MARX, ENGELS, AND MARXISMS
Marx
for the 21st Century
Reevaluating Marx’s Critique of
Political Economy
Edited by
João Antonio de Paula
Hugo da Gama Cerqueira
Leonardo Gomes de Deus
Eduardo da Motta e Albuquerque
Marx, Engels, and Marxisms
The Marx renaissance is underway on a global scale. Wherever the critique
of capitalism re-emerges, there is an intellectual and political demand for
new, critical engagements with Marxism. The peer-reviewed series Marx,
Engels and Marxisms (edited by Marcello Musto & Terrell Carver, with
Babak Amini, Francesca Antonini, Paula Rauhala & Kohei Saito as Assistant Editors) publishes monographs, edited volumes, critical editions,
reprints of old texts, as well as translations of books already published
in other languages. Our volumes come from a wide range of political
perspectives, subject matters, academic disciplines and geographical areas,
producing an eclectic and informative collection that appeals to a diverse
and international audience. Our main areas of focus include: the oeuvre
of Marx and Engels, Marxist authors and traditions of the 19th and 20th
centuries, labour and social movements, Marxist analyses of contemporary
issues, and reception of Marxism in the world.
João Antonio de Paula ·
Hugo da Gama Cerqueira ·
Leonardo Gomes de Deus ·
Eduardo da Motta e Albuquerque
Editors
Marx for the 21st
Century
Reevaluating Marx’s Critique of Political Economy
Editors
João Antonio de Paula
Department of Economics
Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais
Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil
Hugo da Gama Cerqueira
Department of Economics
Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais
Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil
Leonardo Gomes de Deus
Department of Economics
Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais
Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil
Eduardo da Motta e Albuquerque
Department of Economics
Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais
Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil
ISSN 2524-7123
ISSN 2524-7131 (electronic)
Marx, Engels, and Marxisms
ISBN 978-3-031-22010-4
ISBN 978-3-031-22011-1 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22011-1
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2025
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc.
in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such
names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for
general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither
the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with
respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been
made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps
and institutional affiliations.
Cover illustration: sarayut Thaneerat via Getty Images
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
If disposing of this product, please recycle the paper.
Acknowledgments
This book would not have been completed without the support of various
individuals and institutions, to whom we owe our sincere gratitude.
A special acknowledgment is due to the colleagues who, during our
research on Marx’s work, provided us with generous comments, support
and encouragement, including Michael Krätke, Rolf Hecker, Susumu
Takenaga, Alex Callinicos, Lucia Pradella, Denis Melnik, Michael Heinrich, Sofia Lalopoulou-Apostolidou, Fred Moseley, Carl-Erich Vollgraf,
Kevin Anderson and Marcello Musto.
We also thank our colleagues Carlos Eduardo Suprinyak and Alexandre
Mendes Cunha, with whom we shared the research and authorship of two
articles, now republished as chapters in this book, for their collaborative
efforts.
A warm acknowledgment is also extended to the students who collaborated as research assistants at various stages of our investigation: Guilherme Habib Santos Curi, Marco, Túlio Vieira, Luise Soares, Giulia
Tonon, Rafaella Carnevali, Tatiana Guimarães, Caroline Dussin, Manuel
Bueno, Tiago Guedes de Camargo, Victor Toledo Ferraz and Elton Rosa.
Our thanks to Martin C. Nicholl and Helena Mader for their translation and revision of some chapters.
We are deeply grateful to the Brazilian research funding agencies—
Capes, CNPq and Fapemig—for their financial support at different stages
of our research.
v
vi
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We also thank the International Institute of Social History (IISG) in
Amsterdam for allowing us to reproduce images from the Karl Marx/
Friedrich Engels Papers collection, as well as to its staff, who helped us
obtain copies of the Notebook B113.
Our gratitude goes to the editors of Beiträge zur Marx-EngelsForschung, Revista de Economia Política, Síntese and Review of Radical
Political Economics for permitting us to republish as chapters in this book
the texts originally published in these journals.
Finally, we extend our appreciation to the academic community
of the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG)—especially
our colleagues from the Department of Economics and Cedeplar—
for fostering a stimulating and cooperative academic environment that
ensures a plurality of interests and theoretical orientations, even amidst
the most adverse political circumstances. To the professors, staff and
students of UFMG, our special thanks.
Belo Horizonte
July 2024
João Antonio de Paula
Hugo da Gama Cerqueira
Leonardo Gomes de Deus
Eduardo da Motta e Albuquerque
Acknowledgments to Reprinted
Articles
CERQUEIRA, H. E. A. G. Breve história da edição crítica das obras de
Karl Marx. Revista de Economia Política, v. 35, n. 4, pp. 825–844, 2015.
DEUS, L. G. Um conto de duas crises: pesquisa e redação de O Capital
entre 1857 e 1868. Síntese, v. 46, n. 146, pp. 515–540, 2019.
PAULA, J. A.; DEUS, L. G.; CERQUEIRA, H. E. A. G.; ALBUQUERQUE, E. New starting point(s): Marx, technological revolutions
and changes in the centre-periphery divide. Revista de Economia Política,
v. 40, n. 1, pp. 100–116, 2020.
PAULA, J. A.; CERQUEIRA, H. E. A. G; DEUS, L. G.; SUPRINYAK,
C. E.; ALBUQUERQUE, E. M. Investigating Financial Innovation and
Stock Exchanges. Marx’s Notebooks on the crisis of 1866 and structural
changes in capitalism. Beiträge zur Marx-Engels-Forschung, v. 2014/5,
pp. 194–217, 2016.
PAULA, J. A.; CERQUEIRA, H. E. A. G.; CUNHA, A. M.;
SUPRINYAK, C. E.; DEUS, L. G.; ALBUQUERQUE, E. M. Notes
on a crisis: the Exzerpthefte and Marx’s method of research and composition. The Review of Radical Political Economics, v. 45, pp. 162–182,
2013 (https://doi.org/10.1177/0486613412458648).
vii
Introduction
Contemporary capitalism and its crises present huge challenges for
theoretical analysis and political action. Marx remains an indispensable
reference to help deal with these challenges—both old and new.
Marx and his work are at the intersection of the different intellectual
interests that led us to the creation of a research group on Contemporary Political Economy, bringing together professors from the Center for
Regional Development and Planning at the Federal University of Minas
Gerais (Cedeplar-UFMG, Brazil). Established in 1998, it has gathered
professors, researchers and students from the graduate and undergraduate
programs in Economics at UFMG, presenting a changing configuration
at different times.
Over the years, the group’s activities have involved the publication
of books and articles, the organization of seminars and workshops, the
offering of courses on researched authors and topics and the supervision
of theses and dissertations in the undergraduate and graduate programs.
In carrying out these tasks, the group has benefited from the interactions established and the support received from researchers from Brazil,
the Netherlands, Germany, the United States, Russia, Japan and the
United Kingdom. These contributions have been extremely valuable for
the development of our group and for the definition of some investigative paths, especially those related to studies of Marx’s unpublished
manuscripts and other materials made available through the MEGA2
project.
ix
x
INTRODUCTION
This book is the product of this joint, cooperative and dedicated effort.
As the reader will see, the book brings together articles by different
authors, four articles having been individually authored, while the other
three are the result of collaborations among members of the group and
occasional outside contributors. This is a demonstration of our commitment to working toward a common purpose, despite potentially adopting
differing viewpoints or interpretations, which is to provide fresh views on
Marx’s work in the context of contemporary capitalism.
This book suggests that there are two sets of changes that must
be understood in order to deal with contemporary capitalism and the
challenges faced by researchers and activists in the twenty-first century.
The first set of changes refers to capitalism as a system in continuous evolution, transformed by every crisis that impacts and reshapes its
dynamic; a system characterized by a strong expansionary drive that now
encompasses the entire world. As Celso Furtado (2002) puts forward,
there is a series of “metamorphoses of capitalism” to be understood.
The second set of changes concerns the analysis and interpretation of
Marx’s works. During the twentieth century, the horizons of study and
knowledge regarding his works underwent significant transformations.
This included a broader dissemination of his works through translations
of known texts and the discovery of unpublished works. Additionally, the
extensive debates and controversies surrounding Marx’s ideas, along with
their diffusion into universities and academic institutions, enriched the
collective understanding of his theories. The twenty-first century begins
with an even greater accessibility to his works facilitated by the consolidation and systematic organization of the collective and international effort
around MEGA2 .
In our view, these two ongoing changes should be aligned. A better,
more comprehensive and more nuanced understanding of Marx can be a
powerful stimulus for the investigations of contemporary capitalism and
its permanent changes.
That is why our book begins with a chapter on the edition and
the reception of Marx’s texts, written by Hugo da Gama Cerqueira.
