserung”, “Veräusserung”) or “estrangement” (“Entfremdung”), although here in his analysis of economic relations this concept no longer plays such a universal role as in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. The sphere of application of this category became less broad and more definite from the time when he had worked out the system of economic concepts revealing the concrete operation of the mechanism of capitalist exploitation. However, Marx considered this broad concept quite suitable and accurately expressing the existing reality for a philosophical generalisation of the exploiter essence of the capitalist system and the destitution of those who produce the material values, in the first place, of the wage workers. Treating alienation as a historical category, he expounded its essence and peculiarity in capitalist society. Marx sees in the transformation of the conditions and products of labour into something alien and hostile to the worker a profound distortion of the social nature of labour, a manifestation of the glaring contradiction between the social character of production itself in the capitalist epoch and the appropriation of its fruits by property-owners. Marx stresses that capitalism is a system under which “social wealth in huger portions confronts labour as an alien and dominating force” (see p. 209). The emphasis is laid not on the mighty potential of social labour, its capacity to materialise or objectify natural resources, but on its “alienation”, on the fact that “this enormous power” belongs “not to the worker, but to the personified conditions of production, i.e. to capital” (p. 210).

Seeing alienated labour under capitalism as the extreme form of alienation in general, Marx considered it a historically transient, temporary phenomenon. When capitalist production is replaced by collective production, he pointed out, the sources of all alienation of labour will be eliminated, the perversion of its social character will be overcome. On the basis of collective production there will be created the material preconditions not only for the powerful growth of the productive forces of society as a whole, but also for the integral and all-round development of every worker. This, and not an increase in surplus time, will be the purpose of saving labour time under communism. On the other hand, leisure time will in its turn be a most important factor of social progress. It will broaden people’s oudook and knowledge, giving them access to all the achievements of world culture, which is bound to have a favourable effect on their role in production too. “The saving of labour time,” Marx wrote, “is equivalent to the increase of free time, i.e. time for the full development of the individual, which itself, as the greatest productive force, in turn reacts upon the productive power of labour. From the standpoint of the immediate production process, it can be considered as the production of fixed capital, this fixed capital BEING MAN HIMSELF” (see p. 97 of this volume).

The next series of Marx’s economic writings published in this volume is direcdy connected with his work A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, the first part of which was published in book form in the summer of 1859. It was a landmark in the history of Marxism. It was in this book that Marx made public for the first time some of the findings of his theoretical research. The book was not merely an elaboration of the corresponding sections of the 1857-58 manuscript. In it Marx enriched and deepened his understanding of the questions he analysed and made the exposition more streamlined and systematic. Although the increased bulk of the material obliged him to confine his analysis to the commodity and money, devoting a special chapter to each subject (the Chapter on Capital was not included in the final text), the exposition nevertheless embraced the basic, major problems of political economy, the elements which served as its foundation and points of departure for analysing all its categories. By elucidating these problems from fundamentally new positions radically different from those of bourgeois economic doctrines, Marx in substance revolutionised the very basis of political economy as a science.

In his review of Marx’s book in the newspaper Das Volk in August 1859, Engels pointed out that its purpose was by no means “a discussion of some economic issue or other in isolation. On the contrary, it is from the beginning designed to give a systematic résumé of the whole complex of political economy and a coherent elaboration of the laws governing bourgeois production and bourgeois exchange. This elaboration is at the same time a critique of all economic literature, for economists are nothing but interpreters of and apologists for these laws” (see present edition, Vol. 16, p. 472).

Marx’s preface to the first part of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy is of exceptional methodological and theoretical significance. In it he reveals the profound link between the general philosophical foundations of the dialectical and materialistic world outlook, the understanding of the general laws of social development and the scientific method of analysing economic phenomena. By giving a concise survey of the history of his economic studies Marx showed that they represented an organic part of all his theoretical and practical revolutionary activity. The development of each component element of the revolutionary doctrine determined and stimulated progress in all the others.

The most valuable part of the preface is the characterisation of the essence of the materialist conception of history discovered by Marx. The definition given here by Marx of the essence of historical materialism reflected a new and higher stage in the development of his theory of the historical process since that theory was first expounded in the form of a harmonious conception in The German Ideology in 1845. This classical formulation took into account in a generalised form the new results of Marx’s study of whole epochs in world history, of the experience of the 1848-49 revolutions in Europe and of comprehensive research in the field of political economy. The terminology and the system of concepts of historical materialism were also perfected. In particular, the interpretation of history as the process of succession of social formations was formulated in the appropriate terms. (The very term “social formation” appears for the first time on the last page of the principal economic manuscript of 1857-58.)

