Preface to Marx-Engels Collected Works Volume (36)

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Volume 36 of the Collected Works of Marx and Engels contains the second volume of Marx’s Capital published by Engels on the basis of the author’s rough manuscripts. It also includes Engels’ prefaces to the first and second German editions, as well as a short compilation of passages taken by Engels from the author’s Manuscripts II-VIII.

Volume II deals with the circulation of individual and social capital, its metamorphoses and its realisation in the form of value and material objects.

Marx divides the total social production into two major departments: the production of the means of production and that of the articles of consumption. He establishes the necessary proportions between them and between their component parts (constant and variable capital and surplus value) and clarifies the general conditions of simple and expanded reproduction, that is, reproduction on the same scale and on an extended scale.

Volume II of Capital is a link between an analysis of the process of the production of capital made in Volume I and that of its concrete types and forms in bourgeois society (profit, ground rent, interest) in Volume III. The subject of Volume III, according to Marx himself, is the process of capitalist production as a whole.

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The present English edition of Volume II follows the second German edition published in 1893 under Engels’ editorship. It is based on the English edition published by Progress Publishers, which made extensive use of the English translation of the second volume of Capital by Ernest Untermann printed by Charles H. Kerr & Co., Chicago, 1907.

When comparing the first and second German editions with Marx’s manuscripts and with the final version edited by Engels, the editors discovered a number of misprints and printers’ errors in the 1893 edition, checked factual data and calculations and corrected inaccuracies. Obvious slips of the pen in Marx’s text have been corrected without comment.

Marx’s and Engels’ footnotes are indicated by numbers in superscript with a bracket, while the editors’ footnotes are indicated by index letters, and editorial notes by numbers in superscript. The insertions made by Engels in Marx’s text when preparing it for the press and in quotations are given in double oblique lines.

Foreign words and expressions are given as used by Marx, with the translation supplied in footnotes where necessary. English phrases, expressions and individual words occurring in the original are set in small capitals. Longer passages and quotations in English are enclosed within asterisks.

All quotations from English and American authors have been checked with the original sources.

In all cases the form of quotation used by Marx is respected. The language in which Marx quotes is indicated in footnotes unless it is German.

In this volume the editors have preserved the terminology used in the Engels-authorised English translation of Volume I of Capital, which is published in Volume 35 of the present edition.

The volume was compiled, the preface, notes and indexes written by Tatyana Vasilyeva (Russian Independent Institute of Social and National Problems) and edited by Lydia Belyakova, Mzia Pitskhelauri (Progress Publishing Group Corporation) and Alexander Malysh, scientific editor (Russian Independent Institute of Social and National Problems).

The volume was prepared for the press by Mzia Pitskhelauri (Progress Publishing Group Corporation).