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WorkKarl Marx

Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy

Marx's private notebooks of 1857–58, written in a crisis and buried for eighty years — a freer, more philosophical draft of the economics that became *Capital*.

by Karl Marx96 passages held

  • German, the original language
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Original title
Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie
First published
(published posthumously)
Original language
German

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Overview

As financial panic ran round the world in the autumn of 1857 — banks failing from New York to Hamburg — Marx, in London and half-expecting a revolution to follow, drove himself to get his economics onto paper before events overtook him. Working at night, often ill, he filled seven notebooks in a few months with roughly eight hundred pages he never meant to publish in that form. This is the Grundrisse: a rough draft, written for self-clarification, in which Marx thinks aloud about money, capital, machinery and time more freely and more philosophically than he would let himself do in print. It is where he sketches capital's drive to replace workers with machines, and imagines a society that might come to measure its wealth not in labour but in free time. Then it disappeared. Marx quarried it for later books and set the notebooks aside, and they stayed unread for eight decades, first printed in Moscow in 1939 in an edition of three thousand that the coming war swallowed almost whole. Only a Berlin reissue in 1953 put the text into circulation, and only in the 1960s and 1970s did readers seize on it — a more Hegelian, more speculative Marx than the one they thought they knew, whose pages on automation spoke straight to their own moment. An English translation waited until 1973.

Key concepts

What is a 'Robinsonade', and why does Marx attack it?

A Robinsonade is a story in the manner of Robinson Crusoe, one man providing for himself alone. Marx uses the word for the economists' habit of beginning with an isolated hunter or fisher. That figure, he argues, is no memory of the earliest times: it is modern society of free competition, where each person seems cut loose from every older tie, projected back onto the beginning of history.

How do production, distribution, exchange and consumption hang together for Marx?

They are parts of one whole, with production in the lead. The textbooks treat them as four separate stations: goods are made, shared out by social rules, traded by private wish, then used up. Marx shows each inside the others. A person who takes part in production as a wage labourer receives a wage as their share, so the way of producing already settles the way of sharing.

What does rising from the abstract to the concrete mean?

It is Marx's name for the right order of explanation: begin with the simplest notions and build up to the full picture. Starting from a whole such as a country's population gives only a blur, because nothing is yet known of its classes, wages or capital. Once those simple elements are worked out, the population returns as a whole with many understood sides, which Marx calls the concrete.

Why doesn't Marx present economic categories in their historical order?

Because a category, a basic concept such as rent, money or capital, takes its meaning from the society it belongs to. Farming came long before industry, so it seems natural to begin with landed property and rent. Yet in modern society capital is the power that rules everything, and rent cannot be understood without it. Marx therefore orders his concepts by their rank in present society, not by their age.

What are the pre-capitalist 'forms' Marx sketches?

They are three ways of holding land in which a person owns only as a member of a community. In the Asiatic form villages possess the soil under a ruler who counts as its sole owner. In the ancient form, as at Rome, a citizen holds a private plot because he is a citizen. In the Germanic form separate households merely assemble as a community. None of them knows a worker without property.

Why does Marx call the earth the worker's 'inorganic body'?

Because in early communities people treat the land as part of themselves, an extension of their own body. The earth is the great workshop that supplies tools, material and a place to live, and nobody made it: it is simply found. Property at this stage means relating to these natural conditions as one's own. The image shows what the modern wage worker lacks, who meets every means of work as someone else's.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

No Producer Stands Alone

Can production be understood by starting from one man alone with nature? The 1857 Introduction answers no, and with that answer the economists' tidy sequence of making, sharing, trading and using up comes apart.

Adam Smith and Ricardo begin with a solitary hunter and fisher; Marx calls him a fantasy of the eighteenth century, the picture a society of free competition paints of its own origins. People become separate individuals only inside a society, as a language grows only among people who talk together. From there he takes the textbook stations in turn: in eating a person produces their own body, a railway nobody rides is a railway only in possibility, and how the product is shared follows from how people take part in making it.

  • production
  • consumption
  • distribution
  • exchange
  • social relations
  • needs
  • bourgeois society
  • production relations
  • social reproduction

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From the Abstract to the Concrete

Where should a science of society begin: with the living whole, a country and its population, or with the simplest ideas? On the answer hangs whether its concepts, labour above all, are timeless or belong to one age.