In this work Marx expounded in a concentrated form the fundamentals of his doctrine on the principal laws governing the development of human society, on the aggregate of the production relations, as forming the economic structure of society, its real basis determining the political and juridical superstructures and, in the final analysis, the various forms of social consciousness, on the dialectical development of the productive forces and the relations of production, on the inevitability—due to the conflict between the developing productive forces and the obsolete relations of production—of social revolution leading to the replacement of one mode of production by another, more progressive one, of the old social formation by a new one, a replacement which in its turn involves an upheaval in the whole enormous superstructure. “In broad outline, the Asiatic, ancient, feudal and modern bourgeois modes of production may be designated as epochs marking progress in the economic development of society,” Marx wrote, making abstraction here of the earliest stage in human development—primitive communism (see p. 263). Capitalism, Marx stressed, is the last social formation based on class antagonisms. However, within it the conditions are created for the elimination of the antagonism, for the revolutionary transition to a higher system under which social production will cease to be carried on in antagonistic forms. “The prehistory of human society accordingly closes with this social formation,” Marx notes (see p. 264).

As Lenin said, Marx gave in the preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy “an integral formulation of the fundamental principles of materialism as applied to human society and its history”. In so doing he “indicated the way to a scientific study of history as a single process which, with all its immense variety and contradictoriness, is governed by definite laws” (V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 21, pp. 55, 57).

In his book Marx applied the method of materialist dialectics to the study of economic problems in all their aspects, in particular to analysing the commodity, labour, value and money. Unlike the bourgeois economists, who considered the commodity and value eternal and natural categories, Marx shows their historically transient character. He notes that the product only takes the form of a commodity under definite social relations, that commodity production appears at a certain historical stage and passes through various stages in its development from simple commodity production to the capitalist type. Marx considers the commodity as an elementary particle of capitalist society, the “unit” of bourgeois wealth. He stresses that it is necessary to study the commodity in order to elucidate the very nature of the contradictions which manifest themselves in a more complex and developed form in capital.

Economists prior to Marx had already noted the dual character of the commodity as use value and exchange value, but they were unable to clarify their actual correlation. Marx in his analysis was the first to establish that use value and exchange value form a contradictory unity reflecting the really existing contradiction between the private and social labour of the commodity producers. Analysing the commodity, Marx discovered that the contradiction, inherent in the commodity is conditioned by the contradictory character of the labour expended on its production. Here Marx formulated with great precision the proposition concerning the dual character of labour embodied in the commodity (concrete labour and abstract, general labour) which he had already established in his manuscript of 1857-58. In his own words, this discovery was the “point of departure” which made it possible to explain the true nature of value and a number of other most important categories of political economy.

Basing himself on his study of the commodity and labour and proceeding from the conclusions he had drawn in 1857-58, Marx developed his theory of value. Sharing the view held by the classics of bourgeois political economy on labour as the source of value, he went further than his predecessors in analysing the nature of value, clarifying the qualitative nature and the specifics of the labour which creates it. He showed that value is the embodiment of abstract, socially necessary labour, which is its measure. By his theory of value Marx provided the premisses for understanding how surplus value arises in the process of exchange between labour and capital.

It was in this book that Marx for the first time clearly disclosed the meaning of the phenomenon which he later described in Capital as “commodity fetishism”. In the world of commodity producers, especially at the capitalist stage, the external manifestation of economic laws, he stressed, is different from their essence. On the surface the exchange of commodities appears to be an exchange between things, the capacity to be exchanged seems to be a natural, inherent property of the object itself, whereas in reality commodity exchange is the result of historically determined production relations between the producers. “Only the conventions of everyday life make it appear commonplace and ordinary that social relations of production should assume the shape of things, so that the relations into which people enter in the course of their work appear as the relations of things to one another and of things to people” (see p. 276). This illusory appearance by which properties expressing relations between people are attributed to the things themselves, an appearance which confused even such perspicacious economists as Smith and Ricardo, is intensified all the more, Marx points out, as the veiled economic relations between people are more complex and more concealed by the surface phenomena of capitalist society.