It provides a systematic overview of the various attempts to organize a
complete edition of Marx’s works, starting with David Riazanov’s efforts
in the 1920s and the fate of the first MEGA, culminating in the development of the MEGA2 project. This project contributed new insights into
Marx’s work, identifying its blind alleys and the systematic efforts Marx
made to broaden his own horizons. These insights have already led to
INTRODUCTION
xi
new interpretations of classic themes and have sparked new debates and
controversies as indicated at the end of the chapter, which concludes with
an invitation to explore this bibliographic treasure now available to the
public.
One of the most significant outcomes of the MEGA2 is a clearer understanding of the incomplete and unfinished state of Capital. Chapter 2,
written by João Antônio de Paula, addresses various interpretations of
Marx’s plans, as well as what Marx managed to complete during his
lifetime. This chapter explores how the different levels of completeness
should be understood for an accurate reading of Capital as a whole. It
reviews several debates that occurred both before and after the release
of MEGA2 and suggests that the interpretations made prior to MEGA2
can now be reassessed with empirical evidence on Marx’s efforts, potentially challenging some of those earlier views. Furthermore, the chapter
highlights the unfinished nature of Capital, showing how the new findings of MEGA2 enhance our understanding of its incomplete state. João
Antonio de Paula presents MEGA2 as both a tool for interpreting the
result of Marx’s work and a guide for further research into his extensive
and unfinished project.
Our research group greatly benefited from the new sources for investigations on Marx. The materials available at the International Institute of
Social History (IISH) in Amsterdam, now also accessible online, such as
Marx’s unpublished manuscripts and notebooks, were extensively used in
our collective research. Chapters 3–7 demonstrate how we explored and
utilized this material.
Chapter 3 was written by João Antonio de Paula, Hugo da
Gama Cerqueira, Alexandre Mendes Cunha, Carlos Eduardo Suprinyak,
Leonardo Gomes de Deus and Eduardo Albuquerque. It offered an
opportunity to deal with Notebook B113, which contains excerpts from
Marx’s readings after 1867, with a focus on crises, especially the crisis
of 1866. Researching Notebook B113 and the literature reviewed within
it, such as articles published in The Economist and in The Money Market
Review, provided us with additional insights into some aspects of Marx’s
method of research. Furthermore, our investigation of that notebook
suggested ways to interpret the unfinished nature of Capital. Our hypothesis is that Marx was collecting empirical and theoretical material for his
forthcoming editorial work on Volumes II and III. There would be no
xii
INTRODUCTION
reason for Marx to keep, especially in Volume III, only the detailed references to the crises that happened before 1863. There would also be no
reason not to include his investigation of the 1866 crisis in that volume.
Chapter 4, written by João Antonio de Paula, Hugo da Gama
Cerqueira, Carlos Eduardo Suprinyak, Leonardo Gomes de Deus and
Eduardo Albuquerque, complements the previous investigation by
extending it to Notebooks B108 and B109. These three notebooks—
B108, B109 and B113—provide a very detailed picture of Marx’s
studies. Our analysis shows how Marx tracked and excerpted evidence
of the structural transformations that capitalism in the United Kingdom
underwent during and after the crisis of 1866.
Chapter 5, written by Leonardo Gomes de Deus, offers a theoretical
reflection on Marx’s analysis of the crises of 1857 and 1866, drawing from
both published and unpublished works. While the first crisis was extensively examined and commented in the first and third volumes of Capital,
the second crisis was thoroughly investigated by Marx after the initial
publishing of the first volume of Capital in 1867. However, these findings were not included in Volume III: it would have been challenging for
Engels to incorporate those excerpts and notes into his editorial work of
the 1880s and 1890s. Nonetheless, the lessons that can be gleaned from
these sources, now available through MEGA2 , not only provide empirical
evidence of the incompleteness of Marx’s seminal work, but also have the
potential to inform new interpretations of Capital.
Chapter 6, written by João Antonio de Paula, Hugo da Gama
Cerqueira, Leonardo Gomes de Deus and Eduardo Albuquerque, draws
on evidence from Notebooks B51, B108, B109, B113, B156 and B162
to present topics of Marx’s investigations in the final years of his life.
Marx explored two very broad and novel avenues in his research: the
possibilities and challenges of capitalist expansion into new regions and
new technological eras. The first subject, which had been investigated
earlier, can be seen as Marx expanding his investigations into what could
be called the contemporary capitalist periphery, including readings about
different parts of the world such as India, Ceylon and Java. The second
subject is the investigation of an emerging technology: electricity. These
two subjects highlight two arenas where capitalism would renew and
expand: through new technological revolutions and the incorporation of
new regions into its global dynamic.
Finally, Chapter 7, written by Eduardo Albuquerque, discusses how
Marx addresses a key category in his critique of political economy:
INTRODUCTION
xiii
surplus profit. This chapter combines Marx’s published and unpublished
works on profits, including notebooks with excerpts (particularly B106)
focused on the economy of the United States. These excerpts, along
with the literature originally reviewed by Marx, examine changes in
transports and other ongoing developments in the US economy, referencing major companies such as Standard Oil. Additionally, this chapter
explores how Marx’s contributions, as illustrated by Schumpeter, influenced economic thought in various approaches throughout the twentieth
century—an intellectual legacy that we must/should incorporate into the
twenty-first-century scenario.
These seven chapters, though written by different authors, are the
result of the joint work of our research group, offering multiple viewpoints which enhance the distinctive character of this book. The reader
thus has an opportunity to explore varied approaches on the matter and is
invited to consider how Marx, whose works are more thoroughly known
and understood after MEGA2 , can help us to comprehend twenty-firstcentury capitalism and its ongoing structural transformations. This deeper
understanding is essential for formulating an updated socialist alternative.
João Antonio de Paula
Hugo da Gama Cerqueira
Leonardo Gomes de Deus
Eduardo da Motta e Albuquerque
Contents
1
2
3
4
5
A Brief History of the Critical Edition of the Works
of Karl Marx
Hugo da Gama Cerqueira
1
Dialectic of Unfinishedness: 150 Years of Volume 1
of Capital
João Antonio de Paula
27
Notes on a Crisis: The Exzerpthefte and Marx’s Method
of Research and Composition
João Antonio de Paula, Hugo da Gama Cerqueira,
Alexandre Mendes Cunha, Carlos Eduardo Suprinyak,
Leonardo Gomes de Deus,
and Eduardo da Motta e Albuquerque
Investigating Financial Innovation and Stock
Exchanges: Marx, the Notebooks on the Crisis of 1866
and Structural Changes in Capitalism
João Antonio de Paula, Hugo da Gama Cerqueira,
Carlos Eduardo Suprinyak, Leonardo Gomes de Deus,
and Eduardo da Motta e Albuquerque
A Tale of Two Crises: Research and Writing of Capital
Between 1857 and 1868
Leonardo Gomes de Deus
71
103
131
xv
xvi
6
7
CONTENTS
New Starting Point(s): Marx, Technological
Revolutions and Changes in the Center-Periphery Divide
João Antonio de Paula, Hugo da Gama Cerqueira,
Leonardo Gomes de Deus,
and Eduardo da Motta e Albuquerque
Surplus Profit: A Key Concept for an Investigation
of Modern Industrial Capitalism
Eduardo da Motta e Albuquerque
Index
159
183
211
List of Figures
Fig. 3.1
Fig. 3.2
Fig. 3.3
Fig. 3.4
Fig. 3.5
Fig. 4.1
Fig. 4.2
A reproduction of Marx’s index for his notes on The
Economist and The Money Market Review (Source
Notebook B113, p. 22. Karl Marx/Friederich Engels
Papers, International Institute of Social History,
Amsterdam [see http://www.iisg.nl/archives/en/files/m/
10760604.php])
Marx’s notes on “Causes of present commercial depression”
Partial reproduction of the 18 January 1868 issue of The
Money Market Review (p. 59)
A transcription of Marx’s index for his notes on The
Economist and The Money Market Review (Source
Notebook B113, pp. 87–89 Karl Marx/Friederich
Engels Papers, International Institute of Social History,
Amsterdam (see http://www.iisg.nl/archives/en/files/m/
10760604.php), authors’ transcription.)
Appendix: MEGA Second Section: “The Capital”
and Preparatory Works (Source International Institute
of Social History [http://www.iisg.nl/imes/mega2.php]).
