Appendix: References to My Own Notebooks

• • 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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References to My Own Notebooks belong to the period when, after an interruption caused by his editorial work on the newspaper Das Volk (summer 1859), writing his pamphlet Herr Vogt and other circumstances, Marx resumed intensive studies of political economy and returned to his work on the subsequent parts of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, primarily on its third chapter, devoted to capital. “A week ago I made a serious start on my book,” he wrote to Engels on June 10, 1861 (see MECW, Vol. 41, p. 292). Evidently, the first thing Marx did was to systematise the material already collected. For this purpose, he made use of the last, as yet empty, pages of his Notebook B”. Pages 1-19 of this notebook contain the end of the fragment of the original text of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, written as far back as the autumn of 1858. Pages 20-27 contain passages from different economic sources, evidently written later on as they include references to editions published in 1860. The References published here are to be found on pages 28-36 of Notebook B” (these pages are given here in editorial square brackets, and oblique lines are substituted for the square brackets used by Marx himself).

The References constitute a concise review of the contents of the notebooks containing the economic manuscripts of 1857-1858 (Notebook M with “Introduction”, notebooks I-VII) and also of notebooks with the original text of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (notebooks C, B’ and B”). In this review, Marx included material he had not used in the first part of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, completed in January 1859. Hewrote this review in order to facilitate writing the part of his economic work that was to be the continuation of the first part of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. When writing the References, Marx worked out a plan for the third chapter of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy and later on implemented it in a large Economic Manuscript of 1861-1863, which was a new, already systematised, though rough version of all the parts of the future Capital.

In Marx’s References, Arabic numerals indicate the pages of the notebooks.