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 Marx37 passages held

German, the original language

Original title: Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie
First published: 1858(aged 40)
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 does 'general intellect' mean in the Grundrisse?

Marx's phrase for the accumulated social knowledge and skill of society, once it becomes built into machinery itself. In the passage later readers call the Fragment on Machines, he argues that as production comes to depend on this collective intelligence rather than individual toil, the measure of wealth in labour time starts to break down. The phrase became central to late-twentieth-century readings.

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

In a long section, the Formen, Marx surveys the ways people held property and organised production before capitalism, communal, Asiatic, ancient and Germanic forms in which the individual belonged to a community rather than facing the market alone. He uses them to show that private property and wage labour are historical, not natural, and had to be violently created. This is where the notebooks dwell on land, community and lineage.

What kind of text is the 'Grundrisse'?

The word means outlines or foundations, and that is what it is: seven notebooks Marx filled at night in the crisis winter of 1857 to 1858, writing for self-clarification and never meaning to publish them in that form. He later quarried them for Capital and set them aside; they stayed unread for eighty years. Their rough, thinking-aloud character is the point.

What is the '1857 Introduction' and its method?

A famous methodological preface to the notebooks, in which Marx works out how political economy should proceed: not from concrete wholes like 'population' taken raw, but by analysing them into simple abstractions and then rising back to the concrete as a rich totality of many determinations. It is his clearest statement of the method that structures Capital.

Themes of the book

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

The Rough Draft of Capital

Where does wealth come from, and could a society ever measure it in free time rather than labour? Written fast in a financial panic, these private notebooks think the question aloud.

Filling seven notebooks in the crisis winter of 1857–58, Marx works through money, capital, labour and production more freely and philosophically than he would allow himself in print. He sketches capital's drive to replace workers with machines and imagines wealth measured not in labour but in free time — a more Hegelian, speculative Marx than his readers knew. Quarried for later books and set aside, the manuscript stayed unread for eighty years, surfacing only after a 1953 reissue to become central to the Marx revival of the New Left.

property
labor
capital
production
wealth
alienation
historical materialism
political economy
historical development
modernity
communal property
community
land

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Within this work

passages held: 37
distinct concepts: 85
by passages held, corpus-wide: #245

What this book thinks together

Every arc around the wheel is one concept in this book. A ribbon joins two the text reaches for together, and its width is how many of its passages hold both. Strongest: community with property.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 10 pairings. 23 shared passages in all. 5 weaker pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
community	property	3
historical materialism	property	3
labor	property	3
capital	labor	2
communalism	labor	2
communalism	property	2
community	historical development	2
historical development	labor	2
historical development	property	2
historical materialism	labor	2

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.

1843 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
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
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
1845 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
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
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
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
1858 Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie) you are here DE
1865 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
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

— or open another of their works