Marx’s reproduction of “Analysis of the Bank Rates
of Discount for 22 years” (Source B102-B108, p. 14)
Marx’s reproduction of a table on the “State of the Stock
Market (1860–1866)” (Source B102-B108, p. 26, The
Money Market Review, 12 Jan 1867, p. 37)
95
96
97
98
99
116
117
xvii
xviii
LIST OF FIGURES
Fig. 4.3
Fig. 4.4
Fig. 6.1
Fig. 6.2
Fig. 6.3
Fig. 6.4
Reproduction of Quotations of the London Stock
Exchange (May, 1866) (Source The Money Market Review,
5 May 1866, pp. 618–619)
Marx’s transcription of statistics collected by The Money
Market Review (Source B101-B109, p. 255, The Money
Market Review, 9 March 1867, p. 295)
Contents of notebook B162 (1881–1882) (Source IISG,
https://search.socialhistory.org/Record/ARCH00860#
A072e534c62)
Contents of notebook B56 (1851) (Source IISG, https://
search.socialhistory.org/Record/ARCH00860#A072e534c
62)
Reference to “The Rocket”, 1829, excerpts from A. Ure,
in notebook B51 (1851) (Source B51, IISG)
(A) Reference to “La Physique Moderne”, 1882, excerpts
in notebook B156 (1882) (B) Contents of E. Hospitallier’s
La Physisque Moderne 1882 (Source 4A [B156, IISG], 4B
[Hospitallier])
120
123
161
163
164
175
List of Tables
Table 2.1
Table 3.1
Translations of the expression “vertracktes Ding”
in Chapter I of Volume I of Capital
Marx’s active correspondence about Capital, 1843–1881
64
79
Chart 1.1
Chart 1.2
Volumes published in the MEGA
Volumes of the MEGA2 published up until April 2024
7
14
xix
CHAPTER 1
A Brief History of the Critical Edition
of the Works of Karl Marx
Hugo da Gama Cerqueira
All I know is that I am not a Marxist.1
In a book published in the early 1980s I came across a cartoon. It showed a
man meeting Karl Marx on a cloud in heaven. The man says to Marx ‘I’ve
read your book.’ Marx replies: ‘Oh really? And how does it end?’ 2
1 Engels attributed this phrase to Marx in a letter dated 5 August 1890, addressed to
Conrad Schmidt.
2 As told by Bellofiore (1999, p. 43).
This text was originally published in Portuguese by the Revista de Economia
Política (Cerqueira 2015). It was translated into English by Martin C. Nicholl.
The research that gave rise to the text was supported by the Brazilian National
Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq). In this version,
the information on the MEGA2 publications has been brought up to date.
H. da Gama Cerqueira (B)
Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, Brazil
e-mail: hugo@cedeplar.ufmg.br
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature
Switzerland AG 2025
J. A. de Paula et al. (eds.), Marx for the 21st Century, Marx, Engels,
and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22011-1_1
1
2
H. DA GAMA CERQUEIRA
Introduction
In the last century and a half scholars and researchers of the most varied
fields all over the world have read the works of Karl Marx. It would
be hard to remember any other thinker who has been so influential in
this period. A considerable part of the concepts we use to think our
contemporary world derives directly or indirectly from his works. His
ideas address the entire spectrum of the social sciences and up until
recently, Marxism, the doctrine inspired by his works was embraced by
governments that ruled over a third of all humanity (Hobsbawn 2011,
p. 311).
While it is true that Marx has been widely read, it must also be noted
that the reception of his work contains many problems, distortions and
even paradoxes (Thomas 1991). First of all, the fact that his ideas have
invaded the curricula of so many academic disciplines should not lead us
to forget the relative marginalization of his influence precisely in those
fields in which he would have most to teach us, economics for one, but
also philosophy and politics. Second, in those countries that have venerated Marx’s name and in which Marxism became an official ideology, the
reading of his works was restricted to a handful of scholars associated
with little-known institutions. Outside of them, what prevailed was the
teaching of a simplified monolithic version of Marx’s ideas, constructed
in such a way as to justify the political practices of the regimes in power.
Lastly, followers and adversaries of Marx alike established a direct continuity between his ideas and those that populated the different extant
versions of Marxism. Thus, the differences that could exist—and that
most certainly do exist—between the Marxian concepts and the ideas of
Marxists were relegated to a lower plane and eventually extinguished.
Indeed, if we take those judgments and concepts that we can safely
attribute to Marx himself as being Marxian and those ideas that the
majority considers to be in accordance with his intellectual legacy as being
Marxist, then it is easy to see that not everything that passes as Marxist
is actually Marxian. As an example, the theories of imperialism belong
much more to Lenin, Hilferding or Bukharin than to Marx himself. On
the other hand, however strange or paradoxical it may seem, it is equally
true that not everything Marxian can be considered Marxist even if only
for the simple reason that Marxism developed at a time when there were
many gaps in the knowledge of Marx’s writings and for that reason it was
partial and inadequate (Thomas 1991, pp. 25–26).
1
A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE CRITICAL EDITION …
3
That was the case, for example, with the doctrine of “historical
materialism”, an expression that Marx himself never used. Authors like
Plekhanov, Mehring and Kautsky formulated it in the last decades of the
nineteenth century and the first ones of the twentieth century, long before
the publication of the set of manuscripts The German Ideology. In turn,
the doctrine decisively influenced the way in which the manuscripts of
Marx and Engels were read and interpreted, that is, as a text in which, for
the first time, a version more or less complete of the so-called “historical
materialism” could be found.
In the same vein, the discrepancy between Marxism and some of
Marx’s ideas enables an understanding of the tension brought about by
the publishing of works like the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts
of 1844 and the Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Grundrisse). When those texts emerged, they challenged the extant conventional interpretations of the critique of political economy and gave rise
to long controversies in which they were often reduced to the condition
of works of Marx’s youth, prior to maturity and incompatible with the
meaning already established by the theoretical elaboration of Marx; one
that was considered to be insusceptible to questioning.
For that reason, the fact that Marxism had constituted itself before the
majority of Marx’s texts became known, understanding the reception of
Marx’s work requires a firm comprehension of the editing and publishing
movements of each one of his texts. In turn, a knowledge of the two
processes, the way Marx’s works came to public knowledge, and the way
they were read, can remove the obstacles and suggest pathways for a rereading of those texts in a new light and to a reinterpretation of Marx’s
thinking, this time free from the ideological functions that have weighed
down on it in the past.
That is what we endeavor to show in this article. It is organized into
three parts, apart from this introduction, and a brief conclusion The first
section discusses the early attempts at editing the works of Marx and
Engels up until the abrupt end of the first Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe
(MEGA) (The Complete Works of Marx and Engels). The second section
briefly addresses the edition of Marx-Engels-Werke (Marx and Engels’
Works) and presents the new MEGA2 project, while the third section
analyzes some of the repercussions of the MEGA2 on the interpretations
of some of Marx’s consecrated texts.
4
H. DA GAMA CERQUEIRA
The First Efforts and the MEGA
130 years after the death of Karl Marx, a significant part of his writings
still remains unpublished and, therefore, inaccessible and unknown to the
vast majority of those who research his work.3 Indeed the problem of
how to make those manuscripts public dates back to the long and laborious efforts of Engels to edit and publish the fourth edition of Volume
I of Capital , launched in 1890, and for a long time considered to be
the standard or “definitive” version and to compose, from the notes that
Marx left, Volumes II and III of that work, launched in 1885 and 1894.
The ascension of the socialist movement at the end of the nineteenth
century aroused interest in the works of Marx and Engels and that led
to the emergence of translations of classical texts, such as the Communist
Manifesto, in various languages. The same movement gave rise to Engels’
attempt to systematically publish an expressive part of Marx’s works in the
languages they had originally been written in, which meant the re-editing
of texts that had long been out of print such as The Poverty of Philosophy and The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, the publishing of
unedited texts of Marx, namely, the Critique of the Gotha Programme and
the two volumes of Capital and finally the publishing of some new works
by Engels such as Anti-Duhring and The Origin of the Family, Private
Property and the State. However, there was no intention, at the time, of
publishing the complete set of Marx’s writings or even of editing them in
such a way as to enable a reconstruction of the genesis and development
of his thinking. What Engels had in mind was to edit volumes that would
make the set of theoretical writings, that in his view formed the polished
corpus of the doctrine he and Marx had elaborated, accessible to socialist
militants (Anderson 2010, p. 247; Hobsbawn 1983, p. 427).
The idea of publishing a critical edition of the complete works of Marx
and Engels dates back to December 1910, when it was discussed by a
prominent group of Austro-Marxists. However, the plan for a so-called
“Vienna Edition” did not materialize, whether because of difficulties
in financing it or because of problems associated with the outbreak of
the First World War. Even so, in the first two decades of the twentieth century, the set of Marx and Engels’ texts available for reading was
expanded by the scholarly efforts of Karl Kautsky who between 1905 and
3 Some parts of this section have been reproduced from earlier works of the author
(Cerqueira 2010; Paula et al. 2013).
1
A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE CRITICAL EDITION …
5
1910 published part of the 1861–63 manuscripts known as the Theory
of Surplus Value; by Franz Mehring, who in 1902 edited a collection
of Marx and Engels’ texts from the years 1841–50 and some letters
from the period 1849–62 and, finally, by David Riazanov, who published
two volumes that gathered together articles that Marx and Engels had
written in the 1850s for newspapers like the New York Tribune and
the People’s Paper (Kautsky 1905–1910; Mehring 1902; Riazanov 1917;
Rojahn 1998, p. 3; Hecker 2010, p. 282).
