In August 1861, Marx again devoted himself to the critique of political economy, working with such intensity that by June 1863 he had filled twenty-three sizeable notebooks on the transformation of money into capital; on commercial capital; and above all on the various theories with which economists had tried to explain surplus value.1 His aim was to complete A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, which had been meant as the first instalment of his planned work. The book published in 1859 contained a brief first chapter, ‘The Commodity’, differentiating between use value and exchange value, and a longer second chapter, ‘Money, or Simple Circulation’, dealing with theories of money as unit of measure. In the preface, Marx stated: ‘I examine the system of bourgeois economy in the following order: capital, landed property, wage labour; the state, foreign trade, world market’.2
Two years later, Marx’s plans had not changed: he was still intending to write six books, each devoted to one of the themes he had listed in 1859.3 However, from summer 1861 to March 1862, he worked on a new chapter, ‘Capital in General’, which he intended to become the third chapter in his publication plan. In the preparatory manuscript contained in the first five of the twenty-three notebooks he compiled by the end of 1863, he focused on the process of production of capital and, more particularly, on: (1) the transformation of money into capital; (2) absolute surplus value; and (3) relative surplus value.4 Some of these themes, already addressed in the Grundrisse, were now set forth with greater analytic richness and precision.
A momentary alleviation of the huge economic problems that had beset him for years allowed Marx to spend more time on his studies and to make significant theoretical advances. In late October 1861 he wrote to Engels that ‘circumstances ha[d] finally cleared to the extent that [he had] at least got firm ground under [his] feet again’. His work for the New-York Tribune assured him of ‘two pounds a week’.5 He had also concluded an agreement with Die Presse [The Press]. Over the past year, he had ‘pawned everything that was not actually nailed down’, and their plight had made his wife seriously depressed. But now the ‘twofold engagement’ promised to ‘put an end to the harried existence led by [his] family’ and to allow him to ‘complete his book’.
Nevertheless, by December, he told Engels that he had been forced to leave IOUs with the butcher and grocer, and that his debt to assorted creditors amounted to one hundred pounds.6 Because of these worries, his research was proceeding slowly: ‘Circumstances being what they were, there was, indeed, little possibility of bringing [the] theoretical matters to a rapid close.’ But he gave notice to Engels that ‘the thing is assuming a much more popular form, and method is much less in evidence than in Part I’.7
Against this dramatic background, Marx tried to borrow money from his mother, as well as from other relatives and the poet Carl Siebel. In a letter to Engels later in December, he explained that these were attempts to avoid constantly ‘pestering’ him. At any event, they were all unproductive. Nor was the agreement with Die Presse working out, as they were only printing (and paying for) half the articles he submitted to them.
Things took a further turn for the worse when the New-York Tribune, faced with financial constraints associated with the American Civil War, had to cut down on the number of its foreign correspondents. Marx’s last article for the paper appeared on 10 March 1862. From then on, he had to do without what had been his main source of income since the summer of 1851. That same month, the landlord of his house threatened to take action to recover rent arrears, in which case – as he put it to Engels – he would be ‘sued by all and sundry’.8 And he added shortly after: ‘I’m not getting on very well with my book, since work is often checked, i.e. suspended, for weeks on end by domestic disturbances.’9
During this period, Marx launched into a new area of research: Theories of Surplus Value (1862–63).10 This was planned to be the fifth11 and final part of the long third chapter on ‘Capital in General’. Over ten notebooks, Marx minutely dissected how the major economists had dealt with the question of surplus value; his basic idea was that ‘all economists share the error of examining surplus-value not as such, in its pure form, but in the particular forms of profit and rent’.12
In Notebook VI, Marx started from a critique of the physiocrats. First of all, he recognized them as the ‘true fathers of modern political economy’,13 since it was they who ‘laid the foundation for the analysis of capitalist production’14 and sought the origin of surplus value not in ‘the sphere of circulation’ – in the productivity of money, as the mercantilists thought – but in ‘the sphere of production’. They understood the ‘fundamental principle that only that labour is productive which creates a surplus value’.15 On the other hand, being wrongly convinced that ‘agricultural labour’ was ‘the only productive labour’,16 they conceived of ‘rent’ as ‘the only form of surplus value’.17 They limited their analysis to the idea that the productivity of the land enabled man to produce ‘no more than sufficed to keep him alive’.18 According to this theory, then, surplus value appeared as ‘a gift of nature’.19
In the second half of Notebook VI, and in most of Notebooks VII, VIII and IX, Marx concentrated on Adam Smith. He did not share the false idea of the physiocrats that ‘only one definite kind of concrete labour – agricultural labour – creates surplus value’.20 Indeed, in Marx’s eyes one of Smith’s greatest merits was to have understood that, in the distinctive labour process of bourgeois society, the capitalist ‘appropriates for nothing, appropriates without paying for it, a part of the living labour’;21 or again, that ‘more labour is exchanged for less labour (from the labourer’s standpoint), less labour is exchanged for more labour (from the capitalist’s standpoint)’.22 Smith’s limitation, however, was his failure to differentiate ‘surplus-value as such’ from ‘the specific forms it assumes in profit and rent’.23 He calculated surplus value not in relation to the part of capital from which it arises, but as ‘an overplus over the total value of the capital advanced’,24 including the part that the capitalist expends to purchase raw materials.
Marx put many of these thoughts in writing during a three-week stay with Engels in Manchester in April 1862. On his return, he reported to Lassalle:
As for my book, it won’t be finished for another two months. During the past year, to keep myself from starving, I have had to do the most despicable hackwork and have often gone for months without being able to add a line to the ‘thing’. And there is also that quirk I have of finding fault with anything I have written and not looked at for a month, so that I have to revise it completely.25
Marx doggedly resumed work and until early June extended his research to other economists such as Germain Garnier and Charles Ganilh [1758–1836]. Then he went more deeply into the question of productive and unproductive labour, again focusing particularly on Smith who, despite a lack of clarity in some respects, had drawn the distinction between the two concepts. From the capitalist’s viewpoint, productive labour:
is wage labour which, exchanged against the […] part of the capital that is spent on wages, reproduces not only this part of the capital (or the value of its own labour capacity), but in addition produces surplus value for the capitalist. It is only thereby that commodity or money is transformed into capital, is produced as capital. Only that wage labour is productive which produces capital.26
Unproductive labour, on the other hand, is ‘labour which is not exchanged with capital, but directly with revenue, that is, with wages or profit’.27 According to Smith, the activity of sovereigns – and of the legal and military officers surrounding them – produced no value and in this respect was comparable to the duties of domestic servants. This, Marx pointed out, was the language of a ‘still revolutionary bourgeoisie’, which had not yet ‘subjected to itself the whole of society, the state, etc.’:
illustrious and time-honoured occupations – sovereign, judge, officer, priest, etc. – with all the old ideological castes to which they give rise, their men of letters, their teachers and priests, are from an economic standpoint put on the same level as the swarm of their own lackeys and jesters maintained by the bourgeoisie and by idle wealth – the landed nobility and idle capitalists.28
In Notebook X, Marx turned to a rigorous analysis of François Quesnay’s [1694–1774] Tableau économique (1758).29 He praised it to the skies, describing it as ‘an extremely brilliant conception, incontestably the most brilliant for which political economy had up to then been responsible’.30
Meanwhile, Marx’s economic circumstances continued to be desperate. In mid-June, he wrote to Engels: ‘Every day my wife says she wishes she and the children were safely in their graves, and I really cannot blame her, for the humiliations, torments and alarums that one has to go through in such a situation are indeed indescribable’. Already in April, the family had had to re-pawn all the possessions it had only recently reclaimed from the loan office. The situation was so extreme that Jenny made up her mind to sell some books from her husband’s personal library – although she could not find anyone who wanted to buy them.
