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 himself 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 that begins "In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will" and ends with the sentence about the prehistory of human society drawing to a close — became the single most quoted, most examined, and most misused piece of writing in the whole of official Marxism. This edition is worth having because it lets you read those two pages back inside the book they came from, and read the book back inside the caution the Preface itself contains.
Marx wrote the Critique 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 it was 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, on the commodity and on money, and no further part in that form ever appeared. Marx abandoned the six-book architecture and began again on the four-volume plan that became Capital. So the Critique is a fragment of an abandoned design, valuable now for two things it does supremely and for the trouble the first of them caused.
The present text is the one prepared in Moscow: Progress Publishers' edition, translated from the German of Marx/Engels, Werke, Band 13, by S. W. Ryazanskaya. It is generous in what it gathers. It carries an Introduction by the English Marxist economist Maurice Dobb, written in 1970; it prints, as an appendix, the "Introduction" of 1857 — the discarded methodological draft, found among Marx's papers and first published by Kautsky in 1903 — and Engels's own review of the Critique from Das Volk; and it closes with the notes of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism and three full indexes. Reference marks appear here as [Note 1] and so on; the page-bottom notes are Marx's own, marked with an asterisk, and the editors', marked with a letter and closing "—Ed.". It is a properly equipped scholarly edition, and its apparatus is where the argument of this introduction has to be made.
What the book does supremely, first, is state the materialist conception of history in the most compressed form Marx ever gave it. "The general conclusion at which I arrived and which, once reached, became the guiding principle of my studies," he writes, is that relations of production "appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production" form "the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness." Then the motor: "At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production… From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution." There is nothing else in nineteenth-century thought that packs so much into so little. As an agenda for research it is inexhaustible; generations of the best historical work have been done by taking one clause of it seriously.
The second thing the book does supremely is method, and here the edition's own additions carry the weight. The appended 1857 "Introduction" is Marx thinking aloud about how political economy should proceed — why the apparently concrete "population" is an empty abstraction until it is broken down and rebuilt, why "the method of advancing from the abstract to the concrete is simply the way in which thinking assimilates the concrete". Engels's review states the same point as a principle: the way to grasp a developed subject is "the logical method… only stripped of the historical form and diverting chance occurrences. The point where this history begins must also be the starting point of the train of thought." Dobb's Introduction, the best short thing in the volume, sees exactly this and says so plainly — "the focus of attention of the Critique is methodological" — and reads the book as the workshop in which the method of Capital was forged rather than as a set of conclusions to be memorised.
All of which can make it easy to forget that most of the book is neither manifesto nor method but hard economic analysis. The two chapters proper — on the commodity and on money — are the first systematic statement Marx ever published of the labour theory of value, and they are the direct rehearsal of Capital: the sentence that opens the first chapter here, "The wealth of bourgeois society, at first sight, presents itself as an immense accumulation of commodities, its unit being a single commodity," is the sentence Marx set, almost word for word, at the head of Capital eight years later. Between the chapters he inserts two remarkable historical excurses — "Historical Notes on the Analysis of Commodities" and the "Theories of the Standard of Money" — in which the doctrines of Petty, Steuart, Ricardo and the rest are not refuted from outside but placed, each shown as the theoretical reflex of a stage of the thing it studies. This is the materialist conception turned on the history of economics itself, and it is the Critique's quiet proof that the method of the Preface can actually be worked.
Now for what does not work, or rather for the trouble the compression caused. The Preface is written in the indicative of natural science — "conditions", "corresponds", "determines" — and its architectural metaphor of a foundation and a superstructure rising on it invites a reading in which the economy is a machine and everything else is its exhaust. Marx's own practice never worked that way: his histories are full of politics, religion and ideology acting back on the foundation, and the Preface itself, if read to the end of the sentence, says that ideological forms are the medium "in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out" — the fighting-out is not an epiphenomenon, it is where history happens. But a slogan does not have an end of the sentence. The other dangerous compression is the line, endlessly cited, that "no social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society." Read as a caution against wishful voluntarism it is wise. Read as a law, it becomes a guarantee that history advances on rails and that revolutions must wait their turn — and that reading, made by the Marxists of the Second International, was the standing argument against every attempt to make a socialist revolution in a country that was not yet "ripe".