By then Riazanov had become one of the people with the greatest
knowledge of Marx’s literary legacy. The contacts he made with Auguste
Bebel and Kautsky ensured his access to those manuscripts of Marx and
Engels that were in the hands of the German Social-Democratic Party as
well as those of Marx’s texts that had been preserved by Laura Lafargue.
The advent of the Russian Revolution in 1917 gave him the opportunity
to begin his first endeavor to materialize a historical–critical edition of
the complete works of Marx and Engels: the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe
(MEGA). Lenin had given him the task of founding and administering the
Marx-Engels Institute (MEI) in Moscow. Riazanov received considerable
material and financial support for his organization as well as the freedom
to recruit his staff from among the available specialists. He set up a broad
network of correspondents in Europe and established intense collaboration with the Institut für Sozialforschung (Social Research Institute) in
Frankfurt which, at that time, was under the direction of Carl Grünberg.
Thus, he was able to gather all the material needed to start editing the
MEGA, which involved the acquisition of originals or obtaining photocopies of the letters, manuscripts and volumes that were in the archives
of the SPD in Berlin.
The editorial plan of the first MEGA foresaw the launching of 42
volumes divided into four parts or sections. The first section of 17
volumes was intended to bring together the works of Marx and Engels,
with the exception of those related to Capital which would be the object
of the 13 volumes of the second section. The third part was supposed
to embrace all of Marx and Engels’ correspondence, including not only
correspondence between the two authors but also their letters to Lassalle,
Weydemeyer, Kugelmann, Freiligrath and others. Lastly, the original plan
foresaw a fourth part of two volumes containing thematic and nominal
indexes.
6
H. DA GAMA CERQUEIRA
Only 11 of the originally planned volumes actually appeared in the
period between 1927 and 1935 (see Chart 1.1). Even so, they considerably expanded the set of available works insofar as they included editions
of texts such as the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts and The
German Ideology that had decisive and prolonged impacts on the debates
around the interpretation of Marx’s thinking. To those 11 volumes, can
be added the special volume of Engels’s Anti-Duhring published in 1935,
the two volumes of Marx’s manuscripts of the period 1857–58, and the
Foundations of a Critique of Political Economy (Grundrisse), launched
from 1939 to 1941 in the same format as the books edited in the MEGA
(Cerqueira 2010, pp. 208–212).
On the other hand, it is important to observe that despite the rigorous
philological criteria that Riazanov and his team adopted, the MEGA
project did not plan the publication of a significant part of Marx’s
manuscripts, made up chiefly of his Exzerpthefte (excerpts). These last
consist of long passages from works that Marx had studied in the course
of his life, extracts of those he had copied, resumed and commented
and dozens of notebooks written for his own personal use. In a report
that Riazanov wrote in 1923, he mentioned the existence of those notebooks full of comments which he felt would be useful, especially for
Marx’s biographers, but which the MEGA project4 had not thought
about publishing. Indeed, the very existence of some of those notebooks
and the nature of the themes they addressed caused a lot of surprise.
If in 1881–82 he [i.e., Marx] lost his ability for intensive, independent,
intellectual creation, he nevertheless never lost the ability for research.
Sometimes, in reconsidering these Notebooks, the question arises: Why
did he waste so much time on this systematic, fundamental summary, or
expend so much labor as he spent as late as the year 1881, on one basic
book on geology, summarizing it chapter by chapter. In the 63rd year of
his life – that is inexcusable pedantry. Here is another example: he received,
in 1878, a copy of Morgan’s work. On 98 pages of his very miniscule handwriting (you should know that a single page of his is the equivalent of a
minimum of 2.2 pages of print) he makes a detailed summary of Morgan.
In such manner does the old Marx work. (Riazanov apud Anderson 2010,
pp. 248–249)
4 That came about with “some mathematics notebooks of Marx’s” that were edited
in the 1920s by a young German mathematician, Julius Gumbel, but were only actually
published in 1968. In that respect see Alcouffe and Wells (2009, pp. 1–12).
1
Chart 1.1
A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE CRITICAL EDITION …
7
Volumes published in the MEGA
Abt. 1. Sämtliche Werke und Schriften mit ausnahme des Kapitals [Complete Works
with the Exception of Das Kapital]
Bd. 1. Karl Marx. Werke und Schriften bis Anfang 1844 nebst Briefen und
Dokumenten [Works and writings up to the beginning of 1844, plus letters and other
documents]. Hrsg. von D. Rjazanov. Halbbd. 1. Werke und Schriften. Unveränd.
Neudr. d. Ausg. Frankfurt/M., 1927. LXXXIV, 626 S.: mit Abb
Bd. 1. Karl Marx. Werke und Schriften bis Anfang 1844 nebst Briefen und
Dokumenten [Works and writings up to the beginning of 1844 plus letters and other
documents] [C]. Hrsg. von D. Rjazanov. Halbbd. 2., Jugendarbeiten, Nachträge,
Briefe und Dokumente. Unveränd. Neudr. d. Ausg. Berlin 1929. XLV, 371 S.: mit Abb
Bd. 2. Friedrich Engels. Werke und Schriften bis Anfang 1844 nebst Briefen und
Dokumenten [Works and writings up to the beginning of 1844 plus letters and other
documents].. Hrsg. von D. Rjazanov, Unveränd. Neudr. d. Ausg. Berlin, 1930.
LXXXII, 691 S.: mit Abb
Bd. 3. Karl Marx; Friedrich Engels. Die heilige Familie und Schriften von Marx von
Anfang 1844 bis Anfang 1845 [Holy family and Marx’s writings from the beginning
of 1844 up to the beginning of 1845]. Hrsg. von V. Adoratskij, Unveränd. Neudr. d.
Ausg. Berlin, 1932. XXI, 640 S.: mit Abb
Bd. 4. Friedrich Engels. Die Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England und andere
Schriften von August 1844 bis Juni 1846 [The situation of the working class in
England and other writings from August 1844 to June 1846]. Hrsg. von V.
Adoratskij, Unveränd. Neudr. d. Ausg. Berlin, 1932. XX, 558 S.: mit Abb
Bd. 5. Karl Marx; Friedrich Engels. Die deutsche Ideologie. Kritik d. neuesten dt.
Philosophie in ihren Repräsentanten, Feuerbach, B. Bauer u. Stirner u.d. dt. Sozialismus
in seinen verschiedenen Propheten 1845–1846 [The German ideology. A critique of the
most recent German philosophy in the person of its representatives Feuerbach, B.
Bauer and Stirner, and of German socialism in its various prophets. 1845–1846]. Hrsg.
von V. Adoratskij, Unveränd. Neudr. d. Ausg. Berlin, 1932. XIX, 706 S.: mit Abb
Bd. 6. Karl Marx; Friedrich Engels. Werke und Schriften von Mai 1846 bis März
1848 [Works abd writngs. May, 1846, to March, 1848]. Hrsg. von V. Adoratskij,
Unveränd. Neudr. d. Ausg. Moskau/Leningrad, 1933. XXI, 746 S.: mit Abb
Bd. 7. Karl Marx; Friedrich Engels. Werke und Schriften von März bis Dezember
1848 [Works and writings from March to December, 1848]. Hrsg. von V. Adoratskij,
Unveränd. Neudr. d. Ausg. Moskau, 1935. XXII, 768 S.: mit Abb
Abt. 3. Briefwechsel [Correspondence]
Bd. 1. Der Briefwechsel zwischen Marx und Engels 1844–1853 [Correspondence
between Marx and Engels, 1844–1853]. Hrsg. von D. Rjazanov, Unveränd. Neudr. d.
Ausg. Berlin, 1929. L, 539 S.: mit Abb
Bd. 2. Der Briefwechsel zwischen Marx und Engels 1854–1860 [Correspondence
between Marx and Engels, 1854–1860]. Hrsg. von D. Rjazanov, Unveränd. Neudr. d.
Ausg. Berlin, 1930. XXI, 564 S.: mit Abb
Bd. 3. Der Briefwechsel zwischen Marx und Engels 1861–1867 [Correspondence
between Marx and Engels, 1861–1867]. Hrsg. von D. Rjazanov, Unveränd. Neudr. d.
Ausg. Berlin, 1930. XXIII, 488 S.: mit Abb
(continued)
8
H. DA GAMA CERQUEIRA
Chart 1.1
(continued)
Abt. 1. Sämtliche Werke und Schriften mit ausnahme des Kapitals [Complete Works
with the Exception of Das Kapital]
Bd. 4. Der Briefwechsel zwischen Marx und Engels 1868–1883 [Correspondence
between Marx and Engels, 1868–1883]. Hrsg. von V. Adoratskij, Unveränd. Neudr. d.
