1. George Sand, Jean Ziska. A Historical Novel.
* This last point is made compellingly by Martin Nicolaus in his informative Foreword to Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, translated by Martin Nicolaus (New York: Vintage, 1973), p. 7. The same point could be made with reference to the 1844 manuscripts.
** Some have interpreted these passages as heralding the end of manual labour under capitalism. Nicolaus (Foreword, p. 52) objects that "neither here nor anywhere else in Marx's work is there a prediction that rr—Inual industrial labour will be abolished in industrial so-ciety...."
1. Utopias on the lines of Defoe's Rob-inson Crusoe.
2. Sir James Steuart (1712-80), "the rational exponent of the Monetary; and Mercantile System" (Marx), an adherent of the Stuart cause who went into exile in 1745 and pursued economic studies on the Continent. Author of An Inquiry into the Principles of Political Economy (London, 1767, 2 vols.; Dub-lin, 1770, 3 vols.—the edition used by Marx).
3. A political animal.
4. Frederic Bastiat (1801-50), French economist, and "modern bagman of Free Trade" (Marx). A believer in Laissez-faire and the natural harmony of interests between labour and capital; a fierce opponent of socialism in theory and in practice (as deputy in the Constituent and Legislative assemblies of 1848 to 1851).
5. Henry Charles Carey (1793-1879), American economist, opponent of Ricardian pessimism ("Carey, who does not understand Ricardo"—Marx), believed in state intervention to establish harmony between the interests of labour and of capital, and in the tendency of real wages to rise.
6. Of a commonplace (mind). Marx refers here to Bastiat's Harmonies Economiques (Paris, 1851), pp. 16-19, and Carey's Principles of Political Economy, PT. I (Philadelphia, 1837), pp. 7-8.
7. John Stuart Mill (1806-73), English political theorist and economist; radical in politics, confusedly and eclectically Ricardian in economics. His Principles of Political Economy (London, 1948), begin in Bk. I, Ch. 1, with the analysis of production.
8. "Determination is negation," i.e., given the undifferentiated self-identity of the universal world substance, to attempt to introduce particular determinations is to negate this self-identity (Spinoza, Letters, No. SO. to J. Jelles, 2 June 1674).
9. In English in the original.
1. "Potentially." Cf. Aristotle, Metaphysics, Bk. VIII, Ch. 6, p. 2.
2. The manuscript has: "for the product is production not only as. . . ."
3. The manuscript has "for production."
4. Jean-Baptiste Say (1767-1832), "the inane Say," who "superficially condensed political economy into a textbook" (Marx), a businessman who popularized and vulgarized the doctrines of Adam Smith in his Traite d'iconomie politique (Paris, 1803).
5. Henrich Friedrich Storch (1766—1835), Professor of Political Economy in the Russian Academy of Sciences at St. Petersburg. Say issued Storch's work Cours d'economie politique with critical notes in 1823; he attacked Say's interpretation of his views in Considerations sur la nature du revenu national (Paris, 1824), pp. 144-59.
6. David Ricardo, On the Principles of ed. (London, 1821), preface, p. v. Political Economy and Taxation, 3rd
7. Marx considered that the Monetary System, as defined here, covered economists from the sixteenth century to the Physiocrats. However, within the Monetary System there arose what he calls here the "commercial, or manufacture system" but elsewhere the Mercantile System (known to economics textbooks as Mercantilism). He distinguishes between the two systems later in this work, but his normal practice is to link them together, since "the Mercantile System is merely a variant of the Monetary System" (A Contribution to Me Critique of Political Economy [London, 1971], p. 158).
8. See p. 229, note 1.
9. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Systeme des contradictions economiques ou philosophie de to misere (Paris, 1846), Vol. I. p. 146.
1 . Bastiat et Proudhon, Gratuitevu crevit ( Paris, 1 8 5 0 ) , p. 2 5 0.
2. The Times, London, Saturday, 21 November 1857, No. 22,844, p. 9. "Negroes and the Slave Trade. To the Editor of The Times. By Expertus." Marx's English in this sentence has been changed to conform to modern usage.