Nevertheless, Marx managed to ‘work hard’ and in mid-June expressed a note of satisfaction to Engels: ‘strange to say, my grey matter is functioning better in the midst of the surrounding poverty than it has done for years’.31 Continuing his research, he compiled Notebooks XI, XII and XIII in the course of the summer; they focused on the theory of rent, which he had decided to include as ‘an extra chapter’32 in the text he was preparing for publication. Marx critically examined the ideas of Johann Rodbertus [1805–1875], then moved on to an extensive analysis of the doctrines of David Ricardo. Denying the existence of absolute rent, Ricardo had allowed a place only for differential rent related to the fertility and location of the land. In this theory, absolute rent was an excess: it could not have been anything more, because that would have contradicted his ‘concept of value being equal to a certain quantity of labour time’;33 he would have had to admit that the agricultural product was constantly sold above its cost price, which he calculated as the sum of the capital advanced and the average profit.34 Marx’s conception of absolute rent, by contrast, stipulated that ‘under certain historical circumstances […] landed property does indeed put up the prices of raw materials’.35
In the same letter to Engels, Marx wrote that it was ‘a real miracle’ that he ‘had been able to get on with [his] theoretical writing to such an extent’.36 His landlord had again threatened to send in the bailiffs, while tradesmen to whom he was in debt spoke of withholding provisions and taking legal action against him. Once more he had to turn to Engels for help, confiding that had it not been for his wife and children he would ‘far rather move into a model lodging house than be constantly squeezing [his] purse’.37
In September, Marx wrote to Engels that he might get a job ‘in a railroad office’ in the New Year.38 In December, he repeated to Ludwig Kugelmann [1828–1902] that things had become so desperate that he had ‘decided to become a “practical man”’; nothing came of the idea, however. Marx reported with his typical sarcasm: ‘Luckily – or perhaps I should say unluckily? – I did not get the post because of my bad handwriting.’39 Meanwhile, in early November, he had confided to Ferdinand Lassalle that he had been forced to suspend work ‘for some six weeks’ but that it was ‘going ahead […] with interruptions’. ‘However,’ he added, ‘it will assuredly be brought to a conclusion by and by.’40
During this span of time, Marx filled another two notebooks, XIV and XV, with extensive critical analysis of various economic theorists. He noted that Thomas Robert Malthus, for whom surplus value stemmed ‘from the fact that the seller sells the commodity above its value’, represented a return to the past in economic theory, since he derived profit from the exchange of commodities.41 Marx accused James Mill of misunderstanding the categories of surplus value and profit; highlighted the confusion produced by Samuel Bailey [1791–1870] in failing to distinguish between the immanent measure of value and the value of the commodity; and argued that John Stuart Mill did not realize that ‘the rate of surplus value and the rate of profit’ were two different quantities,42 the latter being determined not only by the level of wages but also by other causes not directly attributable to it.
Marx also paid special attention to various economists opposed to Ricardian theory, such as the socialist Thomas Hodgskin. Finally, he dealt with the anonymous text Revenue and Its Sources (?) – in his view, a perfect example of ‘vulgar economics’, which translated into ‘doctrinaire’ but ‘apologetic’ language the ‘standpoint of the ruling section, i.e. the capitalists’.43 With the study of this book, Marx concluded his analysis of the theories of surplus value put forward by the leading economists of the past and began to examine commercial capital, or the capital that did not create but distributed surplus value.44 Its polemic against ‘interest-bearing capital’ might ‘parade as socialism’, but Marx had no time for such ‘reforming zeal’ that did not ‘touch upon real capitalist production’ but ‘merely attacked one of its consequences’. For Marx, on the contrary:
The complete objectification, inversion and derangement of capital as interest-bearing capital – in which, however, the inner nature of capitalist production, [its] derangement, merely appears in its most palpable form – is capital which yields ‘compound interest’. It appears as a Moloch demanding the whole world as a sacrifice belonging to it of right, whose legitimate demands, arising from its very nature, are however never met and are always frustrated by a mysterious fate.45
Marx continued in the same vein:
Thus it is interest, not profit, which appears to be the creation of value arising from capital as such [ … and] consequently it is regarded as the specific revenue created by capital. This is also the form in which it is conceived by the vulgar economists. […] All intermediate links are obliterated, and the fetishistic face of capital, as also the concept of the capital-fetish, is complete. This form arises necessarily, because the juridical aspect of property is separated from its economic aspect and one part of the profit under the name of interest accrues to capital in itself which is completely separated from the production process, or to the owner of this capital. To the vulgar economist who desires to represent capital as an independent source of value, a source which creates value, this form is of course a godsend, a form in which the source of profit is no longer recognisable and the result of the capitalist process – separated from the process itself – acquires an independent existence. In M-C-Mʹ an intermediate link is still retained. In M-Mʹ we have the incomprehensible form of capital, the most extreme inversion and materialisation of production relations.46
Following the studies of commercial capital, Marx moved on to what may be thought of as a third phase of the economic manuscripts of 1861–1863. This began in December 1862, with the section on ‘capital and profit’ in Notebook XVI that Marx indicated as the ‘third chapter’.47 Here Marx drew an outline of the distinction between surplus value and profit. In Notebook XVII, also compiled in December, he returned to the question of commercial capital (following the reflections in Notebook XV48) and to the reflux of money in capitalist reproduction. At the end of the year, Marx gave a progress report to Kugelmann, informing him that ‘the second part’, or the ‘continuation of the first instalment’, a manuscript equivalent to ‘about 30 sheets of print’ was ‘now at last finished’. Four years after the first schema, in the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx now reviewed the structure of his projected work. He told Kugelmann that he had decided on a new title, using Capital for the first time, and that the name he had operated with in 1859 would be ‘merely the subtitle’.49 Otherwise he was continuing to work in accordance with the original plan. What he intended to write would be ‘the third chapter of the first part, namely Capital in General’.50 The volume in the last stages of preparation would contain ‘what Englishmen call “the principles of political economy”’. Together with what he had already written in the 1859 instalment, it would comprise the ‘quintessence’ of his economic theory. On the basis of the elements he was preparing to make public, he told Kugelmann, a further ‘sequel (with the exception, perhaps, of the relationship between the various forms of state and the various economic structures of society) could easily be pursued by others’.
Marx thought he would be able to produce a ‘fair copy’51 of the manuscript in the New Year, after which he planned to take it to Germany in person. Then he intended ‘to conclude the presentation of capital, competition and credit’. In the same letter to Kugelmann, he compared the writing styles in the text published in 1859 and in the work he was then preparing: ‘In the first part, the method of presentation was certainly far from popular. This was due partly to the abstract nature of the subject […]. The present part is easier to understand because it deals with more concrete conditions.’ To explain the difference, almost by way of justification, he added:
Scientific attempts to revolutionize a science can never be really popular. But, once the scientific foundations are laid, popularization is easy. Again, should times become more turbulent, one might be able to select the colours and nuances demanded by a popular presentation of these particular subjects.52
A few days later, at the start of the New Year, Marx listed in greater detail the parts that would have comprised his work. In a schema in Notebook XVIII, he indicated that the ‘first section [Abschnitt]’, ‘The Production Process of Capital’, would be divided as follows:
1) Introduction. Commodity. Money. 2) Transformation of money into capital. 3) Absolute surplus value. […] 4) Relative surplus value. […] 5) Combination of absolute and relative surplus value. […] 6) Reconversion of surplus value into capital. Primitive accumulation. Wakefield’s theory of colonization. 7) Result of the production process. […] 8) Theories of surplus value. 9) Theories of productive and unproductive labour.53
Marx did not confine himself to the first volume but also drafted a schema of what was intended to be the ‘third section’ of his work: ‘Capital and Profit’. This part, already indicating themes that were to comprise Capital, Volume III, was divided as follows:
1) Conversion of surplus value into profit. Rate of profit as distinguished from rate of surplus value. 2) Conversion of profit into average profit. […] 3) Adam Smith’s and Ricardo’s theories on profit and prices of production. 4) Rent. […] 5) History of the so-called Ricardian law of rent. 6) Law of the fall of the rate of profit. 7) Theories of profit. […] 8) Division of profit into industrial profit and interest. […] 9) Revenue and its sources. […] 10) Reflux movements of money in the process of capitalist production as a whole. 11) Vulgar economy. 12) Conclusion. Capital and wage labour.54
In Notebook XVIII, which he composed in January 1863, Marx continued his analysis of mercantile capital. Surveying George Ramsay [1855–1935], Antoine-Elisée Cherbuliez [1797–1869] and Richard Jones, he inserted some additions to the study of how various economists had explained surplus value.
