During most of the 1840s, Marx and Engels were making their way from the Hegelian philosophy of consciousness to the fundamental principles of historical materialism.
Their writings from these years abound with creative energy, but in many respects they were also experimental and provisional in their conclusions. Ideas were in motion, and the final consequences would begin to appear only from the late 1850s onwards.
Along the way to political economy, Marx first made his break with the left Hegelian group,1 then undertook a provisional philosophical critique of economic life based on the concept of alienation in the 1844 Manuscripts, next went beyond Feuerbach’s humanism in the form of a more active concept of human praxis, and then finally debated economic issues directly in his polemic against Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s.Sys- teme des contradictions economiques, ou, Philosophic de la misere (1846).Marx’s response to Proudhon first appeared in 1847 as Misere de la philo- sophie, the book that English-language readers know as The Poverty of Philosophy. In 1885 a German edition of the book was published after being translated by Eduard Bernstein and Karl Kautsky. In a preface to that edition, dated 13 October 1884, Engels pointed out that ‘the terminology used in this work does not entirely coincide with that in Capital. Thus this work still speaks of labour as a commodity, of the purchase and sale of labour, instead of labour power’.[1] [2] In a subsequent footnote Engels also criticised the original thesis ‘that the “natural,” i.e., normal, price of labour power coincides with the wage minimum, i.e., with the equivalent in value of the means of subsistence absolutely indispensable for the life and procreation of the worker’, indicating that ‘in Capital, Marx has put the above thesis right’.[3]
Engels faced similar issues when preparing a new edition of Marx's WageLabour and Capital, a series of lectures delivered before the German Workingmen's Club of Brussels in 1847 and first published in several instalments in Die Neue Rheinische Zeitung, beginning on 4 April 1849.
In his introduction to the new edition, dated 30 April 1891, Engels again noted that, contrary to what Marx had originally said, workers do not sell their labour in exchange for wages but rather their labour power:Marx, in the 1840s, had not yet completed his criticism of political economy. This was not done until toward the end of the fifties. Consequently, such of his writings as were published before the first instalment of his Critique of Political Economy was finished, deviate in some points from those written after 1859, and contain expressions and whole sentences which, viewed from the standpoint of his later writings, appear inexact, and even incorrect.[4]
Even A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), Marx's first mature economic work, stands out today mainly for the unsurpassed exposition of the general principles of historical materialism in its extraordinary preface. There Marx described existing society as the last stage in the ‘prehistory' of humanity, beyond which producers would no longer be dominated by the products of their own labour. Capitalism would create the technical and social preconditions for transition to a superior social formation, in which people would exert conscious control over the production process, shortening the working day and thus making it possible to overcome the division between manual and intellectual labour. But even this work was still incomplete in terms of its exposition of the form of value, as Isaak Rubin comprehensively demonstrates in his essay ‘Towards a History of the Text of the First Chapter of Marx's Capital’ (Document 18 of this volume). As a consequence, Marx ended up rewriting the material from the Critique and incorporating it in the first volume of Capital as ‘Part One: Commodities and Money'.
The problem that later Marxists repeatedly encountered was that Marx's work was forever in progress and never really completed. In the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy Marx stated that he intended to examine the system of bourgeois economy in six books (capital, landed property, wage-labour; the state, foreign trade, world market), yet only the first volume of the first book was actually published during Marx’s lifetime.
For several decades after Marx’s death in 1883 major new manuscripts appeared, including the second and third volumes of Capital, the three parts of Theories of Surplus-Value and the 1844 Manuscripts, all of which were essential for a complete understanding of Marx’s project, how it developed, and what it aimed to accomplish. As a result, Marx’s followers continuously had to adapt their interpretations of his work as these new materials became available. The story of this ongoing process of discovery is reconstructed in this volume. We have included a total of 20 documents, beginning with the initial response to Volume I of Capital and ending with six remarkable essays from Isaak Rubin that were written in the later 1920s and appear here for the first time in English translation.