3. Having themselves becomes = having themselves undergone the process of becoming, as indicated above.
4. On 22 February 1858, Marx wrote to Lassalle that he was planning three works: (1) a critique of the economic categories or the system of bourgeois economy critically presented, (2) a critiqtfe and history of political economy and socialism, and (3) a short historical sketch of the development of economic relations or categories (Marx-Engels Selected Correspondence, Moscow, n.d., p. 125). Marx referred here to the third work, which he never produced in a completed form.
5. Do ut facias: I give you that you may do; facto ut des: I do that you may give; do ut des: I give that you may give (Roman law).
6. That is with the free workers in manufactures (hand crafts).
7. Steuart. An Inquiry. Vol. 1, p. 40.
8. Marx did not in fact mention this in the Chapter on Money but rather in the
9. Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, Vol. I, pp. 104-5.
1. Political animal; literally, city-dweller.
2. The dissolution of the still earlier forms of communal Drouerty and real community goes without saying. [Marx]
3. For in that case the capital presupposed as a condition of wage labor is a wage labours own product, and is pre-supposed by it as its own presuppositions, created by it as its own presupposition. [Marx]
4. Once capital and wage labour are posited as their own presupposition, as the basis presupposed to production itself, then what appears initially is that the capitalist possesses, in addition to the fund of raw materials and necessaries required for the laborer to reproduce himself, to create the required means of subsistence, i.e. to realize necessary labour, a fund of raw material and means of labour in which the worker realizes his surplus labour, i.e. the capitalist's profit. On further analysis this takes the form that the worker constantly creates a double fund for the capitalist, or in the form of capital. One part of this fund constantly fulfils the conditions of his own existence and the other part fulfills the con-ditions for the existence of capital. As we have seen, in the case of the surplus capital—and surplus capital in relation to its antediluvian relation to labour all real, present capital and each of its elements has equally been appropriated without exchange, without an equivalent, as objectified, appropriated alien labour. (Marx]
5. The first glance shows what a nosensical circle it would be if on the one hand the workers whom capital has to put to Work in order to posit itself as capital had first to be created, to be brought to life through its stockpiling if they waited for its command, Let There Be Workers!; while at the same time it was itself incapable of stockpiling without alien labor, could at most stockpile its own labor, i.e. could itself exist in the form of not-Capital and not-money; since labor, before the existence of capital, can only realize itself in forms such as craft labour, petty agriculture, etc., in short, all forms which cannot stockpile, or only sparingly; in forms which allow only a small surplus product and eat up most of it. We shall have to examine this notion of stockpiling (Aufhaufung] still more closely later on. [Marx]
6. Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, Vol. III, Bk. III, Ch. 4.
7. T. R. Malthus, An Inquiry into the Nature and Progress of Rent, London, 1815, p. 7.
8. Ricardo, On the Principles of Political Economy, p. 493.
9. The manuscript has: ". . . now appears as circulating capital (the first two) and fixed capital."
1. Hodgskin, Labour Defended, p. 16
2. "Ais hate es Deb Ent Letbe," Goethe, Faust, Part I, Act 5, Auerbach's Cellar in Leipzig.
3. Fourier, Le Nouveau Monde industriel et societaire, Vol. VI, pp. 242-52.
4. The sentence preceding this one was inserted by Marx, above the line, in English; thus the apparent virtual repetition. (The sentence following also appears in English in the original.)
1. This is the more necessary, as even the section of Ferdinand Lassalle's work against Schulze-Delitzsch, in which he professes to give "the intellectual quintessence" of my explanations on these subjects, contains important mistakes. If Ferdinand Lassalle has borrowed almost literally from my writings, and without any acknowledgement, all the general theoretical propositions in his economic works, e.g., those on the historical character of capital, on the connection between the conditions of production and the mode of production, &c., &c., even to the terminology created by me, this may perhaps be due to purposes of propaganda. I am here, of course, not speaking of his detailed working out and application of these propositions, with which I have nothing to do.. (Marx)
2. This story is about you.
3. The dead man seizes the living one.
4. Marx was inaccurate here, although for an easily understandable reason. The vice presidency became vacant when Vice President Andrew Johnson succeeded to the presidency upon Lincoln's assassination in 1865. In 1867 Senator Benjamin F. Wade of Ohio was elected president pro tern of the Senate. He thereby became first in linc of succession to the presidency during the Johnson administration and in this sense was the equivalent of a vice president although he did not in fact occupy that office. [R. T.]