Marx’s financial difficulties persisted during this period and actually grew worse in early 1863. He wrote to Engels that his ‘attempts to raise money in France and Germany [had] come to nought’, that no one would supply him with food on credit, and that ‘the children [had] no clothes or shoes in which to go out’.55 Two weeks later, he was on the edge of the abyss. In another letter to Engels, he confided that he had proposed to his life’s companion what now seemed an inevitability: ‘My two elder children will obtain employment as governesses through the Cunningham family. Lenchen is to enter service elsewhere, and I, along with my wife and little Tussy, shall go and live in the same City Model Lodging-House in which Red Wolff once resided with his family’.56 At the same time, new health problems had appeared. In the first two weeks of February, Marx was ‘strictly forbidden all reading, writing or smoking’. He suffered from ‘some kind of inflammation of the eye, combined with a most obnoxious affection of the nerves of the head’. He could return to his books only in the middle of the month, when he confessed to Engels that during the long idle days he had been so alarmed that he ‘indulged in all manner of psychological fantasies about what it would feel like to be blind or insane’.57 Just over a week later, having recovered from the eye problems, he developed a new liver disorder that was destined to plague him for a long time to come. Since Dr Allen, his regular doctor, would have imposed a ‘complete course of treatment’ that would have meant breaking off all work, he asked Engels to get Dr Eduard Gumpert [?] to recommend a simpler ‘household remedy’.58
During this period, apart from brief moments when he studied machinery, Marx had to suspend his in-depth economic studies. In March, however, he resolved ‘to make up for lost time by some hard slogging’.59 He compiled two notebooks, XX and XXI, that dealt with accumulation, the real and formal subsumption of labour to capital, and the productivity of capital and labour. His arguments were correlated with the main theme of his research at the time: surplus value.
In late May, he wrote to Engels that in the previous weeks he had also been studying the Polish question60 at the British Museum: ‘What I did, on the one hand, was fill in the gaps in my knowledge (diplomatic, historical) of the Russian-Prussian-Polish affair and, on the other, read and make excerpts from all kinds of earlier literature relating to the part of the political economy I had elaborated.’61 These working notes, written in May and June, were collected in eight additional notebooks A to H, which contained hundreds of more pages summarizing economic studies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.62
Marx also informed Engels that, feeling ‘more or less able to work again’, he was determined to ‘cast the weight off his shoulders’ and therefore intended to ‘make a fair copy of the political economy for the printers (and give it a final polish)’. He still suffered from a ‘badly swollen liver’, however,63 and in mid-June, despite ‘wolfing sulphur’, he was still ‘not quite fit’.64 In any case, he returned to the British Museum and in mid-July reported to Engels that he had again been spending ‘ten hours a day working at economics’. These were precisely the days when, in analysing the reconversion of surplus value into capital, he prepared in Notebook XXII a recasting of Quesnay’s Tableau économique.65 Then he compiled the last notebook in the series begun in 1861 – n. XXIII – which consisted mainly of notes and supplementary remarks.
At the end of these two years of hard work, and following a deeper critical re-examination of the main theorists of political economy, Marx was more determined than ever to complete the major work of his life. Although he had not yet definitively solved many of the conceptual and expository problems, his completion of the historical part now impelled him to return to theoretical questions.
Marx gritted his teeth and embarked on a new phase of his labours. From summer 1863, he began the actual composition of what would become his magnum opus.66 Until December 1865, he devoted himself to the most extensive versions of the various subdivisions, preparing drafts in turn of Volume I, the bulk of Volume III (his only account of the complete process of capitalist production),67 and the initial version of Volume II (the first general presentation of the circulation process of capital). As regards the six-volume plan indicated in 1859 in the preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx inserted a number of themes relating to rent and wages that were originally to have been treated in volumes II and III. In mid-August 1863, Marx updated Engels on his steps forward:
In one respect, my work (preparing the manuscript for the press) is going well. In the final elaboration the stuff is, I think, assuming a tolerably popular form. […] On the other hand, despite the fact that I write all day long, it’s not getting on as fast as my own impatience, long subjected to a trial of patience, might demand. At all events, it will be 100% more comprehensible than No. l.68
Marx kept up the furious pace throughout the autumn, concentrating on the writing of Volume I. But his health rapidly worsened as a result, and November saw the appearance of what his wife called the ‘terrible disease’ against which he would fight for many years of his life. It was a case of carbuncles,69 a nasty infection that manifested itself in abscesses and serious, debilitating boils on various parts of the body.
Because of one deep ulcer following a major carbuncle, Marx had to have an operation and ‘for quite a time his life was in danger’. According to his wife’s later account, the critical condition lasted for ‘four weeks’ and caused Marx severe and constant pains, together with ‘tormenting worries and all kinds of mental suffering’. For the family’s financial situation kept it ‘on the brink of the abyss’.70
In early December, when he was on the road to recovery, Marx told Engels that he ‘had had one foot in the grave’71 – and two days later, that his physical condition struck him as ‘a good theme for a short story’. From the front, he looked like someone who ‘regale[d] his inner man with port, claret, stout and a truly massive mass of meat’. But ‘behind on his back, the outer man, a damned carbuncle’.72
In this context, the death of Marx’s mother obliged him to travel to Germany to sort out the legacy. His condition again deteriorated during the trip, and on the way back this forced him to stop off for a couple of months with his uncle Lion Philips, at Zaltbommel in the Netherlands. During this time, a carbuncle larger than anything before appeared on his right leg, as well as extensive boils on his throat and back; the pain from these was so great that it kept him awake at night. In the second half of January 1864, he wrote to Engels that he felt ‘like a veritable Lazarus […], assailed on all sides at once’.73
After he returned to London, all the infections and skin complaints continued to take their toll on Marx’s health into the early spring, and he was only able to resume his planned work towards the middle of April, after an interruption of more than five months. In that time, he continued to concentrate on Volume I, and it seems likely that it was precisely then that he drafted the so-called ‘Results of the Immediate Process of Production’, the only part of the initial version that has been preserved.
Towards the end of May, new purulent growths appeared on his body and caused indescribable torments. Bent on continuing with the book at all costs, he again avoided Dr Allen and his urgings of a ‘regular course of treatment’, which would have disrupted the work he simply ‘had to get done’. Marx felt all the time that ‘there was something wrong’, and he confessed his misgivings to his friend in Manchester: ‘The tremendous resolution I have to summon up before I can tackle more difficult subjects also contributes to this sense of inadequacy. You excuse the Spinozistic term.’74
The arrival of summer did not change his precarious circumstances. In the first days of July, he came down with influenza and was unable to write.75 And two weeks later, he was laid up for ten days because of a serious pustulent lesion on his penis. Only after a family break in Ramsgate, in the last week of July and the first ten days of August, did it become possible to press on with his work. He began the new period of writing with Volume III: Part Two, ‘The Conversion of Profit into Average Profit’, then Part One, ‘The Conversion of Surplus Value into Profit’ (which was completed, most probably, between late October and early November 1864). During this period, he assiduously participated in meetings of the International Working Men’s Association, for which he wrote the Inaugural Address and the Statutes in October. Also in that month, he wrote to Carl Klings [1828–?], a metallurgical worker in Solingen who had been a member of the League of Communists, and told him of his various mishaps and the reason for his unavoidable slowness:
I have been sick throughout the past year (being afflicted with carbuncles and furuncles). Had it not been for that, my work on political economy, Capital, would already have come out. I hope I may now complete it finally in a couple of months and deal the bourgeoisie a theoretical blow from which it will never recover. […] You may count on my remaining ever a loyal champion of the working class.76
Having resumed work after a pause for duties to the International, Marx wrote Part Three of Volume III, entitled ‘The Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall’. His work on this was accompanied with another flare-up of his disease. In November, ‘yet another carbuncle appeared below [his] right breast’77 and confined him to bed for a week; it then continued to give him trouble when he ‘leaned forward to write’.78 The next month, fearing another possible carbuncle on his right side, he decided to treat it himself. He confided to Engels that he was reluctant to consult Dr Allen, who knew nothing of his prolonged recourse to an arsenic-based remedy, and who would give him a ‘dreadful dressing-down’ for ‘carbuncling behind his back’.79
From January to May 1865, Marx devoted himself to Volume II. The manuscripts were divided into three chapters, which eventually became parts in the version that Engels had printed in 1885: (1) The Metamorphoses of Capital; (2) The Turnover of Capital; and (3) Circulation and Reproduction. In these pages, Marx developed new concepts and connected up some of the theories in volumes I and III.