Ausg. Berlin, 1931. XVI, 759 S.: mit Abb
Volumes Associated with the MEGA
Sonderbd. Friedrich Engels. Herrn Eugen Dührings Umwälzung der Wissenschaft.
Dialektik der Natur. 1873 – 1882 [Mr. Eugen Dühring revolutionizes Science. The
Dialectics of Nature. 1873–1882]. Hrsg. von V. Adoratskij. Sonderausg. z. 40.
Todestage von Friedrich Engels, Unveränd. Neudr. d. Ausg. Moskau 1935. XLVII,
846 S.: mit Abb
Karl Marx. Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie (Rohentwurf) 1857–1858
[Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (draft) 1857–1858]. Hauptw..
Moskau: Verl. f. fremdsprachige Literatur, 1939. XVI, 764 S.: 5 Taf
Karl Marx. Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie (Rohentwurf) 1857–1858
[Foundations of the Critique of Political economy (draft) 1857–1858]. Anh.,
1850–1859. Moskau: Verl. f. fremdsprachige Literatur, 1941. S. 770–1103
Source Elaborated based on the catalogue of the Deutschen Nationalbibliothek [German National
Library]
The truth is that, over time, Riazanov’s position in regard to those
notebooks seems to have evolved. In a text of 1929, he acknowledged
that, given the methods Marx adopted, it was sometimes difficult to
distinguish between what should be considered a notebook of extracts
from what should be considered a notebook of “preparatory work”. That
is because, even in those notebooks that hardly contain any comments
made by Marx, the respective excerpts are strictly grouped around a determined problem and should be considered as being “preparatory work” for
planned research. On the other hand, he stated that, in many notebooks,
the excerpts are alternated with Marx’s own observations, while, in others,
he unfolds long digressions that are the expression of his thinking. Well
aware that the study of the genesis of the critique of political economy
could not dispense with an examination of those notebooks, Riazanov
expressed his hope that the progress of the philological-historical research
on Marx’s work would be such, that, in a short space of time, the need
would be felt for an integral edition of the notebooks of excerpts (Hecker
2002, pp. 50–51).
Unfortunately, the fact is that, in the 1930s, such an expectation and
even the editorial endeavor of the MEGA succumbed to Stalinism and
1
A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE CRITICAL EDITION …
9
Nazism, which put off indefinitely, any possibility of seeing the complete
edition of Marx and Engels’ works. In 1931, Riazanov was arrested and
deposed from the direction of the Marx-Engels Institute. The leadership
of the Institute was then submitted to the control of the Communist
Party and entrusted to Vladimir Adoratskij. A good part of the Institute’s research staff was fired. The installation of Adoratskij represented
an inflection in the trajectory of the MEI whose primary mission was no
longer research, but instead concentrated on tasks related to education
and political propaganda unfolded under the Party’s direction. In regard
to editorial work, there was the publication of the Sochinenija (Collected
works) that is, the editions of the works of Marx and Engels in Russian,
which were published in 28 volumes (33 tomes), launched in the period
from 1928 to 1947. In this last, as well as in the volumes of MEGA
launched from 1931 on, the notes and introductions were in a tone
very different from those in the volumes that Riazanov had edited. Being
more concerned to affirm Marxism-Leninism and a supposed coherence
between the texts of Marx and Engels and the dominant concepts of the
Stalinist period, they put aside the historical–critical approach adopted
in the initial volumes. Furthermore, Riazanov’s concern with ensuring a
reproduction that was as faithful as possible to the manuscripts’ contents
gave rise to arbitrary distortions and manipulations. Lastly, the rise of
Nazism provoked the emigration and dispersal of the Institute’s network
of researchers and collaborators in Germany and decisively contributed
to the demise of the MEGA editorial project (Cerqueira 2010; Takenaga
2009; Zapata 1985; Musto 2007).
The New MEGA
It was only in the 1950s, especially after Stalin’s death and the ensuing
political upheaval that space opened up, both in Moscow and Berlin, for
the discussion of the plan for a new critical edition. There were many
problems associated with that initiative, the high cost of the project, to
start with, but also concerns of an ideological order: the fear that an
edition of that kind would further fragilize the primordial function of
Marx and Engels for the communist parties and for the Eastern European
regimes which was to serve as supports for Marxism-Leninism (Bellofiore;
Fineschi 2009, p. 3; Rojahn 1998, p. 3 ss.).
In view of those difficulties, the East Berlin Marxism-Leninism Institute initiated a less ambitious editorial project, namely, the editing of
10
H. DA GAMA CERQUEIRA
a collection, Marx-Engels-Werke (MEW), which would consist of 41
volumes published between 1956 and 1968. Even though it was not
complete, it constituted the most comprehensive edition among those
available. The majority of Marx scholars quickly adopted it as a reference
and it served as the base for translations into various languages, starting
with the Japanese edition, launched in the period from 1959 to 1975,
and later, the 50-volume English edition, Marx-Engels Collected Works
(MECW), published between 1975 and 2005 (Takenaga 2009).
In the late 1960s, with the political resistance at least partly overcome,
the Marxism-Leninism Institutes of Moscow and Berlin began the work of
editing a second Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe, the MEGA2 . A test volume
(Probeband) was launched in 1972 and then after intense discussions, the
editorial principles that would guide the new edition were established. It
was decided that it should be absolutely complete, including unabridged
versions of Marx and Engels’ published works and the notebooks, with
excerpts and observations as well as the letters written by others but
addressed to the two authors. It was also established that the material
should be transcribed in whichever language it had been composed in
and that the original spelling and punctuation should be preserved.
Initially, it was planned to publish 164 volumes but later, with the difficulty encountered to finance the project, the number was revised down to
114 volumes. Generally speaking, each volume consists of two tomes: the
first containing the texts of Marx and/or Engels, and the second with the
critical apparat of the edition. In addition, some of the volumes are spread
over different tomes. For example, Volume II.4, which brings together
the economic manuscripts that Marx wrote in the period from 1863 to
1868, is divided into three different tomes of text and another three of
the critical apparat.
The volumes are distributed in four sections. The first, containing texts
and drafts that are unrelated to Capital has only been published in printed
form. The second, with the various editions of Capital and the preparatory material related to that book, was published completely in printed
form but the edited texts of ten volumes are also available in digital form.
The third section, containing Marx and Engels’ correspondence and that
of others with them and the fourth section containing the excerpts, annotation, and marginalia will be composed of printed volumes and of some
volumes only available in digital format.
The materialization of this project will be crucially dependent on the
collaboration of the Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis
1
A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE CRITICAL EDITION …
11
(International Institute of Social History) which is the repository of most
of the original manuscripts of Marx and Engels.5 When Hitler came to
power, the papers that were in the hands of the German Social-Democrat
Party were taken abroad and later acquired by a Dutch insurance company
which donated them to the then recently established IISG where they
remain to this day (Rojhan 1998).
The Karl Marx/Friedrich Engels Papers collection of that Institute
embraces a huge amount of material.6 Among Marx’s papers, there are
personal documents and his correspondence with Engels, Bruno Bauer,
Nikolai Danielson, Moses Hess, Ludwig Kugelmann, Ferdinand Lassalle,
Wilhelm Liebknecht, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Arnold Ruge and many
others. The collection also includes correspondence with family members,
the manuscripts of his doctoral thesis, parts of the manuscript of Marx’s
Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and of The German Ideology, as
well as the economics manuscripts of the period 1857–1859 and parts
of Capital including corrections and notes for a printed second edition
of Book I. There are also 200 notebooks with excerpts from books and
publications on economics, history, philosophy and other scientific areas.
Among Engels’ papers, apart from his personal documents and his correspondence with Marx, Victor Adler, August Bebel, Eduard Bernstein, Karl
Kautsky, Antonio Labriola, Paul Lafargue, Georgij Plekhanov and many
others, there are also manuscripts of the Dialectics of Nature, and preliminary work for the composition of Anti-Duhring, as well as notes and
excerpts from books and other publications.7 From 1959 to 1965, the
IISG inventoried and organized all that material which is divided into 18
parts identified by the letters A to S.
At first, the IISG was hesitant about supporting or participating in
the MEGA2 project, whether because of the sheer size of the project
5 At the time the rest of the manuscripts were in the Moscow Marxism-Leninism
Institute and today they are in the Russian State Archive of Social and Political History.
6 In addition to the documents acquired from the SPD, the collection includes material
that was subsequently acquired by the IISG.
7 The collection also includes material of Marx’s family members (his wife and children and other relatives) and Papers that have something to do with Marx and Engels
such as pamphlets, clippings, reviews of his books and other articles, issues of magazines
containing his articles and so on. For further details see a description of the collection on
the site of the IISG.