5. "Follow your own course, no matter what people say."
6. "With this work Marx takes his place among the most eminent analytic minds."
1. Karl Marx, "Zur Kritik der Politischen Oekonomie." Berlin, 1859, p. 3. [Marx]
2. "Desire implies want; it is the appetite of the mind, and as natural as hunger to the body. . . . The greatest number (of things) have their value from supplying the wants of the mind." Nicholas Barbon: "A Discourse Concerning Coining the New Money Lighter. In Answer to Mr. Locke's Considerations," &c., London, 1696, pp. 2, 3. [Marx]
3. "Things have an intrinsick vertue" (this is Barbon's special term for value in use) "which in all places have the same vertue; as the loadstone to attract iron" (1. c., p. 6). The property which the magnet possesses of attracting iron, became of use only after by means of that property the polarity of the magnet had been discovered. [Marx]
4. "The natural worth of anything consists in its fitness to supply the necessities, or serve the conveniences of human life." (John Locke, "Some Considerations on the Consequences of the Lowering of Interest, 1691," in Works Edit. Lond., 1777, Vol. II, p. 28.) In English writers of the 17th century we frequently find "worth" in the sense of value in use, and "value" in the sense of exchange-value. This is quite in accordance with the spirit of a language that likes to use a Teutonic word for the actual thing, and a Romance word for its reflexion. [Marx]
5. In, bourgeois societies the economic fictio juris prevails, that every one, as a buyer, possesses an encyclopaedic knowledge of commodities. [Marx]
6. "La valeur consiste dans le rapport d'echange qui se trouve entre telle chose et telle autre, entre telle mesure dune production, et telle mesure dune autre." (Le Trosne: "De l'Interet Social." Physiocrates, Ed. Daire. Paris, 1846. P. 889.) [Marx]
7. "Nothing can have an intrinsick value." (N. Barbon, 1. c., p. 6); or as Butler says— "The value of a thing is just as much as it will bring." [Marx]
8. "The value of them (the necessaries of life), when they are exchanged the one for another, is regulated by the quantity of labour necessarily required and commonly taken in producing them." ("Some Thoughts on the Interest of Money in General, and Particularly in the Publick Funds, &c." Lond., p. 36.) This remarkable anonymous work, written in the last century, bears no date. It is clear, however, from internal evidence, that it appeared in the reign of George II. about 1739 or 1740. [Marx]
9. "Toutes les productions d'un meme genre ne forment proprement qu'une masse, dont le prix se determine en general et sans egard aux circonstances particulieres." (Le Trosne, 1. c., p. 893.) (Marx]
1. I am inserting the parenthesis because its omission has often given rise to the misunderstanding that every product that is consumed by someone other than its producer is considered in Marx a commodity. [Engels, 4th German edition]
2. Comp. Hegel, "Philosophic des Rechts." Berlin, 1840. P. 250, § 190. [Marx]
3. The reader must note that we are not speaking here of the wages or value that the labourer gets for a given labour-time, but of the value of the commodity in which that labour-time is materialised. Wages is a category that, as yet, has no existence at the present stage of our investigation. (Marx]
4. The celebrated Franklin, one of the first economists, after Wm. Petty, who saw through the nature of value, says: "Trade in general being nothing else but the exchange of labour for labour, the value of all things is . . . most justly measured by labour." ("The works of B. Franklin, &c.," edited by Sparks. Boston, 1836, Vol. II., p. 267.) Franklin is unconscious that by estimating the value of everything in labour, he makes abstraction from any difference in the sorts of labour exchanged, and thus reduces them all to equal human labour. But although ignorant of this, yet he says it. He speaks first of "the one labour," then of "the other labour," and finally of "labour," without further qualification. as the substance of the value of everything. (Marx)
5. In a sort of way, it is with man as with commodities. Since he comes into the world neither with a looking glass in his hand, nor as a Fichtian philosopher, to whom "I am I" is sufficient, man first sees and recognises himself in other men. Peter only establishes his own identity as a man by first comparing himself with Paul as being of like kind. And thereby Paul, just as he stands in his Pauline personality, becomes to Peter the type of the genus homo, [Marx]
6. Value is here, as occasionally in the preceding pages, used in sense of value determined as to quantity, or of magnitude of value. [Marx]