In the New Year too, however, the carbuncle did not stop persecuting Marx, and around the middle of February, there was another flare-up of the disease. He told Engels that, unlike in the previous year, his ‘faculties were not affected’ and he was ‘perfectly able to work’.80 But such forecasts proved to be over-optimistic: by early March, the ‘old trouble [was] plaguing [him] in various sensitive and “aggravating” places, so that sitting down [was] difficult’.81 In addition to the ‘furuncles’, which persisted until the middle of the month, the International took up an ‘enormous amount of time’. Still, he did not stop work on the book, even if it meant that sometimes he ‘didn’t get to bed until four in the morning’.82
A final spur for him to complete the missing parts soon was the publisher’s contract. Thanks to the intervention of Wilhelm Strohn [?], an old comrade from the days of the League of Communists, Otto Meissner [1819–1902] in Hamburg had sent him a letter on 21 March that included an agreement to publish ‘the work Capital: A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy’. It was to be ‘approximately 50 signatures83 in length [and to] appear in two volumes’.84
Time was short, and once in late April, Marx wrote to Engels that he felt ‘as limp as a wet rag […], partly from working late at night […], partly from the diabolical muck [he had] been taking’.85 In mid-May, ‘a ghastly carbuncle’ appeared on his left hip, ‘near the inexpressible part of the body’.86 A week later, the furuncles were ‘still there’, although fortunately ‘they only trouble[d him] locally and [did] not disturb the brain-pan’. He made good use of the time when he was ‘fit for work’ and told Engels that he was ‘working like a mule’.87
Between the last week of May and the end of June, Marx composed a short text Wages, Price and Profit (1865).88 In it, he contested John Weston’s [?] thesis that wage increases were not favourable to the working class, and that trade union demands for higher pay were actually harmful. Marx showed that, on the contrary, ‘a general rise of wages would result in a fall in the general rate of profit, but not affect the average prices of commodities, or their values’.89
In the same period, Marx also wrote Part Four of Volume III, entitling it ‘Conversion of Commodity-Capital and Money-Capital into Commercial Capital and Money-Dealing Capital (Merchant’s Capital)’. At the end of July 1865, he gave Engels another progress report:
There are 3 more chapters to be written to complete the theoretical part (the first 3 books). Then there is still the 4th book, the historical-literary one, to be written, which will, comparatively speaking, be the easiest part for me, since all the problems have been resolved in the first 3 books, so that this last one is more by way of repetition in historical form. But I cannot bring myself to send anything off until I have the whole thing in front of me. Whatever shortcomings they may have, the advantage of my writings is that they are an artistic whole, and this can only be achieved through my practice of never having things printed until I have them in front of me in their entirety.90
When unavoidable slowdowns and a series of negative events forced him to reconsider his working method, Marx asked himself whether it might be more useful first to produce a finished copy of Volume I, so that he could immediately publish it, or rather to finish writing all the volumes that would comprise the work. In another letter to Engels, he said that the ‘point in question’ was whether he should ‘do a fair copy of part of the manuscript and send it to the publisher, or finish writing the whole thing first’. He preferred the latter solution, but reassured his friend that his work on the other volumes would not have been wasted:
[Under the circumstances], progress with it has been as fast as anyone could have managed, even having no artistic considerations at all. Besides, as I have a maximum limit of 60 printed sheets,91 it is absolutely essential for me to have the whole thing in front of me, to know how much has to be condensed and crossed out, so that the individual sections shall be evenly balanced and in proportion within the prescribed limits.92
Marx confirmed that he would ‘spare no effort to complete as soon as possible’; the thing was a ‘nightmarish burden’ to him. It prevented him ‘from doing anything else’ and he was keen to get it out of the way before a new political upheaval: ‘I know that time will not stand still for ever just as it is now’.93
Although he had decided to bring forward the completion of Volume I, Marx did not want to leave what he had done on Volume III up in the air. Between July and December 1865 he composed, albeit in fragmentary form, Part Five (‘Division of Profit into Interest and Profit of Enterprise. Interest-Bearing Capital’), Part Six (‘Transformation of Surplus-Profit into Ground-Rent’) and Part Seven (‘Revenues and Their Sources’).94 The structure that Marx gave to Volume III between summer 1864 and the end of 1865 was therefore very similar to the 12-point schema of January 1863 contained in Notebook XVIII of the manuscripts on theories of surplus value.
The lack of financial difficulties that had allowed Marx to forge ahead with his work was not to last long; they reappeared after a year or so had passed, and his health took another turn for the worse in the course of the summer. On top of this, his duties for the International were particularly intense in September, in connection with its first conference, in London. In October, Marx paid a visit to Engels in Manchester, and when he returned to London he had to face more terrible events: his daughter Laura had fallen ill, the landlord was again threatening to evict his family and send in the bailiffs, and ‘threatening letters’ began to pour in from ‘all the other riff-raff’. His wife Jenny was ‘so desolate’ that – as he put it to Engels – he ‘did not have the courage to explain the true state of things to her’ and ‘really [did] not know what to do’.95 The only ‘good news’ was the death of a 73-year-old aunt in Frankfurt, from whom he expected to receive a small share of the inheritance.
At the beginning of 1866, Marx launched into the new draft of Capital, Volume I. In mid-January, he updated Wilhelm Liebknecht [1826–1900] on the situation: ‘Indisposition, […] all manner of unfortunate mischances, demands made on me by the International Association etc., have confiscated every free moment I have for writing out the fair copy of my manuscript.’ Nevertheless, he thought he was near the end and that he would ‘be able to take Volume I of it to the publisher for printing in March’. He added that its ‘two volumes’ would ‘appear simultaneously’.96 In another letter, sent the same day to Kugelmann, he spoke of being ‘busy 12 hours a day writing out the fair copy’,97 but hoped to take it to the publisher in Hamburg within two months.
Contrary to his predictions, however, the whole year would pass in a struggle with the carbuncles and his worsening state of health. At the end of January, his wife Jenny informed the old comrade-in-arms Johann Philipp Becker that her husband had ‘again been laid low with his former dangerous and exceedingly painful complaint’. This time it was all the more ‘distressing’ for him because it interrupted ‘the copying out of his book that he [had] just begun’. In her view, ‘this new eruption [was] simply and solely due to overwork and long hours without sleep at night’.98
Just a few days later, Marx was struck by the most virulent attack yet and was in danger of losing his life. When he recovered enough to start writing again, he confided to Engels:
It was a close shave this time. My family did not know how serious the case was. If the matter recurs in that form three or four times more, I shall be a dead man. I am marvellously wasted away and still damned weak, not in the mind but about my loins and in my legs. The doctors are quite right to think that excessive work at night has been the chief cause of this relapse. But I cannot tell these gentlemen the reasons that force this extravagance on me – nor would it serve any purpose to do so. At this moment, I have all kinds of little progeny about my person, which is painful but no longer in the least dangerous.99
Despite everything, Marx’s thoughts were still directed mainly at the task ahead of him:
What was most loathsome to me was the interruption in my work, which had been going splendidly since January 1st, when I got over my liver complaint. There was no question of ‘sitting’, of course, […]. I was able to forge ahead even if only for short periods of the day. I could make no progress with the really theoretical part. My brain was not up to that. I therefore elaborated the section on the ‘Working-Day’ from the historical point of view, which was not part of my original plan.100
Marx concluded the letter with a phrase that well summed up this period of his life: ‘My book requires all my writing time.’101 How much the more was this true in 1866.
The situation was now seriously alarming Engels. Fearing the worst, he intervened firmly to persuade Marx that he could no longer go on in the same way:
You really must at last do something sensible now to shake off this carbuncle nonsense, even if the book is delayed by another 3 months. The thing is really becoming far too serious, and if, as you say yourself, your brain is not up to the mark for the theoretical part, then do give it a bit of a rest from the more elevated theory. Give over working at night for a while and lead a rather more regular life.102
Engels immediately consulted Dr Gumpert, who advised another course of arsenic, but he also made some suggestions about the completion of his book. He wanted to be sure that Marx had given up the far from realistic idea of writing the whole of Capital before any part of it was published. ‘Can you not so arrange things,’ he asked, ‘that the first volume at least is sent for printing first and the second one a few months later?’103 Taking everything into account, he ended with a wise observation: ‘What would be gained in these circumstances by having perhaps a few chapters at the end of your book completed, and not even the first volume can be printed, if events take us by surprise?’
