Appendix: Draft Plan of the Chapter on Capital

• • Preface
  • Chapter 1: The Commodity
  • Note A. Historical Notes on the Analysis of Commodities
  • Chapter 2: Money or Simple Circulation
  • Note B. Theories of the Standard of Money
  • Note C. Theories of the the Medium of Circulation and of Money
  • Appendix: Introduction by Karl Marx
  • Appendix: Index to the 7 Notebooks
  • Appendix: Original text of Second and beginning of Third chapter
  • Appendix: Additional Notes
  • Appendix: Draft Plan of the Chapter on Capital
  • Appendix: References to My Own Notebooks

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The draft plan of Part Two of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, which was to contain Chapter Three (“Chapter on Capital”), is in a separate small notebook (without number or letter designation) and has no general title. (In this edition, the pages of the notebook are given in editorial square brackets and the author’s brackets are replaced by oblique lines.) In the draft, the problems treated in notebooks II-VII of the 1857-1858 economic manuscript are divided into three sections: I. The Process of Production of Capital, II. Circulation Process of Capital, III. Capital and Profit. The draft plan ends with the section “Varia”, which includes mainly issues of the history of political economy. Many points of the plan are separated from one another by big spaces; on pp. 13 and 15 there is no text at all (the former has drawings of geometrical figures and the latter logarithmic formulae that have nothing to do with this work). In the course of his further economic studies, Marx used the structure of Chapter Three fixed in this plan as a basis for generally dividing his future work into three theoretical parts, though later the contents of each of them, especially the third, were considerably extended. In references to the 1857-1858 manuscript Marx uses Roman numerals to denote notebooks and Arabic ones to denote the relevant pages.