12
H. DA GAMA CERQUEIRA
or because of its doubts as to how to conduct cooperation with institutions connected to political parties such as the MLIs of Moscow and
Berlin. In that light, it opted to not participate directly in the editorial
project, limiting itself to ceding the documents in its possession and, as a
counterpart, gaining access to the documents guarded by the MLIs. That
agreement ensured the project’s viability, and it started launching the first
volumes in 1975. While it is undeniable that the critical apparat of the
volumes launched in that period was marked by an unmistakable ideological accent, the academic nature of the project was preserved and, in time,
the collaboration among scholars and institutions became easier and more
productive, leading to the adherence of other groups and institutions
(Rojhan 1998).
The expansion of the group proved to be crucial in ensuring the continuity of the MEGA2 project after the dissolution of the Soviet Union
and the fall of the Eastern European regimes when the financing of
the project became a critical problem. In 1990, the IISG, the Moscow
MLI,8 the Berlin Academy of Sciences and the Karl Marx Haus (of
the Friedrich Ebert Foundation) came together to constitute the Internationale Marx-Engels-Stiftung (International Marx-Engels Foundation)
with headquarters in Amsterdam. It took over the direction of the MEGA
and the responsibility for, not only ensuring the financial resources for
the work but also the venture’s academic uniformity and quality. Accordingly, the project was internationalized with the setting up of working
groups in various countries (Japan, France, the United States, Russia and
Germany, among others) and performing without any political or ideological restrictions. The originally planned number of volumes was reduced
by eliminating around 30 volumes of the fourth section which would have
included notes Marx and Engels had made in the margins of texts they
had read (in addition to the integral reproduction of those texts).9
Up to this moment (April 2024), 75 volumes of the MEGA2 have been
published. Of the 32 planned for the first section, 25 are now available.
As regards the second section (basically, the texts on economics) the work
has been finalized with the publication of all 15 volumes as planned. 17
8 Later replaced by the Russian State Archive of Social and Political History.
9 They were replaced by Volume 32 of the fourth section of MEGA2 . That volume,
launched in 1999, contains a list of the books found in Marx and Engels’ personal libraries
and a description of the annotations and marks left in them by their owners.
1
A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE CRITICAL EDITION …
13
volumes of the 35 planned for the third section have been published.
Lastly, 18 of the 32 volumes planned for the fourth section have been
launched so far (see Chart 1.2).
Re-Readings and Controversies
Inspired by the New MEGA
To conclude this presentation of the problem, it is important to note
that, in many respects, the Marx who is emerging from this protracted
and laborious editing effort is quite different from the image we have had
of him up until recently; an image forged by successive generations of
adepts and critics of his thinking (Musto 2010; 2020, p. 408; Fineschi,
2008).
Above all, it is necessary to acknowledge the unfinished and incomplete
nature of his work and that characteristic should guide the reading and
understanding of the texts he has bequeathed to us. Not only did Marx
publish very little in comparison with the volume of manuscripts that he
wrote and the great research efforts that he made in the course of his
life, but it must also be recognized that, in many aspects, his work is
fragmentary, open-ended and unconcluded (Musto 2007).
The publishing of MEGA2 has made a considerable contribution
toward explaining those characteristics of Marx’s works and, based on
that, fostering new interpretations of consecrated themes and texts.
Putting aside any intention of conducting a lengthy analysis of the
controversies involved in these reinterpretation efforts, which would be
incompatible with the objectives and size of this text, and in order to
sustain what we have stated above, we present two debates that are exemplary illustrations of the new MEGA’s implications for understanding
Marx’s thinking.
The first concerns The German Ideology. It is well-known that for
decades the text was published and translated in the format in which
it came before the public for the first time in 1932, as part of the
first MEGA. Since then, it has been presented and read as if it were a
more or less finalized formulation of the so-called historical materialism
which was especially presented in the chapter headed “I. Feuerbach”.10
10 That “chapter” was published for the first time in 1924 in a Russian language version
and again in 1926 but in the language of the original.
14
H. DA GAMA CERQUEIRA
Chart 1.2
Volumes of the MEGA2 published up until April 2024
Erste Abteilung: Werke. Artikel. Entwürfe [First Section: Works, Articles and Drafts]
I/1 MARX: Werke · Artikel · Literarische Versuche bis März 1843. (Differenz der
demokratischen und epikureischen Naturphilosophie, publizistische Arbeiten u. a.) [Works ·
articles · literary essays, up until March 1843 (The Difference Between the Democritean
and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature; works published…etc.)], 1975
I/2 MARX: Werke · Artikel · Entwürfe. März 1843 bis August 1844. (Zur Kritik der
Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie, Zur Judenfrage, Ökonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte u. a.)
[Works · articles· drafts. March, 1843 to August, 1844 (Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of
Right, On the Jewish Question, Economic-philosophical manuscripts, etc.)] 2., unveränd.
Aufl. 2009
I/3 ENGELS: Werke · Artikel · Entwürfe. Bis August 1844 [Works · articles · drafts [until
August, 1844]. 1985
I/4 MARX & ENGELS: Werke · Artikel · Entwürfe. Ende August 1844 bis April 1846.
(Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England, Heilige Familie u. a.) [Works—Articles—Drafts.
End of August 1844 to April 1846 (Conditions of the working class in England, The Holy
Family, etc.)], 2022
I/5 MARX & ENGELS: Werke · Artikel · Entwürfe. Deutsche Ideologie. Manuskripte und
Drucke [Works—Articles—Drafts. The German Ideology. Manuscripts and printed material],
2017
I/7 MARX & ENGELS: Werke · Artikel · Entwürfe. Februar bis Oktober 1848
(Publizistik: Neue Rheinische Zeitung u. a.) [Works—Articles—Drafts. February to October
1848 (Journalism: Neue Rheinische Zeitung and others)], 2016
I/8 MARX & ENGELS: Werke · Artikel · Entwürfe. Oktober 1848 bis Februar 1849
(Publizistik: Neue Rheinische Zeitung u. a.) [Works—Articles—Drafts. October 1848 to
February 1849 (Journalism: Neue Rheinische Zeitung and others)], 2020
I/10 MARX & ENGELS: Werke · Artikel · Entwürfe. Juli 1849 bis Juni 1851 [Works ·
articles · drafts. July 1849 to June 1851]. 1977
I/11 MARX & ENGELS: Werke · Artikel · Entwürfe. Juli 1851 bis Dezember 1852
(Revolution and Counter Revolution, Der 18. Brumaire, Die großen Männer des Exils,
Enthüllungen u. a.) [Works · articles · drafts. July 1851 to December 1852 (Revolution and
counter-revolution, The 18th Brumaire, The Great Men of the Exile, Revelations etc.)].
1985
I/12 MARX & ENGELS: Werke · Artikel · Entwürfe. Januar bis Dezember 1853
(Publizistik: New-York Tribune, People’s Paper, Reform) [Works · articles · drafts. January to
December 1853. (Jornalism: New-York Tribune, People’s Paper, Reform)]. 1984
I/13 MARX & ENGELS: Werke · Artikel · Entwürfe. Januar bis Dezember 1854.
(Publizistik: New-York Tribune, People’s Paper) [Works · articles · drafts. January to
December 1854. (Jornalism: New-York Tribune, People’s Paper)]. 1985
I/14 MARX & ENGELS: Werke · Artikel · Entwürfe. Januar bis Dezember 1855.
(Publizistik: New-York Tribune, Neue Oder-Zeitung) [Works · articles · drafts. January to
December 1855. (Journalism: New-York Tribune, Neue Oder-Zeitung)]. 2001
I/16 MARX & ENGELS: Werke · Artikel · Entwürfe. Oktober 1857 bis Dezember 1858.
(Publizistik: New-York Tribune; Lexikonartikel: New American Cyclopædia)
[Works—Articles—Drafts. October 1857 to December 1858 (Publications: New-York Tribune;
Encyclopaedia article: New American Cyclopædia)], 2018
(continued)
1
Chart 1.2
A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE CRITICAL EDITION …
15
(continued)
Erste Abteilung: Werke. Artikel. Entwürfe [First Section: Works, Articles and Drafts]
I/18 MARX & ENGELS: Werke · Artikel · Entwürfe. Oktober 1859 bis Dezember 1860.
(Herr Vogt u. a.) [Works · articles · drafts. October 1859 to December 1860. (Herr Vogt
etc.)], 1984
I/20 MARX & ENGELS: Werke · Artikel · Entwürfe. September 1864 bis September 1867.
(Gründung und Anfangsjahre der Internationalen Arbeiterassoziation, Inauguraladresse, Die
preußische Militärfrage, Value, price and profit u. a.) [Works · articles · drafts. September
1864 to September, 1867. (Foundation and early Years of the International Workers
Association, Inaugural speech, The Prussian Military Question, wages, price and profit
etc.)]. 2., unveränd. Aufl. 2003
I/21 MARX & ENGELS: Werke · Artikel · Entwürfe. September 1867 bis März 1871.
(Internationale Arbeiterassoziation, Geschichte Irlands, Deutsch-Französischer Krieg u. a.)