Marx replied to each of Engels’s points, alternating between serious and facetious tones. With regard to arsenic, he wrote: ‘Tell or write to Gumpert to send me the prescription with instructions for use. As I have confidence in him, he owes it to the best of “Political Economy” if nothing else to ignore professional etiquette and treat me from Manchester.’104 As for his work plans, he wrote:
As far as this ‘damned’ book is concerned, the position now is: it was ready at the end of December. The treatise on ground rent alone, the penultimate chapter, is in its present form almost long enough to be a book in itself.105 I have been going to the Museum in the day-time and writing at night. I had to plough through the new agricultural chemistry in Germany, in particular Liebig and Schönbein, which is more important for this matter than all the economists put together, as well as the enormous amount of material that the French have produced since I last dealt with this point. I concluded my theoretical investigation of ground rent 2 years ago. And a great deal had been achieved, especially in the period since then, fully confirming my theory incidentally. And the opening up of Japan (by and large I normally never read travel-books if I am not professionally obliged to). So here was the ‘shifting system’ as it was applied by those curs of English manufacturers to one and the same persons in 1848–50, being applied by me to myself.106
Daytime study at the library, to keep abreast of the latest discoveries, and night-time work on his manuscript: this was the punishing routine to which Marx subjected himself in an effort to use all his energies for the completion of the book. On the main task, he wrote to Engels: ‘Although ready, the manuscript, which in its present form is gigantic, is not fit for publishing for anyone but myself, not even for you.’ He then gave some idea of the preceding weeks:
I began the business of copying out and polishing the style on the dot of January first, and it all went ahead swimmingly, as I naturally enjoy licking the infant clean after long birth-pangs. But then the carbuncle intervened again, so that I have since been unable to make any more progress but only to fill out with more facts those sections which were, according to the plan, already finished.107
In the end, he accepted Engels’s advice to spread out the publication schedule: ‘I agree with you and shall get the first volume to Meissner as soon as it is ready.’ ‘But,’ he added, ‘in order to complete it, I must first be able to sit.’108
In fact, Marx’s health was continuing to deteriorate. Towards the end of February, two huge new carbuncles appeared on his body, and he attempted to treat them alone. He told Engels that he used a ‘sharp razor’ to get rid of the ‘upper one’, lancing ‘the cur’ all by himself. ‘The infected blood […] spurted, or rather leapt, right up into the air’, and from then he thought of the carbuncle as ‘buried’, albeit in need of ‘some nursing’. As for the ‘lower one’, he wrote: ‘It is becoming malignant and is beyond my control. […] If this diabolical business advances, I shall have to send for Allen, of course, as, owing to the locus of the cur, I am unable to watch and cure it myself.’109
Following this harrowing account, Engels rebuked his friend more severely than ever before: ‘No one can withstand such a chronic succession of carbuncles for long, apart from the fact that eventually you may get one that becomes so acute as to be the end of you. And where will your book and your family be then?’110 To give Marx some relief, he said he was prepared to make any financial sacrifice. Begging him to be ‘sensible’, he suggested a period of total rest:
Do me and your family the one favour of getting yourself cured. What would become of the whole movement if anything were to happen to you, and the way you are proceeding, that will be the inevitable outcome. I really shall not have any peace day or night until I have got you over this business, and every day that passes without my hearing anything from you, I worry and imagine you are worse again. Nota bene. You should never again let things come to such a pass that a carbuncle which actually ought to be lanced, is not lanced. That is extremely dangerous.111
Finally, Marx let himself be persuaded to take a break from work. On 15 March he travelled to Margate, a seaside resort in Kent, and on the tenth day sent back a report about himself: ‘I am reading nothing, am writing nothing. The mere fact of having to take the arsenic three times a day obliges one to arrange one’s time for meals and for strolling. […] As regards company here, it does not exist, of course. I can sing with the Miller of the Dee112: “I care for nobody and nobody cares for me.”’113
Early in April, Marx told his friend Kugelmann that he was ‘much recovered’. But he complained that, because of the interruption, ‘another two months and more’ had been entirely lost, and the completion of his book ‘put back once more’.114 After his return to London, he remained at a standstill for another few weeks because of an attack of rheumatism and other troubles; his body was still exhausted and vulnerable. Although he reported to Engels in early June that ‘there has fortunately been no recurrence of anything carbuncular’, 115 he was unhappy that his work had ‘been progressing poorly owing to purely physical factors’.116
In July, Marx had to confront what had become his three habitual enemies: Livy’s periculum in mora (danger in delay) in the shape of rent arrears; the carbuncles, with a new one ready to flare up; and an ailing liver. In August, he reassured Engels that, although his health ‘fluctuate[d] from one day to the next’, he felt generally better: after all, ‘the feeling of being fit to work again does much for a man’.117 He was ‘threatened with new carbuncles here and there’, and although they ‘kept disappearing’ without the need for urgent intervention they had obliged him to keep his ‘hours of work very much within limits’.118 On the same day, he wrote to Kugelmann: ‘I do not think I shall be able to deliver the manuscript of the first volume (it has now grown to 3 volumes) to Hamburg before October. I can only work productively for a very few hours per day without immediately feeling the effects physically.’119
This time too, Marx was being excessively optimistic. The steady stream of negative phenomena to which he was daily exposed in the struggle to survive once more proved an obstacle to the completion of his text. Furthermore, he had to spend precious time looking for ways to extract small sums of money from the pawnshop and to escape the tortuous circle of promissory notes in which he had landed.
Writing to Kugelmann in mid-October, Marx expressed a fear that as a result of his long illness, and all the expenses it had entailed, he could no longer ‘keep the creditors at bay’ and the house was ‘about to come crashing down about [his] ears’.120 Not even in October, therefore, was it possible for him to put the finishing touches to the manuscript. In describing the state of things to his friend in Hannover, and explaining the reasons for the delay, Marx set out the plan he now had in mind:
My circumstances (endless interruptions, both physical and social) oblige me to publish Volume I first, not both volumes together, as I had originally intended. And there will now probably be 3 volumes. The whole work is thus divided into the following parts:
Book I. The Process of Production of Capital.
Book II. The Process of Circulation of Capital.
Book III. Structure of the Process as a Whole.
Book IV. On the History of the Theory.
The first volume will include the first 2 books. The 3rd book will, I believe, fill the second volume, the 4th the 3rd.121
Reviewing the work he had done since the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, published in 1859, Marx continued:
It was, in my opinion, necessary to begin again from the beginning in the first book, i.e., to summarize the book of mine published by Duncker in one chapter on commodities and money. I judged this to be necessary, not merely for the sake of completeness, but because even intelligent people did not properly understand the question, in other words, there must have been defects in the first presentation, especially in the analysis of commodities.122
Extreme poverty marked the month of November, too. Referring to a terrible everyday life that allowed no respite, Marx wrote to Engels: ‘Not merely has my work been frequently interrupted by all this, but by trying to make up at night for the time lost during the day, I have acquired a fine carbuncle near my penis.’123 But he was keen to point out that ‘this summer and autumn it was really not the theory which caused the delay, but [his] physical and civil condition’. If he had been in good health, he would have been able to complete the work. He reminded Engels that it was three years since ‘the first carbuncle had been lanced’ – years in which he had had ‘only short periods’ of relief from it.124 Moreover, having been forced to expend so much time and energy on the daily struggle with poverty, he remarked in December: ‘I only regret that private persons cannot file their bills for the bankruptcy court with the same propriety as men of business.’
The situation did not change all winter, and in late February 1867, Marx wrote to his friend in Manchester (who had never failed to send him whatever he could): ‘A grocer is sending the bailiffs in on Saturday (the day after tomorrow) if I do not pay him at least £5. […] The work will soon be complete, and would have been so today if I had been subject to less harassment of late.’125
At the end of February 1867, Marx was finally able to give Engels the long-awaited news that the book was finished. Now he had to take it to Germany, and once again he was forced to turn to his friend so that he could redeem his ‘clothes and timepiece from their abode at the pawnbroker’s’;126 otherwise he would not have been able to leave.