Population looks like the solid place to start, yet it is an empty word without its classes, and these without wage labour and capital. So Marx goes down to the simplest notions and climbs back to the whole, the concrete as many features gathered into one. Against Hegel he insists that this is only how thought takes hold of the world, never how the world arises. Even the simplest notion, labour as such, becomes true in practice only where people change trades with ease. The pages break off over Greek art, which still delights an age unable to produce it.

  • political economy
  • economic categories
  • abstraction
  • labor
  • historical change
  • social development

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Property Before Capital

For most of history, to own land meant to belong to a community. What had to be torn apart before a worker with nothing to sell but labour could stand facing capital?

In the fragment on the forms that precede capitalist production Marx turns the usual question round. That working people are joined to the earth, their natural workshop, needs no explaining; what needs a history is their separation from it. He follows that bond through the Asiatic village under its despot, the ancient city whose citizens are landowners, and the Germanic settlement of scattered households. Each makes its members, not wealth, the purpose of production. The ancient world therefore looks nobler than ours, and Marx still calls it narrow: wealth, stripped of its bourgeois form, would be the full unfolding of human powers.

  • property
  • communal property
  • communal ownership
  • community
  • land
  • capital
  • wage labor
  • wealth
  • alienation
  • historical materialism
  • historical development
  • modernity
  • political community
  • slavery
  • war

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Within this work

passages held
96
distinct concepts
160
by passages held, corpus-wide
#507

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “consumption” and “production”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 19 pairings. 81 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
consumptionproduction13
political economyproduction12
distributionproduction9
productionproperty7
distributionpolitical economy6
historical materialismpolitical economy6
historical materialismsocial relations6
historical materialismproduction5
consumptionpolitical economy4
distributionproperty4
political economysocial relations4
productionsocial relations4
consumptiondistribution3
distributionsocial relations3
historical materialismproperty3
propertysocial relations3
distributionhistorical materialism2
political economyproperty2
communal propertyproperty1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 1844 On the Jewish Question (Zur Judenfrage)

    Written alongside the Hegel critique and published in the same short-lived Paris journal, this is Marx settling accounts with Bruno Bauer and the Young Hegelians. It marks his turn away from religion and the state toward the economic life he came to think lay underneath them.

     DE
  2. 1845 The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism (Die heilige Familie oder Kritik der kritischen Kritik)

    Overwhelmingly Marx's despite the shared title page, and aimed squarely at Bruno Bauer's circle. It sits on the hinge between the Young Hegelian quarrels Marx was leaving and the historical materialism he was about to work out.

     DE
  3. 1848 The Communist Manifesto (Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei)

    Commissioned to a deadline as revolution gathered in 1848, and the most public thing Marx ever put his name to — the opposite pole from the manuscripts he left unfinished in drawers. It states in a few pages the view of history his longer works spent decades grounding.

     DE
  4. 1849 Wage Labour and Capital (Lohnarbeit und Kapital)

    An early, popular run at the economics Marx would spend the next twenty years perfecting. Engels reissued it in 1891 with the term "labour-power" set where Marx had written "labour" — repairing it with a concept that arrived only later.

     DE
  5. 1852 The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (Der achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte)

    Marx as historian and political analyst rather than economist or agitator: a close reading of a single French coup, written for a New York émigré paper in 1852. It handed later Marxism its theory of the state's independence from the classes beneath it.

     DE
  6. 1867 Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (Das Kapital)

    The work of Marx's maturity and the one book of his economics he saw into print. Volume one appeared in 1867; Engels assembled volumes two and three from the unfinished manuscripts after Marx died, in 1885 and 1894.

     DE
  7. 1888 Theses on Feuerbach (Thesen über Feuerbach)

    Eleven notebook jottings, not an argument built for readers but private markers Marx set down in 1845 and Engels rescued in 1888. They register the moment he broke with Feuerbach and put human practice at the centre of his thinking.

     DE
  8. 1898 Value, Price and Profit (Lohn, Preis und Profit)

    A pair of lectures rather than a book — Marx answering a fellow member at the General Council of the International in 1865, in English. His daughter Eleanor found the manuscript and published it in 1898, and it became the shortest way into the economics of Capital.

     DE
  9. 1927 Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right (Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie. Kritik des Hegelschen Staatsrechts)

    His earliest sustained work, written at twenty-five before he had read a page of political economy: a reckoning with the German idealism he had been raised inside. Its published introduction announced the proletariat; the manuscript behind it waited eighty years for a reader.

     DE
  10. 1939 Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie) you are here DE
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