7. Among the ancient Germans the unit for measuring land was what could be harvested in a day, and was called Tagwerk, Tagwanne (jurnale, or terra jurnalis, or diornalis), Mannsmaad, &c. (See G. L. von Maurer. "Einleitung zur Geschichte der Mark—, &c. Verfassung," Munchen, 1854, p. 129 sq.) [Marx)
8. "What are we to think of a law that asserts itself only by periodical revolutions? It is just nothing but a law of Nature, founded on the want of knowledge of those whose action is the subject of it." (Friedrich Engels: "Urnrisse zu einer Kritik de Nationalakonornie ," in the "Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbiicher," edited by Arnold Ruge and Karl Marx. Paris, 1844.) [Marx]
9. "Capital is divisible ... into the original capital and the profit, the increment to the capital ... although in practice this profit is immediately turned into capital, and set in motion with the original." (F. Engels, "Umrisse zu einer Kritik der Nationalokonomie, in the "Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbilcher," edited by Arnold Ruge and Karl Marx." Paris, 1844, p. 99.) [Marx]
1. Aristotle opposes Oeconomic to Chrematistic. He starts from the former. So far as it is the art of gaining a livelihood, it is limited to procuring those articles that are necessary to existence, and useful either to a household or the state. "True wealth consists of such values in use; for the quantity of possessions of this kind, capable of making life pleasant, is not unlimited. There is, however, a second mode of acquiring things, to which we may by preference and with correctness give the name of Chrematistic, and in this case there appear to be no limits to riches and possessions. Trade (literally retail trade, and Aristotle takes this kind because in it values in use predominate) does not in its nature belong to Chrematistic, for here the exchange has reference only to what is necessary to themselves (the buyer or seller)." Therefore, as he goes on to show, the original form of trade was barter, but with the extension of the latter, there arose the necessity for money. On the discovery of money, barter of necessity developed into. trading in commodities, and this again, in opposition to its original tendency, grew into Chrematistic, into the art of making money. Now Chrematistic is distinguishable from Oeconomic in this way, that "in the case of Chrematistic circulation is the source of riches. And it appears to revolve about money, for money is the beginning and end of this kind of exchange. Therefore also riches, such as Chrematistic strives for, are unlimited. Just as every art that is not a means to an end, but an end in itself, has no limit to its aims, because it seeks constantly to approach nearer and nearer to that end, while those arts that pursue means to an end, are not boundless, since the goal itself imposes a limit upon them, so with Chrematistic, there are no bounds to its aims, these aims being absolute wealth. Oeconomic not Chrematistic has a limit . . . the object of the former is something different from money, of the latter the augmentation of money. . . . By confounding these two forms, which overlap each other, some people have been led to look upon the preservation and increase of money ad infinitum as the end and aim of Oeconomic." (Aristoteles, "Dc. Rep." edit. Bekker. lib. I. c. 8, 9. passim.) [Marx]
2. In encyclopaedias of classical antiquities we find such nonsense as this—that in the ancient world capital was fully developed, "except that the free labourer and a system of credit was wanting." Mommsen also, in his "History of Rome," commits, in this respect, one blunder after another. [Marx]
3. Hence legislation in various countries fixes a maximum for labour-contracts. Wherever free labour is the rule, the laws regulate the mode of terminating this contract. In some States, particularly in Mexico (before the American Civil War, also in the territories taken from Mexico, and also, as a matter of fact, in the Danubian provinces till the revolution effected by Kusa), slavery is hidden under the form of peonage. By means of advances, repayable in labour, which are handed down from generation to generation, not only the individual labour. er, but his family, become, de facto, the property of other, persons and their families. Juarez abolished peonage. The so-called Emperor Maximilian re-established it by a decree, which, in the House of Representatives at Washington, was aptly denounced as a decree for the re-introduction of slavery into Mexico. "I may make over to another the use, for a limited time, of my particular bodily and mental aptitudes and capabilities; because, in consequence of this restriction, they are impressed with a character of alienation with regard to me as a whole. But by the alienation of all my labour-time and the whole of my work, I should be converting the substance itself, in other words, my general activity and reality, my person, into the property of another." (Hegel, Philosophie des Rechts, Berlin, 1840, p. 104, § 67.) [Marx]