The remarkable thing is that Marx built the antidote into the very book the poison was extracted from. He explains, in this same Preface, that he has suppressed the general introduction he had drafted "since on further consideration it seems to me confusing to anticipate results which still have to be substantiated". The man who wrote the founding text of "historical materialism" withheld his own methodological overture because he distrusted turning results into a system before they were earned. The 1857 "Introduction" printed at the back of this volume is that withheld draft. The edition thus contains, a few hundred pages apart, both the aphorisms that were made into a catechism and the author's explicit refusal to let his method harden into one. No note connects the two.
Which is the question this edition, for all its equipment, does not put to itself: was the state that canonised these two pages consistent with them? It taught them as the core of "dialectical and historical materialism", the compulsory philosophy of a great power, and the debt is visible on this publisher's own list — A. F. Sheptulin's Marxist-Leninist Philosophy (1978), F. Konstantinov's The Fundamentals of Marxist-Leninist Philosophy (1979), the ABC primers of historical materialism — which take the 1859 Preface as the charter of the science and cite this very work by name. And having taught it, the doctrine did to Marx's text precisely what Marx warned against: it froze a research programme into a ladder. The Preface names, "in broad outline, the Asiatic, ancient, feudal and modern bourgeois modes of production" as "epochs marking progress in the economic development of society" — four named forms, offered as illustration, not as a staircase every people must climb. Soviet orthodoxy reduced them to a single obligatory sequence of five stages, primitive-communal, slave, feudal, capitalist, socialist, through which all societies must pass in order.
And it did something sharper than simplify. It deleted one of the four. The "Asiatic mode of production" — Marx's name for societies in which no private landed class stands between the direct producers and a centralised state that pumps the surplus out of them through taxes and forced labour — was argued about freely by Soviet scholars into the early 1930s and then closed down, the term effectively banned from Soviet discussion for a generation. The reason is not obscure. A mode of production whose ruling class is the state itself, an apparatus of officials living off a surplus it extracts from a labouring population it does not own but does command, was an uncomfortably exact description of the society doing the deleting. The category that Marx had put in the founding proof-text of the whole doctrine turned homeward, and so it was quietly removed from the founding proof-text. The reflexivity test that a genuine science must survive — can its own concepts be turned on the society that holds them? — was failed by administrative decision. The notes to this very edition pass the Asiatic modes without a word; they are scrupulous about the newspapers Marx wrote for in the 1840s and silent about the one epoch on his list that no longer had a home.
None of this is a charge against Marx, and the fatalist reading of the Preface is not the only one available in it. The same passage that was used to prove socialism must wait was refuted in practice by the Bolsheviks in 1917 and in theory by the tradition that defended them. Trotsky's law of uneven and combined development — the observation that backward countries do not repeat the stages of advanced ones but telescope them, importing the latest forms into the oldest conditions — is the materialist conception of history used as a method rather than obeyed as a timetable, and it is the direct answer to the unilinear ladder. It is no accident that the same regime that imposed the five stages also anathematised uneven and combined development and the permanent revolution: a doctrine that has made the sequence of stages into holy writ cannot allow that a peasant empire might leap. The living Marxism and the embalmed one part company on exactly the reading of this Preface.
So what is the Critique worth now, beyond its place as the rehearsal for Capital? Its value is the value of a method kept honest. The materialist conception of history is the most powerful instrument the social sciences possess for asking how the way people make their living shapes the way they think, rule and fight — provided it is used as Marx used it, as a "guiding principle" of inquiry that must earn its results, and not as Marx feared it would be used, as a set of results announced in advance. Read the two famous pages with the sentence about "fighting it out" left in, and the withheld introduction at the back, and the Critique stops being a catechism and becomes what Dobb saw it as: a workshop. The doctrine that canonised the Preface could recite that men's social existence determines their consciousness while forbidding anyone to ask what social existence had produced the consciousness of its own ruling stratum. The book supplies both the guiding principle and the standard by which the users of it can be measured — including the state that printed it, in millions of copies, in the languages of the world, while striking from the list the one mode of production that looked too much like itself.