This is the first of the three volumes of what Marx meant to be the concluding, historical part of Capital. Between January 1862 and July 1863, in the middle of the vast manuscript from which the whole of his great work would later be quarried, he filled notebook after notebook with a critical history of the theory that stood at the centre of his own — the theory of surplus-value, of where the extra wealth of capitalist society actually comes from. He did not live to shape it into a book. What he left was the longest and most fully worked-out section of the 1861–63 draft, and it slept in his papers for forty years, until Karl Kautsky, then the foremost theorist of German social democracy, first gave it to the world between 1905 and 1910 under the title Marx had used in passing — Theorien über den Mehrwert, Theories of Surplus-Value — and fixed it in the tradition as "the fourth volume of Capital." The edition in your hands is not Kautsky's but the English of Progress Publishers in Moscow, prepared by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism from a re-ordering of the notebooks meant to follow Marx's own plan more faithfully; this Part One was translated by Emile Burns and edited by S. Ryazanskaya, first printed in 1963, and co-issued in Britain by Lawrence & Wishart. Being the opening volume, it carries the general Preface and Marx's own "Contents of the Manuscript" — the map of the whole work.
Part One is where the history begins, and it moves from the Physiocrats — the eighteenth-century French school who were the first to look for the origin of surplus in production rather than in cheating at exchange — through Adam Smith, whose honesty Marx admired even where he thought him wrong. But its living centre, the part that has echoed loudest down the following century, is the long analysis of what Smith had called productive and unproductive labour. Here Marx does something the reader does not expect. Productive labour, he insists, has nothing to do with whether the worker makes a solid object or performs a fleeting service, nothing to do with the usefulness of the work or the dignity of it; under capitalism, "only that labour is productive which creates a surplus-value." Productive labour is a relation — labour exchanged against capital in such a way that it returns more value than it costs — so that the very same activity is productive in one setting and unproductive in another. He drives the point home with a mischief that has never lost its edge: "A philosopher produces ideas, a poet poems, a clergyman sermons, a professor compendia and so on. A criminal produces crimes" — and, he goes on, produces the whole industry of police, courts and moralists that lives off crime, and is in that sense as "productive" as any of them. The joke is a scalpel: it cuts the word productive free of the thing produced and ties it to the social form.
An honest introduction must say plainly what this volume is and is not. It is not a finished work, and it does not read like one. It is a set of working notebooks, brilliant in flashes and slack in the stretches between, circling back on itself, breaking off, arguing with minor authors at a length their importance does not justify. Its very order is a construction — first Kautsky's, then the Institute's, neither of them Marx's own hand — so that the architecture the reader follows is partly the editors'. The famous discussion of productive and unproductive labour, for all its depth, Marx never brought to a settled conclusion, and it has generated more than a century of confusion among his followers. This is a quarry of extraordinary richness, not a monument — and it is a better book for being read as the former.
The confusion was not only among scholars. The state that canonised Marx built its entire system of national accounting on a hardened, materialist misreading of these very pages. Where the capitalist West would come to measure its output as Gross National Product, counting services and government and finance alike, the Soviet Union measured "net material product" — a figure that counted the making of physical goods as the creation of national income and treated the labour of the teacher, the nurse, the shop assistant and the clerk as, at best, a deduction from wealth produced elsewhere. This Material Product System, exported to every planned economy and defended as strict Marxist orthodoxy, took Marx's careful account of productive labour as a social relation and flattened it into a fetish of the tangible object — the very fetishism of the material product that these notebooks exist to dissolve. The tonnage cult of the Five-Year Plans, the steel and the cement counted and the human services discounted, had its theoretical licence here, in a doctrine that read Part One of the fourth volume of Capital exactly backwards, mistaking Marx's joke about the criminal for a rule about the carpenter.
None of this is a reproach to Marx, and none to the revolution that first raised his name as a banner. A backward, invaded, blockaded country genuinely had to drag itself up from a low base, and had to count something; the tragedy is that the counting was done by a caste that had usurped the workers' power and could not permit the texts it recited to be read against itself. The degeneration lay in that isolation and that usurpation, not in the doctrine — and it is worth remembering that the man who edited the first edition of this very manuscript, Kautsky, was by the 1920s the Soviet Union's favourite word for a renegade, so that the official Marxism owed the existence of its fourth gospel to a heretic it spent its life denouncing. It was Trotsky, in The Revolution Betrayed, who turned the categories homeward and asked what surplus the plan was pumping and into whose hands; and it was Ernest Mandel, whose Marxist Economic Theory draws deeply on these chapters, who used the productive/unproductive analysis as the living instrument it was meant to be rather than the accounting rule the manuals made of it.
So what is this difficult, unfinished, magnificent volume worth now, past the state that mined it for a statistical dogma? A great deal — perhaps more than when it was written, because its central question has come round again. What counts as productive labour is once more a live and bitter argument, in a world of care work and platform work and the vast unwaged labour on which every economy floats, and Marx's insistence that the answer lies in a relation and not in the substance of the product cuts against the productivists of every camp — the ones who worship the factory and the ones who worship the app alike. His method, too, endures: to take his predecessors at their strongest, to honour the science in the Physiocrats and in Smith, and to show exactly where it turns into confusion or apology. Cleared of the material-product fetish the plan extracted from it, and of the catechism that froze it into a fourth gospel, this opening volume of Marx's history of a science is also a warning against every economics that takes the visible surface of its world for nature. The living current in these notebooks is simply Marx's critical history put back to work.