4. The capitalist epoch is therefore characterised by this, that labour power takes in the eyes of the labourer himself the form of a commodity which is his property; his labour consequently becomes wage-labour. On the other hand, it is only from this moment that the produce of labour universally becomes a commodity. [Marx]
5. "The value or worth of a man, is as of all other things, his price—that is to say, so much as would be given for the use of his power." (Thomas. Hobbes, Leviathan, in Works, ed. Molesworth,London, 1839-44, Vol. III, p. 76.) [Marx]
6. Hence the Roman Villicus, as an over-looker of the agricultural slaves, received "more meagre fare than working slaves, because his work was lighter." (Theodor Mommsen, Romisches Ge-schichte, 1856, p. 810.) [Marx]
7. Compare W. T. Thornton, Overpopulation and Its Remedy, London, 1846. [Marx]
8. Petty [Marx]
9. "Its [labour's] natural price . . . Consists in such a quantity of necessaries and comforts of life, as, from the nature of the climate, and the habits of the country, are necessary to support the labourer, and to enable him to rear such a family as may preserve, in the market, an undiminished supply of labour." (R. Torrens, An Essay on the External Corn Trade, London, 1815, p. 62.) The word labour is here wrongly used for labour-power. [Marx]
1. Rossi, Cours d'Econ. Polit., Bru- Vol. I, xelles, 1842, p. 370. [Marx]
2. Sismondi, Nouv. Print. etc., p. 112. [Marx]
3. "Reason is just as cunning as she is powerful. Her cunning consists principally in her mediating activity, which, by causing objects to act and react on each other in accordance with their own nature, in this way, without any direct interference in the process, carries out reason's intentions." (Hegel: "Enzyklopidie, Erster Theil, Die Logik," Berlin, 1840, p. 382.) [Marx]
4. These figures are quite arbitrary. [Marx]
5. "The name being changed, this story is about you" (Horace, Satires, I, i, 69-10). [R. T.]
6. G. Garnier, Vol V of his translation of A. Smith, pp. 4-5. [Marx]
7. The simple belief in the inventive genius exercised a priori by the individual capitalist in division of labour, exists now-a-days only among German professors, of the stamp of Herr Roscher, who, to recompense the capitalist from whose Tovian head division of labour sprang ready formed, dedi-cates to him "various wages" (diverse Arbeitslohne). The more or less extensive application of division of labour depends on length of purse, not on greatness of genius. [Marx]
8. With Plato, division of labour within the community is a development from the multifarious requirements, and the limited capacities of individuals. The main point with him is, that the labourer must adapt himself to the work, not, the work to the labourer; which latter is unavoidable, if he carries on several trades at once, thus making one or the other of them subordinate. So in Thucydides: "Seafaring is an art like any other, and cannot, as circumstances require, be carried on as a subsidiary occupation; nay, other subsidiary occupations cannot be carried on alongside of this one." If the work, says Plato, has to wait for the labourer, the critical point in the process is missed and the article spoiled. The same Platonic idea is found recurring in the protest of the English bleachers against the clause in the Factory Act that provides fixed meal-times for all operatives. Their business cannot wait the convenience of the workmen, for "in the various operations of singeing, washing, bleaching, mangling, calendering, and dyeing, none of them can be stopped at a given moment without risk of damage . . . to enforce the same dinner hour for all the work people might occasionally subject valuable goods to the risk of danger by incomplete operations." Le platonisme oü vat-il se nicherl [Marx]
9. Mill should have said, "of any human being not fed by other people's labour," for, without doubt, machinery has greatly increased the number of well-to-do idlers. [Marx]
1. A reference to the pseudo-science of phrenology, in which the "bumps" on a person's skull were thought to represent particular character traits. [R. T.]