Marx achieved great perfection in elaborating the theory of money. In the chapter “Money, or Simple Circulation” Marx disclosed the economic essence of money, analysed its historical origin and its role in bourgeois society. He demonstrated that money is a necessary product of the development of commodity exchange and serves as the complete expression of value, the embodiment of that form of value in which the particular individual labour which creates the commodity appears, through a process of alienation, “as its opposite, impersonal, abstract, general—and only in this form social—labour” (see p. 308). Marx elucidates in detail the causes determining the functioning of precious metals, gold and silver, as money. In this chapter he discusses in detail the functions of money as a measure of value, a medium of circulation, a means of payment, a means of hoarding, and finally as world money. On the basis of his analysis of these functions Marx establishes the factors determining the amount of money required in circulation and discloses other laws of money circulation.

Each chapter in Marx’s book is provided with historical and critical surveys: in the first chapter of the analysis of commodities, in the second of theories of money as a standard of measure and a medium of circulation. In these surveys and in a number of notes Marx subjects to a critical analysis the views of bourgeois economists and the Utopian doctrines built on the illusion that the contradictions of capitalism can be eliminated by reforming money circulation, replacing the existing monetary systems by “labour money”, and so on.

The book A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy holds a prominent place among the classical works of Marxism. Marx himself later regarded the first volume of Capital as, in a certain sense, its continuation. He considered it necessary in the first section of that volume to summarise its contents for coherence of exposition, at the same time substantially supplementing certain aspects of the theories of the commodity, value, and price which, from the standpoint of his new studies, had not been sufficiendy disclosed in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Nevertheless, even after the publication of Capital this book did not lose its independent scientific significance. A number of propositions elucidated in detail in it, especially in the chapter on money and in the historical excursions in the field of the theory of the commodity and money circulation, were treated only cursorily in Capital, the reader being practically referred to the earlier monograph for a more detailed acquaintance with them. Up to the present time the book remains the best work on money in world economic literature. It is important also as a model of the application of the Marxist methodology in studying fundamental economic and sociological processes.

This volume contains also manuscripts belonging to the preparatory materials for A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. These include the Index to the 7 Notebooks, which was drawn up in the form of two drafts. The Index shows Marx’s striving to group the materials of his basic rough manuscript in connection with the transition to a new stage in the work on his planned economic study, the stage of preparing it for publication. Intending, at the time, to publish it in six books, Marx outlined in one of the drafts in question the grouping of the material for the first book, devoted to analysing value, money and capital— “capital in general”, as he entitled this section in his letter to Engels on April 2, 1858, and in a letter to Lassalle on March 11 of the same year. In the second draft he systematised in greater detail the material for the section on money.

The Index is of interest because it gives an idea of Marx’s method of scientific work and of the character of the initial oudine for the first book of his intended study. In one of the drafts Marx oudined for the first time the subdivisions of the section “Capital in General”, which anticipated in a rudimentary form the distribution of the material in the theoretical part of the future Capital in three parts.

Among the preparatory materials is the extensive “Original Text of the Second and the Beginning of the Third Chapter of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy”, written directly before the final text. It contains several sections which were not included in the final text because it was written before Marx decided to confine himself in the first part of the book to the chapters on the commodity and money and to publish the third chapter as the second part of the work. For this reason the last sections of the Chapter on Money—”The Manifestation of the Law of Appropriation in the Simple Circulation” and “Transition to Capital” and also the beginning of the chapter on capital in the initial variant substantially supplement the final version as published by Marx.

In these sections Marx shows in a systematic and precise form the conditions for money’s transformation into capital, the transition from simple money circulation to the circulation of capital, defines the directions and sphere of study of the sources of its growth, which are to be found in the exchange between capital and the labour power of the producers and are realised in the very process of capitalist production. Here the reader becomes acquainted, as it were, with an intermediary stage in the analysis of the economic foundations of capitalist society, a stage which reveals the organic link between Marx’s theory of value, exchange value, and money and his doctrine on surplus value. Marx’s study of money’s metamorphosis, its transformation into capital, besides throwing light on the historical sources of capitalism, also shows the place of simple money circulation in the general movement of capital as a subordinate link in its circuit. “The examination of the simple circulation,” he writes, “shows us the general concept of capital, because within the bourgeois mode of production the simple circulation itself exists only as preposited by capital and as prepositing it. The exposition of the general concept of capital does not make it an incarnation of some eternal idea, but shows how in actual reality, merely as a necessary form, it has yet to flow into the labour creating exchange value, into production resting on exchange value” (see p. 505).

