Preface

I am surveying the bourgeois economic system in this sequence: capital, landed property, wage-labour; the state, foreign trade, world market. Under the first three headings I investigate the economic circumstances of the three great classes into which modern bourgeois society is divided; the relevance of the other three headings is obvious at a glance. The first instalment of the first book, which deals with capital, consists of the following chapters: (1) The Commodity; (2) Money or Simple Circulation; (3) Capital in General. The first two chapters form the content of the present volume. All the material lies before me in the form of monographs written at widely different times for my own self-clarification, not for publication, and their coherent exposition according to the plan above depends on the vagaries of circumstance.

I am omitting a general introduction [of 1857 to the Grundrisse] which I had dashed off, because on further reflection any anticipation of results yet to be proved seems disruptive, and the reader who wants to follow me at all must resolve to progress from the individual instance to the general case. At this point, however, a few remarks concerning the course of my own politico-economic studies would appear to be in order.

At university my major subject was jurisprudence, which I pursued as a subordinate course alongside philosophy and history.

A spectre stalks the land of Europe – the spectre of communism. The powers that be – Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police – are in holy alliance for a witchhunt.

Where is the opposition that has not been smeared as communistic by its enemies in government? Where is the opposition that has not retaliated by slandering more progressive groups and reactionary opponents alike with the stigma of communism?

Two things follow from this fact.

1. I. Communism is already recognised as a force by all the European powers.

2. II. It is high time for communists to lay before the world their perspectives, their goals, their principles, and to counterpose to the horror stories of communism a manifesto of the party itself.

For this purpose communists of various nationalities have gathered together in London and have drawn up the following manifesto, for publication in English, French, German, Italian, Flemish and Danish.

Bourgeois and proletarians

The history of all society up to now is the history of class struggles.

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guildmaster and journeyman, in short, oppressor and oppressed stood in continual conflict with one another, conducting an unbroken, now hidden, now open struggle, a struggle that finished each time with a revolutionary transformation of society as a whole, or with the common ruin of the contending classes.

Introduction

Production, consumption, distribution, exchange (circulation)

PRODUCTION

Autonomous individuals. Eighteenth-century ideas.

(a) The subject at hand is, to begin with, material production.

Individuals producing in society – hence the starting point is naturally the socially specific production [carried on] by individuals. The individual – and individuated – hunter and fisher, with which [Adam] Smith and Ricardo begin, belongs to the unimaginative conceits of eighteenth-century stories à la Robinson Crusoe, which in no way express, as cultural historians imagine, a simple reaction against over-refinement and a regression to a misconstrued natural life. [Those stories] no more rest on such naturalism than does Rousseau's social contract, which brings naturally independent subjects into relation and association by means of a contract. This is the pretence, and merely the aesthetic pretence, of small- and large-scale stories à la Robinson Crusoe. It is rather the anticipation of ‘bourgeois society’, which had been in preparation since the sixteenth century and had made giant strides towards its maturity in the eighteenth. In that society of free competition the individual appears detached from the natural bonds, etc., which in earlier historical epochs make him into an appendage of a specific, delimited, human conglomerate. The prophets of the eighteenth century, on whose shoulders Smith and Ricardo are standing, conceived of that eighteenth century individual – the product, on the one hand, of the dissolution of feudal forms of society, and on the other, of the powers of production newly developed since the sixteenth century – as an ideal [conception], which may have had an existence in the past.

Karl Marx (1818–83) did not write a comprehensive or even exemplary work of political theory. Instead he addressed himself as a political agent to a politics of democratic constitutionalism and revolutionary communism, and to a detailed critique of the economics of the day. It is from those works that his contributions to political theory can be constructed and assessed.

Manifesto of the Communist Party

Marx has left us one work that outlines his views – Manifesto of the Communist Party, first published in 1848. This small pamphlet appeared quite fortuitously on the very eve of democratic upheaval and constitutional revolution. His previous writings, largely unavailable to the nineteenth-century audience, play a role in our reading of the Manifesto today, and they amplify, as well as explain, some of the arguments made in its pages. For Marx's political writings before 1848, the reader should consult the companion volume in this series, Marx: Early Political Writings, edited and introduced by Joseph O'Malley with Richard A. Davis. The Manifesto is particularly useful in structuring a reading of Marx's later writings, such as those contained in the present volume, since it introduces and develops a perspective without which the detailed propositions that may be abstracted from Marx's subsequent works are of little use.

Ostensibly the Manifesto was written for a small group of selfstyled communists who considered themselves representative of discontented workers.

On the 4th of September 1870, when the working men of Paris proclaimed the republic, which was almost instantaneously acclaimed throughout France, without a single voice of dissent, a cabal of place-hunting barristers, with Thiers for the statesman and Trochu for their general, took hold of the Hôtel de Ville. At that time they were imbued with so fanatical a faith in the mission of Paris to represent France in all epochs of historical crises, that, to legitimise their usurped titles as governors of France, they thought it quite sufficient to produce their lapsed mandates as representatives of Paris. In our second address on the late [Franco–Prussian] War [of 1870–1], five days after the rise of these men, we told you who they were. Yet, in the turmoil of surprise, with the real leaders of the working class still shut up in Bonapartist prisons and the Prussians already marching upon Paris, Paris bore with their assumption of power, on the express condition that it was to be wielded for the single purpose of national defence. Paris, however, was not to be defended without arming its working class, organising them into an effective force, and training their ranks by the war itself. But Paris armed was the revolution armed. A victory of Paris over the Prussian aggressor would have been a victory of the French workman over the French capitalist and his state parasites.

