Preface to Marx-Engels Collected Works Volume (34)

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Volume 34 of the Collected Works of Marx and Engels contains the conclusion of Marx’s Economic Manuscript of 1861-63 (Notebooks XX-XXIII, pp. 1251-1472 of the manuscript). The manuscript as a whole is the second rough draft of Capital and makes up volumes 30 to 34 of the present edition. This volume also includes Marx’s manuscript “Chapter Six. Results of the Direct Production Process” and other fragments of the Economic Manuscript of 1863-64, the only extant remnants of the third rough draft of Book I of Capital. All these manuscripts are presented in accordance with their new publication in the languages of the original in Karl Marx/Friedrich Engels. Gesamtausgabe (MEGA). Zweite Abteilung. Bd. 3. Berlin, 1976-1982 and Bd. 4.1. Berlin, 1988.

In the part of the 1861-63 manuscript contained in this volume Marx concludes his analysis of the production process of capital, concentrating on relative surplus value and its connection with absolute surplus value and on the primitive accumulation of capital. He also deals here with problems which he subsequently discussed in Book H of Capital, in particular the reproduction and circulation of the total social capital. The closing part of the manuscript consists of excerpts from the works of earlier and contemporary political economists and Marx’s commentaries. In “Chapter Six” Marx examines in detail the prerequisites for and results of the direct production process of capital, considering from this angle the commodity, the production of surplus value and the reproduction of the capitalist relations of production.

Obvious slips of the pen in Marx’s text have been corrected by the Editors without comment. The proper and geographical