Having arrived in Hamburg, Marx discussed with Engels the new plan proposed by Meissner:
He now wants that the book should appear in 3 volumes. In particular he is opposed to my compressing the final book (the historico-literary part) as I had intended. He said that from the publishing point of view […] this was the part by which he was setting most store. I told him that as far as that was concerned, I was his to command.127
A few days later, he gave a similar report to Becker: ‘The whole work will appear in 3 volumes. The title is Capital. A Critique of Political Economy. The first volume comprises the First Book: “The Process of Production of Capital”. It is without question the most terrible missile that has yet been hurled at the heads of the bourgeoisie (landowners included).’128 After a few days in Hamburg, Marx travelled on to Hannover. He stayed there as the guest of Kugelmann, who finally got to know him after years of purely epistolary relations. Marx remained available there in case Meissner wanted him to help out with the proofreading. Marx wrote to Engels that his health was ‘extraordinarily improved’. There was ‘no trace of the old complaint’ or his ‘liver trouble’, and ‘what is more, [he was] in good spirits’.129 His friend replied from Manchester:
I always had the feeling that that damn book, which you have been carrying for so long, was at the bottom of all your misfortune, and you would and could never extricate yourself until you had got it off your back. Forever resisting completion, it was driving you physically, mentally and financially into the ground, and I can very well understand that, having shaken off that nightmare, you now feel quite a new man.130
Marx wanted to fill others in about the forthcoming publication of his work. To Sigfrid Meyer [1840–1872], a German socialist member of the International active in organizing the workers’ movement in New York, he wrote: ‘Volume I comprises the Process of Production of Capital. […] Volume II contains the continuation and conclusion of the theory, Volume III the history of political economy from the middle of the 17th century’.131
In mid-June, Engels became involved in correction of the text for publication. He thought that, compared with the 1859 A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, ‘the dialectic of the argument ha[d] been greatly sharpened’.132 Marx was heartened by this approval: ‘That you have been satisfied with it so far is more important to me than anything the rest of the world may say of it.’133 However, Engels noted that his exposition of the form of value was excessively abstract and insufficiently clear for the average reader; he also regretted that precisely this important section had ‘the marks of the carbuncles rather firmly stamped upon it’.134 In reply, Marx fulminated against the cause of his physical torments – ‘I hope the bourgeoisie will remember my carbuncles until their dying day’135 – and convinced himself of the need for an appendix presenting his conception of the form of value in a more popular form. This twenty-page addition was completed by the end of June.
Marx completed the proof corrections at 2:00 a.m. on 1 August 1867. A few minutes later, he wrote to his friend in Manchester: ‘Dear Fred: Have just finished correcting the last sheet […]. So, this volume is finished. I owe it to you alone that it was possible! […] I embrace you, full of thanks.’136 A few days later, in another letter to Engels, he summarized what he regarded as the two main pillars of the book: ‘1. (this is fundamental to all understanding of the facts) the twofold character of labour according to whether it is expressed in use value or exchange value, which is brought out in the very First Chapter; 2. the treatment of surplus value regardless of its particular forms as profit, interest, ground rent, etc’.137
Capital was put on sale on 14 September 1867.138 Following the final modifications, the table of contents was as follows:
Preface
1. Commodity and money
2. The transformation of money into capital
3. The production of absolute surplus value
4. The production of relative surplus value
5. Further research on the production of absolute and relative surplus value
6. The process of accumulation of capital
Appendix to Part 1, 1: The form of value.139
Despite the long correction process and the final addition, the structure of the work would be considerably expanded over the coming years, and various further modifications would be made to the text. Volume I therefore continued to absorb significant energies on Marx’s part even after its publication.
In October 1867, Marx returned to Volume II. But this brought a recurrence of his medical complaints: liver pains, insomnia, and the blossoming of ‘two small carbuncles near the membrum’. Nor did the ‘incursions from without’ or the ‘aggravations of home life’ leave off; there was a certain bitterness in his sage remark to Engels that ‘my sickness always originates in the mind’.140 As always, his friend helped out and sent all the money he could, together with a hope that it ‘drives away the carbuncles’.141 That is not what happened, though, and in late November Marx wrote to say: ‘The state of my health has greatly worsened, and there has been virtually no question of working.’142
The New Year, 1868, began much as the old one had ended. During the first weeks of January, Marx was even unable to attend to his correspondence. His wife Jenny confided to Becker that her ‘poor husband ha[d] once again been laid up and fettered hand and foot by his old, serious and painful complaint, which [was] becoming dangerous through its constant recurrence’.143 A few days later, his daughter Laura reported to Engels: ‘Moor is once more being victimized by his old enemies, the carbuncles, and is, by the arrival of the latest, made to feel very ill at ease in a sitting posture.’144 Marx began to write again only towards the end of the month, when he told Engels that ‘for 2–3 weeks’ he would ‘do absolutely no work’; ‘it would be dreadful,’ he added, ‘if a third monster were to erupt’.145
The state of Marx’s health continued to fluctuate. In late March, he reported to Engels that it was such that he should ‘really give up working and thinking entirely for some time’. But he added that that would be ‘hard’ for him, even if he had ‘the means to loaf around’.146 The new interruption came just as he was recommencing work on the second version of Volume II – after a gap of nearly three years since the first half of 1865. He completed the first two chapters in the course of the spring,147 in addition to a group of preparatory manuscripts – on the relationship between surplus value and rate of profit, the law of the rate of profit, and the metamorphoses of capital – which occupied him until the end of 1868.148
At the end of April 1868, Marx sent Engels a new schema for his work, with particular reference to ‘the method by which the rate of profit is developed’.149 In the same letter, he made it clear that Volume II would present the ‘process of circulation of capital on the basis of the premises developed’ in Volume I. He intended to set out, in as satisfactory a manner as possible, the ‘formal determinations’ of fixed capital, circulating capital and the turnover of capital – and hence to investigate ‘the social intertwining of the different capitals, of parts of capital and of revenue (=m)’. Volume III would then ‘the conversion of surplus value into its different forms and separate component parts’.150
In May, however, the health problems were back, and after a period of silence Marx explained to Engels that ‘two carbuncles on the scrotum would perhaps have made even Sulla peevish’.151 In the second week of August, he told Kugelmann of his hope to finish the entire work by ‘the end of September’ 1869.152 But the autumn brought an outbreak of carbuncles, and in spring 1869, when Marx was still working on the third chapter of Volume II,153 his liver took yet another turn for the worse. His misfortunes continued in the following years, with troublesome regularity, and prevented him from ever completing Volume II.
There were also theoretical reasons for the delay. From autumn 1868 to spring 1869, determined to get on top of the latest developments in capitalism, Marx compiled copious excerpts from texts on the finance and money markets that appeared in The Money Market Review, The Economist and similar publications.154 Moreover, in autumn 1869, having become aware of new (in reality, insignificant) literature about changes in Russia, he decided to learn Russian so that he could study it for himself. He pursued this new interest with his usual rigour, and in early 1870 Jenny told Engels that, ‘instead of looking after himself, [he had begun] to study Russian hammer and tongs, went out seldom, ate infrequently, and only showed the carbuncle under his arm when it was already very swollen and had hardened’.155 Engels hastened to write to his friend, trying to persuade him that ‘in the interests of the Volume II’ he needed ‘a change of life-style’; otherwise, if there was ‘constant repetition of such suspensions’, he would never finish the book.156
The prediction was spot on. In early summer, summarizing what had happened in the previous months, Marx told Kugelmann that his work had been ‘held up by illness throughout the winter’, and that he had ‘found it necessary to mug up on [his] Russian, because, in dealing with the land question, it ha[d] become essential to study Russian landowning relationships from primary sources’.157
After all the interruptions and a period of intense political activity for the International following the birth of the Paris Commune, Marx turned to work on a new edition of Volume I. Dissatisfied with the way in which he had expounded the theory of value, he spent December 1871 and January 1872 rewriting the 1867 appendix, and this led him to rewrite the first chapter itself.158 On this occasion, apart from a small number of additions, he also modified the entire structure of the book.159
Corrections and reworking also affected the French translation. From March 1872, Marx had to work on correcting the drafts, which were then sent to the printer in instalments between 1872 and 1875.160 In the course of the revisions, he decided to make further changes to the basic text, mostly in the section on the accumulation of capital. In the postscript to the French edition, he did not hesitate to attach to it ‘a scientific value independent of the original’.161
Although the rhythm was less intense than before – because of the precarious state of his health and because he needed to widen his knowledge in some areas – Marx continued to work on Capital during the final years of his life. In 1875, he wrote another manuscript of Volume III entitled ‘Relationship between Rate of Surplus-Value and Rate of Profit Developed Mathematically’,162 and between October 1876 and early 1881 he prepared new drafts of sections of Volume II.163 Some of his letters indicate that, if he had been able to feed-in the results of his ceaseless research, he would have updated Volume I as well.164
The critical spirit with which Marx composed his magnum opus reveals just how distant he was from the dogmatic author that both most of his adversaries and many self-styled disciples presented to the world. Unfinished though it remained,165 those who today want to use essential theoretical concepts for the critique of the capitalist mode of production still cannot dispense with reading Marx’s Capital.
1These notebooks total 1,472 quarto pages. See Friedrich Engels, ‘Preface to the First German Edition’, in Karl Marx, Capital, Volume II, in MECW, vol. 36, p. 6.
2Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, in MECW, vol. 29, p. 261.