All translations in this volume are new and are based on first editions or reliable copy-texts of manuscripts unpublished in Marx's lifetime. Successive editors have hardly altered the ‘classical’ English translations, produced between the 1880s and the 1930s, of the Manifesto of the Communist Party, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, the ‘Preface’ to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, and the Critique of the Gotha Programme. The Civil War in France was written in English, and so does not pose a problem. The manuscript materials – the ‘Introduction’ of 1857 to the Grundrisse and the ‘“Notes” on Adolph Wagner’ – appear in my own translations of 1975. I am grateful to Basil Blackwell Ltd for permission to reproduce this material from my Texts on Method.

It is my aim as editor of the present volume to depart substantially from the way that Marx has previously been presented in English, and in other languages, including German (which was not always the original language of his work). Marx was made responsible for a doctrine or doctrines by Engels and by subsequent Marxists, and by editors who took the view that he should be presented doctrinally in terms of what his thought became, according to a posthumous scheme, rather than what it arguably was, when his writings were generated in the political context that prevailed at the time of first publication or authorial production.

(1) ‘Labour is the source of all wealth and culture, and since it is only possible to have useful labour in and through society, all members of society have an equal right to the undiminished return from labour.’ First part of the paragraph: ‘Labour is the source of all wealth and all culture.’

Labour is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much the source of use-values (and what else is material wealth?) as labour, which is itself only the expression of a natural power, human labour power.

This line can be found in any children's primer and is correct in so far as the implication is that labour requires certain means and materials. However a socialist programme cannot allow a bourgeois phrase like this to conceal the very circumstances that give it some sense. Only in so far as man acts as the proprietor of nature, the primary source of all the means and materials of labour, and treats nature as his own from the outset, does his labour become the source of use values, and hence of wealth. The bourgeoisie have very good reason to credit labour with a supernatural generative power; for it follows directly from the fact that nature is a precondition for labour, that a man who has no property other than his labour power must in all cultural and social circumstances be a slave to those who have become the owners of labour's material prerequisites.

Hegel observes somewhere that all the great events and characters of world history occur twice, so to speak. He forgot to add: the first time as high tragedy, the second time as low farce. Caussidière after Danton, Louis Blanc after Robespierre, the montagne [democratic socialists] of 1848–51 after the montagne [Jacobin democrats] of 1793–5, and then the London constable [Louis Bonaparte], with a dozen of the best debt-ridden lieutenants, after the little corporal [Napoleon Bonaparte], with his roundtable of military marshals! The eighteenth Brumaire of the fool after the eighteenth Brumaire of the genius! And there is the same cartoon-quality in the circumstances surrounding the second imprint of the eighteenth Brumaire. The first time France was on the verge of bankruptcy, this time Bonaparte is on the brink of debtors' prison; then the coalition of the great powers was on the borders – now there is the coalition of Ruge-Darasz in England, of Kinkel-Brentano in America; then there was a St Bernard [Pass] to be surmounted [when Napoleon defeated the Austrians in 1800], now a company of policemen to be dispatched across the Jura [Mountains to demand republican refugees from the Swiss]; then there was a [battle of] Marengo to be won and a lot more, now there is a Grand Cross of the Order of St Andrew [from the Tsar] to be gained and the esteem of the Berlin [newspaper] National-Zeitung to be lost.

Xenophanes of Colophon was a philosopher and poet of the late sixth and early fifth centuries. Although an Ionian by birth, he evidently lived as an exile in Sicily.

(DK 2, W2, lines 11–19)

(DK 15)

(DK 16)

(DK 11)

(DK 34)

The “Old Oligarch” is the name commonly given by modern scholars to the author of this anonymous treatise on the government of Athens, which was preserved among the writings of the Athenian historian and thinker, Xenophon (born c. 430). Technically it is called pseudo-Xenophon's Constitution of the Athenians. The date of the treatise is uncertain, but the consensus is that it was written after 446 (because of events mentioned in 3.11) but probably before 424 (because of an event not mentioned in 2.5).

The author may be an Athenian in exile, for he speaks of Athenians as “they” (1.1 etc.) but also as “we” (1.12 etc.). He disapproves of their democratic constitution but admires the skill with which they have implemented this system. His style is very uneven, and the purpose of the treatise has long puzzled scholars. In our view the treatise belongs to the fifth-century debate about the relative merits of different constitutions and may have been an exercise that, like the Dissoi Logoi, required the assessment of both pros and cons.

[1] My subject is the constitution (politeia) of the Athenians. I do not approve their choice of this type of constitution, for in making their choice they preferred the well-being of the inferior class (ponēroi) at the expense of the better class (chrēstoi). For this reason, then, I do not approve of it.