[Works · articles · drafts. September 1867 to September 1871. (International Workers
Association, The History of Ireland, On the Franco-Prussian war etc.)]. 2009
I/22 MARX & ENGELS: Werke · Artikel · Entwürfe. März bis November 1871. (Civil
War in France, Internationale Arbeiterassoziation) [Works · articles · drafts. March to
November 1871. (Civil War in France, International Workers Association)]. 1978
I/24 MARX & ENGELS: Werke · Artikel · Entwürfe. Dezember 1872 bis Mai 1875.
(Internationale Arbeiterassiziation, Publizistik)) [Works · articles · drafts. December 1872 to
May 1875 September 1864 to September 1867. (International Workers Association,
Journalism)]. 1984
I/25 MARX & ENGELS: Werke · Artikel · Entwürfe. Mai 1875 bis Mai 1883. (Kritik
des Gothaer Programms, Publizistik) [Works · articles · drafts. May 1875 to May 1883.
(Critique of the Gotha Program, Journalism)]. 1985
I/26 ENGELS: Dialektik der Natur (1873–1882) [Dialectics of Nature (1873–1882)].
1985
I/27 ENGELS: Herrn Eugen Dührings Umwälzung der Wissenschaft [Herr Eugen
Dühring’s revolution in science]. 1988
I/29 ENGELS: Der Ursprung der Familie, des Privateigentums und des Staats [The
Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State]. 1990
I/30 MARX & ENGELS: Werke · Artikel · Entwürfe. März 1883 bis September 1886.
(Ludwig Feuerbach und der Ausgang der klassischen deutschen Philosophie u. a.) [Works ·
articles · drafts. From March 1883 to September 1886. (Ludwig Feuerbach and The End of
Classic German Philosophy etc.)]. 2011
I/31 ENGELS: Werke · Artikel · Entwürfe. Oktober 1886 bis Februar 1891 [Works ·
articles · drafts. October 1886 to February 1891]. 2002
I/32 ENGELS: Werke · Artikel · Entwürfe. März 1891 bis August 1895 [Works · articles
· drafts. March 1891 to August 1895] 2010
Zweite Abteilung: “Das Kapital” und Vorarbeiten [Second Section: Capital and
Preparatory Works]
II/1 MARX: Ökonomische Manuskripte 1857/58. (Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen
Ökonomie) [Economic Manuscripts from 1857–58. (Foundations of the Critique of Political
Economy)] 2., unveränd. Aufl. 2006 [1. Aufl. Teil 1: 1976, Teil 2: 1981.] Also in digital
format
II/2 MARX: Ökonomische Manuskripte und Schriften, 1858–1861. (Zur Kritik der
politischen Ökonomie u. a.) [Manuscrpts and Economic Studies, 1858–1861. (A
Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy and others)]1980
(continued)
16
H. DA GAMA CERQUEIRA
Chart 1.2
(continued)
Erste Abteilung: Werke. Artikel. Entwürfe [First Section: Works, Articles and Drafts]
II/3.1 MARX: Zur Kritik der politischen Ökonomie (Manuskript 1861–1863) [A
Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (manuscript of 1861–1863)]. Teil 1.
1976
II/3.2 MARX: Zur Kritik der politischen Ökonomie (Manuskript 1861–1863) [A
Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (manuscript of 1861–1863)]. Teil 2.
1977
II/3.3 MARX: Zur Kritik der politischen Ökonomie (Manuskript 1861–1863) [A
Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (manuscript of 1861–1863)]. Teil 3.
1978
II/3.4 MARX: Zur Kritik der politischen Ökonomie (Manuskript 1861–1863) [A
Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (manuscript of 1861–1863)]. Teil 4.
1979
II/3.5 MARX: Zur Kritik der politischen Ökonomie (Manuskript 1861–1863) [A
Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (manuscript of 1861–1863)]. Teil 5.
1980
II/3.6 MARX: Zur Kritik der politischen Ökonomie (Manuskript 1861–1863) [A
Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (manuscript of 1861–1863)]. Teil 6.
1982
II/4.1 MARX: Ökonomische Manuskripte 1863–1867. Teil 1. (Manuskripte 1864/65 zum
1. und 2. Buch des „Kapital “, Vortrag „Value, price and profit “) [Economioc manuscripts
from 1863–1867. Part 1. (Manuscripts from 1864–65 for the first and second books of
Capital. ‘Value, price and profit’ Conference)] 2. unveränd. Aufl. 2011 [1. Aufl. 1988.] Also
in digital format
II/4.2 MARX: Ökonomische Manuskripte 1863–1867. Teil 2. (Manuskript 1863/65 zum 3.
Buch des „Kapital “) [Economic Manuscriptsfrom 1863–1867. Part 2. (Manuscripts from
1863–65 for the third book of ‘Capital’)] 2. unveränd. Aufl. 2012 [1. Aufl. 1993.] Also in
digital format
II/4.3 MARX: Ökonomische Manuskripte 1863–1867. Teil 3. (Manuskripte 1867–68 zum
2. und 3. Buch des „Kapital “) [Economic Manuscripts from 1863–1867. Part 3.
(Manuscripts from 1867–68 for the second and third books of ‘Capital’)] 2012. Also in
digital format
II/5 MARX: Das Kapital. Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie. Erster Band, Hamburg 1867
[Capital. Critique of political Economy. First Volume, Hamburg 1867]. 1983. Also in
digital format
II/6 MARX: Das Kapital. Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie. Erster Band, Hamburg 1872
[Capital. Critique of Political Economy. First Volume, Hamburg 1872]. 1987
II/7 MARX: Le Capital, Paris 1872–1875[Capital, Paris 1872–75]. 1989
II/8 MARX: Das Kapital. Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie. Erster Band, Hamburg 1883
[Capital. Critique of Political Economy. First Volume, Hamburg 1883]. 1989
II/9 MARX: Capital. A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production, London 1887 . 1990
II/10 MARX: Das Kapital. Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie. Erster Band, Hamburg 1890
[Capital. Critique of Political Econony. First Volume, Hamburg 1890]. 1991. Also in
digital format
II/11 MARX: Manuskripte zum zweiten Buch des “Kapitals “ 1868 bis 1881 [Manuscripts
for the second book of Capital. From 1868 to 1881)]. 2008. Also in digital format
(continued)
1
Chart 1.2
A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE CRITICAL EDITION …
17
(continued)
Erste Abteilung: Werke. Artikel. Entwürfe [First Section: Works, Articles and Drafts]
II/12 MARX: Das Kapital. Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie. Zweites Buch: Der
Zirkulationsprozeß des Kapitals. Redaktionsmanuskript von Friedrich Engels 1884/1885
[Capital. Critique of Political Economy. Second Book: the proces of circulation of capital.
Editorial manuscript of Friedrich Engels 1884/1885]. 2005. Also in digital format
II/13 MARX: Das Kapital. Kritik der politischen Ökonomie. Zweiter Band. Herausgegeben
von Friedrich Engels. Hamburg 1885 [Capital. Critique of Political Economy. Second
volume. Edited by Friedrich Engels. Hamburg 1885]. 2008. Also in digital format
II/14 MARX & ENGELS: Manuskripte und redaktionelle Texte zum dritten Buch des
“Kapitals”, 1871 bis 1895 [Editorial manuscripts and texts for the third book of Capital.
From 1871 to 1895)]. 2003
II/15 MARX: Das Kapital. Kritik der politischen Ökonomie. Dritter Band. Herausgegeben
von Friedrich Engels. Hamburg 1894 [Capital. Critique of Political Economy. Third Volume.
Edited by Friedrich Engels. Hamburg 1894]. 2004. Also in digital format
Dritte Abteilung: Briefwechsel [Third Section: Correspondence]
III/1 MARX & ENGELS: Briefwechsel. Bis April 1846 [Correspondence. Until April
1846]. 1975
III/2 MARX & ENGELS: Briefwechsel. Mai 1846 bis Dezember 1848 [Correspondence.
May 1846 to December 1848]. 1979
III/3 MARX & ENGELS: Briefwechsel. Januar 1849 bis Dezember 1850 [Correspondence.
January 1849 to December 1850]. 1981
III/4 MARX & ENGELS: Briefwechsel. Januar bis Dezember 1851 [Correspondence.
January to December 1851]. 1984
III/5 MARX & ENGELS: Briefwechsel. Januar bis August 1852 [Correspondence. January
to August 1852]. 1987
III/6 MARX & ENGELS: Briefwechsel. September 1852 bis August 1853 [Correspondence.
September 1852 to August 1853]. 1987
III/7 MARX & ENGELS: Briefwechsel. September 1853 bis März 1856 [Correspondence.
September 1853 to March 1856]. 1989
III/8 MARX & ENGELS: Briefwechsel. April 1856 bis Dezember 1857 [Correspondence.