3Previously, in the Grundrisse, Marx had set forth a similar, though less precise, ‘arrangement of the material’, Karl Marx, Grundrisse, p. 108, at four separate points: pp. 108, 227–8, 264 and 275. He also anticipated the six-part schema planned for A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy in two letters from the first half of 1858: one to Ferdinand Lassalle on 22 February 1858, in MECW, vol. 40, pp. 268–71; and one to Friedrich Engels on 2 April 1858, in MECW, vol. 40, pp. 296–304. Between February and March 1859, he also drafted a long preparatory index for his work, which in the English edition of Grundrisse became the ‘Analytical Contents List’, pp. 69–80. On the original plan and its variations, see the by now dated, but still fundamental work by Roman Rosdolsky, The Making of Marx’s Capital. London: Pluto, 1977, pp. 1–62. More limited, however, is Maximilien Rubel, Marx Critique du marxisme. Paris: Payot, pp. 379 and 389, which claims that Marx did not change the original plan he devised in 1857.
4These notebooks were ignored for more than a hundred years, before a Russian translation was finally published in 1973, in a supplementary Volume 47 of the Marx-Engels Sochinenya. An original German edition appeared only in 1976 in MEGA2, vol. II/3.1.
5Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 30 October 1861, in MECW, vol. 41, p. 323.
6Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 9 December 1861, in MECW, vol. 41, p. 332.
7Ibid., p. 333.
8Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 3 March 1862, in MECW, vol. 41, p. 344.
9Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 15 March 1862, in MECW, vol. 41, p. 352.
10Between 1905 and 1910, Kautsky published the manuscripts in question in a form that deviated somewhat from the originals.
11It was to have followed: (1) the transformation of money into capital; (2) absolute surplus value; (3) relative surplus value; and (4) a section – one he never actually wrote – on how these three should be considered in combination.
12Karl Marx, Economic Manuscript of 1861–63, vol. I, in MECW, vol. 30, p. 348.
13Ibid., p. 352.
14Ibid., p. 354.
15Ibid.
16Ibid., p. 355.
17Ibid.
18Ibid., p. 357.
19Ibid.
20Ibid., p. 391.
21Ibid., p. 388.
22Ibid., p. 393.
23Ibid., p. 389.
24Ibid., p. 396.
25Karl Marx to Ferdinand Lassalle, 28 April 1862, in MECW, vol. 41, p. 356.
26Karl Marx, Economic Manuscript of 1861–63, vol. I, in MECW, vol. 31, p. 8.
27Ibid., p. 12.
28Ibid., p. 197.
29Cf. Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 18 June 1862, in MECW, vol. 41, p. 381.
30Marx, Economic Manuscript of 1861–63, vol. I, in MECW, vol. 31, p. 240.
31Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 18 June 1862, in MECW, vol. 41, p. 380.
32Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 2 August 1862, in MECW, vol. 41, p. 394.
33Marx, Economic Manuscript of 1861-63, vol. I, in MECW, vol. 31, p. 359.
34Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 2 August 1862, in MECW, vol. 41, p. 396.
35Ibid., p. 398.
36Ibid., p. 394.
37Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 7 August 1862, in MECW, vol. 41, p. 399.
38Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 10 September 1862, in MECW, vol. 41, p. 417.
39Karl Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann, 28 December 1862, in MECW, vol. 41, p. 436.
40Karl Marx to Ferdinand Lassalle, 7 November 1862, in MECW, vol. 41, p. 426.
41Karl Marx, Economic Manuscript of 1861–63, vol. II, in MECW, vol. 32, p. 215.
42Ibid., p. 373.
43Ibid., p. 450.
44These are the final notebooks that form part of Economic Manuscript of 1861–63, vol. III.
45Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, vol. III, in MECW, vol. 32, p. 453.
46Ibid., p. 458.
47Karl Marx, Zur Kritik der politischen Ökonomie (Manuskript 1861–1863), in MEGA2, vol. II/3.5, pp. 1598–1675.
48Ibid., pp. 1682–1773.
49Karl Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann, 28 December 1862, p. 435.
50See the index to the Grundrisse, written in June 1858 and contained in Notebook M (the same as that of the ‘1857 Introduction’), as well as the draft index for the third chapter, written in 1860: Marx, ‘Draft Plan of the Chapter on Capital’, in MECW, vol. 29, pp. 511–17.
51Karl Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann, 28 December 1862, p. 435. This statement seems to indicate that Marx realized how difficult it would be to complete his original project in six books. Michael Heinrich, ‘Reconstruction or Deconstruction? Methodological Controversies about Value and Capital, and New Insights from the Critical Edition’, in Riccardo Bellofiore and Roberto Fineschi (eds), Re-reading Marx: New Perspectives After the Critical Edition. Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2009, p. 80.
52Karl Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann, 28 December 1862, in MECW, vol. 41, p. 436.
53Marx, Economic Manuscript of 1861–63, vol. III, in MECW, vol. 33, p. 347.
54Marx, Economic Manuscript of 1861–63, vol. I, in MECW, vol. 31, pp. 346–7. The first chapter had already been outlined in Notebook XVI of the economic manuscripts of 1861–63. Marx prepared a schema of the second in Notebook XVIII, see ibid., p. 299.
55Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 8 January 1863, in MECW, vol. 41, p. 442.
56Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 13 January 1863, in MECW, vol. 41, p. 445.
57Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 13 February 1863, in MECW, vol. 41, p. 453
58Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 21 February 1863, in MECW, vol. 41, p. 460.
59Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 24 March 1863, in MECW, vol. 41, p. 461.
60See the more than sixty pages contained in IISH, Marx-Engels Papers, B 98. On the basis of this research, Marx began one of his many unfinished projects; see Karl Marx, Manuskripte über die polnische Frage (1863–1864). S-Gravenhage: Mouton, 1961.
61Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 29 May 1863, in MECW, vol. 41, p. 474.
62IISH, Marx-Engels Papers, B 93, B 100, B 101, B 102, B 103, B 104 contain some 535 pages of notes. To these should be added the three notebooks RGASPI f.1, d. 1397, d. 1691, d. 5583. Marx used some of this material for the compilation of notebooks XXII and XXIII.
63Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 29 May 1863, in MECW, vol. 41, p. 474.
64Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 12 June 1863, in MECW, vol. 41, p. 479.
65Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 6 July 1863, in MECW, vol. 41, p. 485.
66See Michael Heinrich, ‘Entstehungs- und Auflösungsgeschichte des Marxschen Kapital’, pp. 176–9, in Werner Bonefeld and Michael Heinrich (eds), Kapital & Kritik. Nach der ‘neuen’ Marx-Lektüre. Hamburg: VSA, 2011, pp. 176–9, which argues that the manuscripts from this period should be regarded not as the third version of the work begun with the Grundrisse, but as the first draft of Capital.
67Karl Marx, Marx’s Economic Manuscript of 1864–1865, Fred Moseley (ed.). Leiden: Brill, 2015.
68‘No. 1’: that is the 1859 A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 15 August 1863, in MECW, vol. 41, p. 488.
69In recent years, dermatologists have reviewed the discussion on the causes of Marx’s disease. Sam Shuster suggested that he suffered from hidradenitis suppurativa, in ‘The nature and consequence of Karl Marx’s skin disease’, British Journal of Dermatology, vol. 158 (2008), n. 1, pp. 1–3, while Rudolf Happle and Arne Koenig claimed even less plausibly that the culprit was his heavy smoking of cigars. ‘A lesson to be learned from Karl Marx: smoking triggers hidradenitis suppurativa’, British Journal of Dermatology, vol. 159 (2008), n. 1, pp. 255–6. For Shuster’s reply to this suggestion, see ibid., p. 256.
70Jenny Marx, in Hans Magnus Enzensberger (ed.), Gespräche mit Marx und Engels. Frankfurt: Insel Verlag, 1973, p. 288.
71Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 2 December 1863, in MECW, vol. 41, p. 495.
72Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 4 December 1863, in MECW, vol. 41, p. 497.
73Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 20 January 1864, in MECW, vol. 41, p. 507.
74Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 26 May 1864, in MECW, vol. 41, p. 530.
75Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 1 July 1864, in MECW, vol. 41, p. 545.
76Karl Marx to Carl Klings, 4 October 1864, in MECW, vol. 42, p. 4.
77Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 4 November 1864, in MECW, vol. 42, p. 12.
78Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 14 November 1864, in MECW, vol. 42, p. 22.
79Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 2 December 1864, in MECW, vol. 42, p. 51.
80Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 25 February 1864, in MECW, vol. 42, p. 107.
81Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 4 March 1865, in MECW, vol. 42, p. 115.
82Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 13 March 1865, in MECW, vol. 42, pp. 129–30.
83Fifty signatures were equivalent to 800 printed pages.
84‘Agreement between Mr Karl Marx and Mr Otto Meissner, Publisher and Bookseller’, in MECW, vol. 20, p. 361.
85Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 22 April 1865, in MECW, vol. 42, p. 148.
86Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 13 May 1865, in MECW, vol. 42, p. 158.
87Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 20 May 1865, in MECW, vol. 42, p. 159.
88This was published in 1898 by Eleanor Marx, as Value, Price and Profit. This commonly used title was taken as the basis for the German translation that appeared the same year in Die Neue Zeit [The New Times].
89Karl Marx, Value, Price and Profit, in MECW, vol. 20, p. 144.
90Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 31 July 1865, in MECW, vol. 42, p. 173.
91The equivalent of 960 pages. Later, Meissner signalled his openness to modify his agreement with Marx: see Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 13 April 1867, in MECW, vol. 42, p. 357.
92Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 5 August 1865, in MECW, vol. 42, p. 175.
93Ibid.
94This division was followed by Engels when he published Capital, Volume III, in 1894. See Carl-Erich Vollgraf, Jürgen Jungnickel and Stephen Naron, ‘Marx in Marx’s Words? On Engels’ Edition of the Main Manuscript of Volume III of Capital’, in International Journal of Political Economy, vol. 32 (2002), n. 1, pp. 35–78. See also the more recent: Carl-Erich Vollgraf, ‘Das Kapital – bis zuletzt ein “Werk im Werden”’ in Marx-Engels Jahrbuch, vol. 2012/13, pp. 113–33; and Regina Roth, ‘Die Herausgabe von Band 2 und 3 des Kapital durch Engels’, in ibid., pp. 168–82. For a critical assessment of Engels’s editing, see Michael Heinrich, ‘Engels’ Edition of the Third Volume of Capital and Marx’s Original Manuscript’, in Science & Society, vol. 60 (1996–1997), n. 4, pp. 452–66. A different point of view is contained in Michael R. Krätke, Kritik der politischen Ökonomie Heute. Hamburg: VSA, 2017, esp. the final chapter ‘Gibt es ein Marx-Engels-Problem?’
95Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 8 November 1865, in MECW, vol. 42, pp. 193–4.
96Karl Marx to Wilhelm Liebknecht, 15 January 1866, in MECW, vol. 42, p. 219.
97Karl Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann, 15 January 1866, in MECW, vol. 42, p. 221.
98Jenny Marx to Johann Philipp Becker, 29 January 1866, in MECW, vol. 42, pp. 570–1.
99Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 10 February 1866, in MECW, vol. 42, p. 223.
100Ibid., pp. 223–4.
101Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 10 February 1866, in MECW, vol. 42, p. 224.
102Friedrich Engels to Karl Marx, 10 February 1866, in MECW, vol. 42, pp. 225–6.
103Ibid., p. 226.
104Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 13 February 1866, in MECW, vol. 42, p. 227.
105Marx later inserted the section on ground rent into Part Six of Volume III: ‘Transformation of Surplus Profit into Ground Rent’.
106Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 13 February 1866, in MECW, vol. 42, p. 227.
107Ibid.
108Ibid.
109Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 20 February 1866, in MECW, vol. 42, p. 231.
110Friedrich Engels to Karl Marx, 22 February 1866, in MECW, vol. 42, p. 233.
111Ibid., pp. 233–4.
112A traditional English folk song.
113Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 24 March 1866, in MECW, vol. 42, p. 249.
114Karl Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann, 6 April 1866, in MECW, vol. 42, p. 262.
115Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 7 June 1866, in MECW, vol. 42, p. 281.
116Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 9 June 1866, in MECW, vol. 42, p. 282.
117Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 7 August 1866, in MECW, vol. 42, p. 303.
118Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 23 August 1866, in MECW, vol. 42, p. 311.
119Karl Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann, 23 August 1866, in MECW, vol. 42, p. 312.
120Karl Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann, 13 October 1866, in MECW, vol. 42, p. 328.
121Ibid.
122Ibid., pp. 328–9.
123Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 8 November 1866, in MECW, vol. 42, p. 331.
124Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 10 November 1866, in MECW, vol. 42, p. 332.
125Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 21 February 1867, in MECW, vol. 42, p. 347.
126Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 2 April 1867, in MECW, vol. 42, p. 351.
127Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 13 April 1867, in MECW, vol. 42, p. 357.
128Karl Marx to Johann Philipp Becker, 17 April 1867, in MECW, vol. 42, p. 358.
129Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 24 April 1867, in MECW, vol. 42, p. 361.
130Friedrich Engels to Karl Marx, 27 April 1867, in MECW, vol. 42, p. 362.
131Karl Marx to Sigfrid Meyer, 30 April 1867, in MECW, vol. 42, p. 367.
132Friedrich Engels to Karl Marx, 16 June 1867, in MECW, vol. 42, p. 381.
133Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 22 June 1867, in MECW, vol. 42, p. 383.
134Friedrich Engels to Karl Marx, 16 June 1867, in MECW, vol. 42, p. 380.
135Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 22 June 1867, in MECW, vol. 42, p. 383.
136Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 16 August 1867, in MECW, vol. 42, p. 405.
137Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 24 August 1867, in MECW, vol. 42, p. 407.
138The distribution to the bookstores began on September 11th. See Karl Marx, Das Kapital. Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie. Erster Band, Hamburg 1867, in MEGA2, vol. II/5, p. 674.
139Ibid., pp. 9–10.
140Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 19 October 1867, in MECW, vol. 42, p. 453.
141Friedrich Engels to Karl Marx, 22 October 1867, in MECW, vol. 42, p. 457.
142Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 27 November 1867, in MECW, vol. 42, p. 477.
143Jenny Marx to Johann Philipp Becker, ‘After 10 January 1868’, in MECW, vol. 42, p. 580.
144Laura Marx to Friedrich Engels, 13 January 1868, in MECW, vol. 42, p. 583.
145Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 25 January 1868, in MECW, vol. 42, p. 528.
146Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 25 March 1868, in MECW, vol. 42, p. 557.
147Karl Marx, ‘Manuskripte zum zweiten Buch des “Kapitals” 1868 bis 1881’, in MEGA2, vol. II/11, pp. 1–339.
148These texts have recently been published in Karl Marx, Ökonomische Manuskripte 1863–1868, in MEGA2, vol. II/4.3, pp. 78–234 and pp. 285–363. The last part constitutes Manuscript IV of Volume II and contains new versions of Part One, ‘The Circulation of Capital’, and Part Two, ‘The Metamorphoses of Capital’.
149Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 30 April 1868, in MECW, vol. 43, p. 21.
150Ibid.
151Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 16 May 1868, in MECW, vol. 42, p. 35.
152Karl Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann, 10 August 1868, in MECW, vol. 43, p. 82.
153Marx, ‘Manuskripte zum zweiten Buch des “Kapitals” 1868 bis 1881’, in MEGA2, vol. II/11, pp. 340–522.
154Still unpublished, these notes are included in the IISH, Marx-Engels Papers, B 108, B 109, B 113 and B 114.
155Jenny Marx to Friedrich Engels, ‘About 17 January 1870’, in MECW, vol. 43, p. 551.
156Friedrich Engels to Karl Marx, 19 January 1870, in MECW, vol. 43, p. 408.
157Karl Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann, 27 June 1870, in MECW, vol. 43, p. 528.
158Marx, Das Kapital. Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie. Ertser Band, Hamburg 1867, in MEGA2 vol. II/5, pp. 1–55.
159In 1867 Marx had divided the book into chapters. In 1872 these became sections, each with much more detailed subdivisions.
160Karl Marx, Le Capital, Paris 1872–1875, in MEGA2, vol. II/7.
161Karl Marx, ‘Afterword to the French Edition’ to Capital, Volume I, in MECW, vol. 35, p. 24.
162Karl Marx, ‘Manuskripte und redaktionelle Texte zum dritten Buch des “Kapitals”. 1871 bis 1895’, in MEGA2, vol. II/14, pp. 19–150.
163Karl Marx, ‘Manuskripte zum Zweiten Buch des “Kapitals”. 1876 bis 1881’, in MEGA2, vol. II/11, pp. 525–828.
164Cf. Karl Marx to Nikolai Danielson, 13 December 1881, in MECW, vol. 46, p. 161.
165The editorial work that Engels undertook after his friend’s death to prepare the unfinished parts of Capital for publication was extremely complex. It should be borne in mind that the text in question was prepared on the basis of incomplete and often heterogeneous material that Marx had written in various periods of his life, some of which contained observations different from others to be found elsewhere in Capital. Nevertheless, Engels published Volume II in 1885 and Volume III in 1894.