Exile in London

Over the next 30 years Marx devoted much of his time and energy to political economy. He used to work in the reading room of the British Museum, studying the available litera­ture on political economy as well as the so-called Government Blue Books, the economic and financial sections of newspapers and magazines, and various other sources that provided information on the economic and social conditions in Britain and in the rest of the world, filling several hundred notebooks and thousands of pages with excerpts, commentaries, and bibliographic references.

The economic crisis of 1857 induced him to summarize the results of his eco­nomic studies in a first manuscript on political economy of some 800 pages. In the “Introduction” he grouped the topics to be dealt with into six “books”: “(1) Of Capital (with some pre-chapters). (2) Of landed property. (3) Of Wage-labour. (4) Of the State. (5) Foreign Trade. (6) World Market.” This manuscript, which Marx composed from August 1857 to March 1858, was first published in 1939-41 under the title Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Okonomie (Rohentwurf) 1857-1858. It is often referred to as a “rough draft” of Das Kapital (Capital), but Marx’s original plan was in fact much wider in scope. The three volumes of his later main work, Das Kapital, in fact cover only the contents of the first “book” of the originally planned six “books”. In the course of working out this part, Marx realized the impossibility of finishing the huge task he had set himself and was forced to postpone work on “books” 4, 5 and 6, while those on “landed property” and on “wage-labour” were partly integrated into his main work (in volumes I and III of Capital and in the Theories of Surplus Value).

In 1859 Marx managed to prepare a revised version of the first part of the 1857-58 “Rough draft” for publication: Zur Kritik der Politischen Okonomie (Erstes Heft) (A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy). However, this book, in which Marx first presented his value theory in full, did not have the desired impact, which prompted him to revise his publication plans again. As preliminary drafts for his major work, which was now meant to consist of four “books” (in three volumes), he wrote two exten­sive sets of manuscripts, which have been published as Okonomische Manuskripte von 1861-63 and Okonomische Manuskripte von 1863-67 in the new MEGA edition. On the basis of these manuscripts he then managed to complete and prepare for publication, in 1867, only the first volume of Capital, entitled Das Kapital. Kritik der Politischen Okonomie. Erster Band. Buch I: Der Produktionsprozeβ des Kapitals. He did not succeed in bringing the remaining volumes to completion. These were published only posthu­mously by Friedrich Engels from the extant sets of manuscripts, with many changes and additions, in 1885 and 1894, and by Karl Kautsky, in 1905-10. During the 1870s Marx repeatedly interrupted his work on the planned volumes II and III of Capital and devoted his attention to various other research fields (such as Russian society, the Asiatic mode of production, linguistics, mathematics, and the latest developments in the natural sciences, in particular chemistry); in the early 1880s he ceased to work on them altogether.

Engels’s edition of volumes II and III of Capital does not meet today’s editorial stand­ards. As the basis of the text Engels used the manuscripts written by Marx between 1863 and 1867, which he merged with manuscript fragments from later working periods and “supplemented” by insertions, changes, and additions of his own, without properly indi­cating the latter. The full extent of Engels’s editorial intrusions can be assessed only since the original manuscripts have been published in the new MEGA edition.

According to Marx’s plan, the second volume was meant to comprise the “Circulation process of Capital (Book II) and the Process as a whole (Book III)”, but in Engels’s edition book II became volume II and book III became volume III of Capital. According to Marx’s plan, the final and third volume was to be the “History of the Theory” (“Book IV” in Marx’s outline); this was published in three volumes from 1905-10 under the editor­ship of Karl Kautsky as Theorien uber den Mehrwert (Theories of Surplus Value) from a set of manuscripts that Marx had written during 1861-63. (For a detailed account of the gestation of Marx’s economic writings, culminating in the three volumes of Capital and the Theories of Surplus Value, see Rosdolsky 1968 [1977]; Oakley 1983; and the volumes published in the new MEGA edition as “Abteilung II. Vorarbeiten zum Kapital”.)

During the years in London, Marx and his family suffered from material deprivation, in spite of continuous financial support from Engels. Bad housing conditions, mal­nutrition, and lack of medical care led to the worsening of Marx’s health and that of his wife, as well as to the early death of four of his seven children. He took on various journalistic jobs, but these did not earn him a regular income. His work as European cor­respondent of the New York Daily Tribune, for which he wrote hundreds of articles (see Ledbetter 2007), forced him to keep himself well informed about British and European politics. From 1864 to 1872 Marx also often had to interrupt his scientific work because of his multifarious commitments in the International Workingmen’s Association, the so-called “First International”, in whose foundation he was actively involved in 1864. From London he also tried to foster the foundation of a revolutionary socialist party in the German states. At first he distanced himself from Ferdinand Lassalle’s reform­oriented “Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiterverein”, which then however was merged with the “Sozialdemokratische Arbeiterpartei” in 1875, which Wilhelm Liebknecht had founded six years earlier in close collaboration with Marx, to form the “Sozialistische Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands”, from which the German “Social Democratic Party”, the SPD, was later to emerge.

In his last years Marx was plagued by serious health problems. He suffered from chronic liver and lung problems, and also from carbuncles, which are diagnosed today as psychologically caused. In spite of several cure treatments at the English seaside, in Karlsbad and in Algiers, his health further deteriorated. His wife Jenny, who fell fatally ill in 1880, died the following year. Marx only survived her by a little more than two years. He died, presumably from the after-effects of lung tuberculosis that had never been properly treated, on 14 March 1883 in London.