A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy

Almost nobody reads this book, and almost everybody has read one page of it.

A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy came out in Berlin in 1859, eight years before the first volume of Capital, and Marx treated it as a first instalment he would supersede: the analysis of the commodity and of money that opens it was reworked, at greater length and with a sharper eye, into the opening of Capital, and the later book quietly retired the earlier one. What did not get retired was the Preface. Two pages of it - the passage beginning "In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will" - became the single most quoted, most examined and most misused piece of writing in the whole of official Marxism. This edition lets you read those two pages back inside the book they came from, and inside the caution the Preface itself contains.

Marx wrote it in London, in the poverty of the 1850s, as the first published fruit of nearly fifteen years' study. The plan behind it was enormous and never finished. "I examine the system of bourgeois economy in the following order," he announces on the first page: "capital, landed property, wage-labour; the State, foreign trade, world market." Six books were intended; this instalment covers the first two chapters of the first, and no further part in that form ever appeared. Marx abandoned the architecture and began again on the plan that became Capital.

The Moscow edition is generous in what it gathers around the fragment. It carries an Introduction by the English Marxist economist Maurice Dobb, written in 1970; it prints as an appendix the discarded methodological "Introduction" of 1857, found among Marx's papers and first published by Kautsky in 1903; it includes Engels's own review of the Critique from Das Volk; and it closes with the Institute of Marxism-Leninism's notes and three full indexes. Translated from the German by S. W. Ryazanskaya.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.