2. F. Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, p. 2 17.—Even an ordinary optimistic freetrader like Mr. Molinari goes so far as to say: "A man will become exhausted sooner if he watches over the uniform motion of a mechanism fifteen hours day than if he exercises his physical force over the same interval of time. This work of watching over something, which could be useful perhaps as mental gynmastics provided it were not too prolonged, will, in the long run, destroy both body and mind through excess."—G. de Molinari, Eludes economigues, Paris, 1846.
3. Malthus, Principles of Political Economy, pp. 215, 319, 320. In this work, Malthus finally discovers, with the help of Sismondi, the beautiful Trinity of capitalistic production: over-production, over-population, over-consumption— three very delicate monsters, indeed. [Marx]
4. Harriet Martineau, A Manchester Strike, 1832, p. 101. [Marx]
5. Even in the cotton famine of 1863 we find, in a pamphlet of the operative cotton-spinners of Blackburn, fierce denunciations of over-work, which, in consequence of the Factory Acts, of course only affected adult male labourers. "The adult operatives at this mill have been asked to work from twelve to thirteen hours per day, while there are hundreds who are compelled to be idle who would willingly work partial time, in order to maintain their families and save their brethren from a premature grave through being over-worked. . , . We," it goes on to say, "would ask if the practice of working overtime by a number of hands is likely to create a good feeling between masters and servants. Those who are worked over-time feel the injustice equally with those who are condemned to forced idleness. There is in the dis-trict almost sufficient work to give to all partial employment if fairly distributed. We are only asking what is right in requesting the masters generally to pursue a system of short hours, particularly until a better state of things begins to dawn upon us, rather than to work a portion of the hands over-time, while others, for want of work, are compelled to exist upon charity." ("Reports of Insp. of Fact., Oct. 31, 1863," p. 8.) The author of the "Essay on Trade and Commerce" grasps the effect of a relative surplus-population on the employed labourers with his usual unerring bourgeois instinct. "Another cause of idleness in this kingdom is the want of a sufficient number of labouring hands. . . . Whenever from extraordinary demand for manufactures, labour grows scarce, the labourers feel their own consequence, and will make their masters feel it likewise—it is amazing; but so depraved are the dispositions of these people, that in such cases a set of workmen have combined to distress the employer by idling a whole day together." ("Essay, &c.," pp. 27, 28.) The fellows in fact were hankering after a rise in wages. [Marx]
* See, for example, his statement in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (p. 608, below): "In so far as millions of families live under economic conditions of existence that divide their mode of life, their interests and their culture from those of the other classes, and put them in hostile contrast to the latter, they form a class."
1. Here the manuscript breaks off.
* The above headnote was prepared by Thomas Feruson.[R. T.]
1. That Ricardo [regards) money merely as means of circulation is synonymous with his regarding exchange value as a merely transient form, and altogether as something purely formal in bourgeois or capitalist production, which is consequently for him not a specific, definite mode of production, but simply the mode of production. [Marx]
2. In the manuscript, the upper left-hand corner of the next page has been torn away. Consequently, out of the first nine lines of the text, only the right ends of six lines have been pre-served. This does not make it possible to reproduce the complete text here, but it does permit us to surmise that Marx speaks here of crises which arise "out of (the] revolution in the value of the variable capital." The "in-creased price of the necessary means of subsistence" caused, for example, by a poor harvest, leads to a rise in costs for those workers who "are set in motion by variable capital." "At the same time, this rise" causes a fall in the demand for "all other commodities that do not enter into the consumption" of the workers. It is therefore impossible "to sell the commodities at their value; the first phase in their reproduction." The transformation of the commodity into money, is interrupted. The increased price of the means of subsistence thus leads to "crisis in other branches" of production. The two last lines of the damaged part of the page seem to summarize this train of thought, by saying that crises can arise as a result of increased prices of raw materials, "whether these raw materials enter as raw materials into constant capital or as means of subsistence" into the consumption of the workers.