Two other manuscripts from the preparatory materials were produced when A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy had already been published and Marx had resumed work on the second part, which he had now decided to devote entirely to the problems of “capital in general”.

A Draft Plan of the Chapter on Capital is a detailed text in which the theoretical questions concerning capital are divided into three parts: “The Process of Production of Capital”, “Circulation Process of Capital”, and “Capital and Profit”. The first two of these are worked out in particular detail. The section “Varia” contains separate remarks and references to the corresponding material in the manuscript of 1857-58, obviously intended to supplement the above-named three sections. One of the remarks is particularly characteristic; it reveals the Marxian understanding of capital: “capital, not simple relationship, but process” (see p. 516).

The plan as a whole served Marx as a general guideline in creating new variants of his economic work. In the course of this work the thought matured in Marx of concentrating the exposition of the problems of political economy not in six books as planned in 1858, but around the questions which he wanted to elucidate in the three above-named sections of the chapter on “capital in general”. What formerly had been intended as the scheme for one chapter or one part was now altered into the structure of the whole work. The References to My Own Notebooks, which Marx drew up in this connection, reflect his intention to make use of the materials of his earlier manuscripts, including the original text of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, which had a bearing on the given theme, omitting what had already been utilised in the first part. The References therefore represent a far more detailed scheme for working out the problem of “capital in general” than that drawn up by Marx in 1858 in the Index to the 7 Notebooks and are based on more extensive material.

The 1857-61 period, to which the works of Marx published in Volumes 28 and 29 belong, was thus marked by paramount results in the development of Marxist thought. In these years there appeared a whole cycle of economic manuscripts by Marx, the first rough version of his Capital was produced, and his book A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy was published. It

could not yet embrace Marx’s main discovery—his theory of surplus value, which crowned the revolutionary upheaval he wrought in political economy. However, in the form of a draft research paper intended to clarify things for himself, Marx had already evolved this theory as a whole; at least its main features had been elucidated—the economic premisses for the formation of surplus value, the basic aspects of this process, and its determinant place in the entire system of bourgeois production relations. The published first part of the conceived work contained all the necessary postulates for expounding this theory.

Nevertheless Marx himself did not yet consider his study of this central problem of political economy complete. Being an exacting scientist, he set himself new research tasks, aiming in particular at fully elucidating questions which he had only posed in his writings of 1857-61, namely the problem concerning the correlation between surplus value and its converted forms. This was the main cause of the delay in publishing the second part of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy and his subsequent decision not to publish it at all because of a change in the general plan of his intended work. Many years later Engels wrote in this connection to one of the Russian socialists: “Marx worked out the theory of surplus value in the fifties in solitude and stubbornly refused to publish anything about it until he had fully clarified all the conclusions to himself. That was the reason why the second and subsequent parts of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy were not published” (Engels to V. Y. Shmuilov, February 7, 1893).

All the same, during the years 1857-61 Marx covered a gigantic, and one may say the decisive part of the road to the summits of the new economic science. This was a time of great scientific accomplishments in comprehending the economic laws of the development of capitalist society and in economically grounding the inevitability of its revolutionary communist reorganisation.

* * *

This volume comprises rough manuscripts, partly unfinished, and one work which appeared in print during the author’s lifetime.

The translations of these writings, as of the manuscripts included in Volume 28, are 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 and determines the principles of their publication in the present edition, which were expounded in a general form in the editorial preface to Volume 28. The specifics of each of them and the corresponding form of presenting them in this volume are mentioned in the notes.

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. Some of the words are now somewhat archaic or have undergone changes in usage. For example, the term “nigger”, which has acquired generally—but especially in the USA—a more profane and unacceptable status than it had in Europe during the 19th century.

All the manuscripts included in the section “From the Preparatory Materials” are here published in English for the first time. The concluding part of the economic manuscript of 1857-58— Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft) is given in a new English translation.

A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy is published according to the first edition of 1859 with the account being taken of the amendments made by Marx himself in his own copy and in a copy he presented to his friend Wilhelm Wolff. The English text is based on the translation by Salo Ryazanskaya published in K. Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1971. For the present edition this translation was checked and made more precise and the arrangement of the text was brought into conformity with the rules accepted in the publication of similar works in other volumes.

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

The translations were made by Victor Schnittke and Yuri Sdobnikov and edited by Svetlana Gerasimenko, Yelena Kalinina, Margarita Lopukhina, Andrei Skvarsky and Yelena Vorotnikova (Progress Publishers).

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