April 1856 to December 1857]. 1990
III/9 MARX & ENGELS: Briefwechsel. Januar 1858 bis August 1859 [Correspondence.
January 1858 to August 1859]. 2003
III/10 MARX & ENGELS: Briefwechsel. September 1859 bis Mai 1860 [Correspondence.
De September 1859 to May 1860]. 2000
III/11 MARX & ENGELS: Briefwechsel. Juni 1860 bis Dezember 1861 [Correspondence.
June 1860 to December 1861]. 2005
III/12 MARX & ENGELS: Briefwechsel. Januar 1862 bis September 1864
[Correspondence. January 1862 to September 1864]. 2013
III/13 MARX & ENGELS: Briefwechsel. Oktober 1864 bis Dezember 1865
[Correspondence. October 1864 to December 1865]. 2002
III/14 MARX & ENGELS: Briefwechsel. Januar 1866 bis Dezember 1867
[Correspondence. January 1866 to December 1867]. Only in digital format
III/15 MARX & ENGELS: Briefwechsel. Januar 1868 bis Februar 1869 [Correspondence.
January 1868 to February 1869]. Only in digital format
(continued)
18
H. DA GAMA CERQUEIRA
Chart 1.2
(continued)
Erste Abteilung: Werke. Artikel. Entwürfe [First Section: Works, Articles and Drafts]
III/16 MARX & ENGELS: Briefwechsel. März 1869 bis Mai 1870 [Correspondence.
March 1869 to May 1870]. Only in digital format
III/30 ENGELS: Briefwechsel. Oktober 1889 bis November 1890 [Correspondence. October
1889 to November 1890]. 2013
Vierte Abteilung : Exzerpte—Notizen—Marginalien [Fourth Section: Excerpts, Notes
and Marginalia]
IV/1 MARX & ENGELS: Exzerpte und Notizen. Bis 1842 (Epikurstudien, Berliner und
Bonner Hefte zur Philosophie, Kunst, Religion u. a.) [Excerpts and notes. Up until 1842.
(Studies on Epicure. Berlin and Bonn notebooks on philosophy, Art and religion etc.)]. 1976
IV/2 MARX & ENGELS: Exzerpte und Notizen. (Kreuznacher Hefte u. a.) 1843 bis
Januar 1845 [Excerpts and notes. (Kreuznach notebooks etc.) From 1843 to January 1845].
1981
IV/3 MARX: Exzerpte und Notizen. Sommer 1844 bis Anfang 1847 (Feuerbach-Thesen,
Pariser Hefte u. a.) [Excerpts and Notes. Summer 1844 to the beginning of 1847 (Theses on
Feuerbach, Paris notebooks etc.)]. 1998
IV/4 MARX & ENGELS: Exzerpte und Notizen. Juli bis August 1845 (Manchester Hefte
1–5 u. a.) [Excerpts and Notes.From July to August 1845. (Manchester notebooks 1–5 etc.)].
1988
IV/5 MARX & ENGELS: Exzerpte und Notizen. Juli 1845 bis Dezember 1850
(Manchester Hefte 6–9 u.a.) [Excerpts and notes. July 1845 to December 1850 (Manchester
notebooks 6–9 and others)], 2015
IV/6 MARX & ENGELS: Exzerpte und Notizen. September 1846 bis Dezember 1847
(Gülich-Exzerpte) [Excerpts and Notes. From September 1846 to December 1847 (Excerpts
from Gülich)]. 1983
IV/7 MARX & ENGELS: Exzerpte und Notizen. September 1849 bis Februar 1851
(Londoner Hefte I–IV) [Excerpts and Notes. From September 1849 to February 1851 (London
notebooks I-IV)]. 1983
IV/8 MARX: Exzerpte und Notizen. März bis Juni 1851. (Bullion. Das vollendete
Geldsystem, Londoner Hefte VII–X) [Excerpts and Notes. From March to June 1851 (Bullion.
The perfect monetary system, London notebooks VII-X)]. 1986
IV/9 MARX: Exzerpte und Notizen. Juli bis September 1851. (Londoner Hefte XI–XIV)
[Excerpts and Notes. From July to September 1851. (London notebooks XI-XIV)]. 1991
IV/10 MARX & ENGELS: Exzerpte und Notizen. September 1851 bis Juli 1852. (Marx:
Londoner Hefte XV–XVIII, Engels: Glossen zu Proudhons “Idée générale…” und
Russisch-Studien) [Excerpts and notes. September 1851 to July 1852 (Marx: Londoner Hefte
XV-XVIII, Engels: glosses on Proudhon’s “Idée générale…” and Russian studies)], 2023
IV/12 MARX: Exzerpte und Notizen. September 1853 bis Januar 1855. (Marx: Geschichte
der Diplomatie und Geschichte Spaniens; Engels: Militaria) [Excerpts and Notes. September
1853 to January 1855. (Marx: History of Diplomacy and the History of Spain; Engels:
military matters)]. 2007
IV/14 MARX: Exzerpte, Zeitungsausschnitte und Notizen zur Weltwirtschaftskrise
(Krisenhefte). November 1857 bis Februar 1858 (Weltwirtschaftskrise von 1857) [Excerpts,
newspaper cuttings and notes on the Great Depression (Krisenhefte). November 1857 to
February 1858 (Great Depression of 1857)], 2017
(continued)
1
Chart 1.2
A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE CRITICAL EDITION …
19
(continued)
Erste Abteilung: Werke. Artikel. Entwürfe [First Section: Works, Articles and Drafts]
IV/18 MARX & ENGELS: Exzerpte und Notizen. Februar 1864 bis August 1868.
(Politische Ökonomie, insbes. Landwirtschaft) [Excerpts and notes. February 1864 to August
1868 (Political economy, especially agriculture)], 2019
IV/19 MARX: Exzerpte und Notizen. September 1868 bis September 1869. (Politische
Ökonomie, insbes. Geldmarkt und Krisen) [Excerpts and notes. September 1868 to September
1869 (Political economy, esp. money market and crises)], 2021. Only in digital format
IV/26 MARX: Exzerpte und Notizen zur Geologie, Mineralogie und Agrikulturchemie.
März bis September 1878 [Excerpts and notes on geology, mineralogy and agricultural
chemistry. March to September 1878]. 2011
IV/27 MARX & ENGELS: Exzerpte und Notizen. 1879 bis 1881 (Ethnologie,
Frühgeschichte, Geschichte des Grundeigentums) [Excerpts and notes. 1879 to 1881 (ethnology,
early history, history of land ownership)]. 2023/24. Only in digital format
IV/31 MARX & ENGELS: Naturwissenschaftliche Exzerpte und Notizen. Mitte 1877 bis
Anfang 1883 [Excerpts and Notes on natural sciences. Mid-1877 to the beginning of 1883].
1999
IV/32 Die Bibliotheken von Karl Marx und Friedrich Engels. Annotiertes Verzeichnis des
ermittelten Bestandes [Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels libraries.]. 1999
Source Elaborated based on data gathered from the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der
Wissenschaften [Berlin-Brandenberg Academy of science/scholarship/research]
As it happens, the text that Riazanov and later Adoratskij edited is very
different from the manuscript that Marx and Engels left. As an example,
although it was indeed planned by Marx and Engels, the section on Feuerbach was never completed, as Engels himself admitted later on when
writing the introduction to Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical
German Philosophy in 1888:
I have once again ferreted out and looked over the old manuscript
of 1845–6. The section dealing with Feuerbach is not completed. The
finished portion consists of an exposition of the materialist conception of
history which proves only how incomplete our knowledge of economic
history still was at that time. (Engels apud Carver 2010, p. 116)
Actually, in the early editions, various dispersed fragments of the
original manuscript were re-managed in such a way as to produce the
consecrated chapter on Feuerbach. That became clear during the work
of editing Volume I/5 of the MEGA 2, which contains material related
to The German Ideology. In 2004, the team responsible for that volume
20
H. DA GAMA CERQUEIRA
published a special number of the Marx-Engels-Jahrbuch 11 (The MarxEngels Yearbook) in the form of a “test volume” containing parts of the
manuscript brought together, but as independent texts, and set in chronological order, maintaining the form in which their authors left them. That
edition made the non-unitary nature of the text very clear, being, as
it was, not only unfinished but also fragmentary. That now obliges us
to rethink its place in Marx’s theoretical elaboration (cf. Carver 2010;
Xiaoping 2010; Musto 2020).
The second debate, exemplifying the impact of MEGA2 on the interpretation of Marx’s thought, concerns the publication of manuscripts of
the critique of political economy that Marx composed between 1863 and
1883 and Engels made use of in editing Volumes II and III of Das
Kapital. They can now be found in the volumes of the second section
of MEGA2 which contemplated publishing the three volumes of Capital
the same way as they were edited and published in the nineteenth century,
that is to say: the texts of Book I in German (1867, 1872, 1883 and
1890), and their translations in French (1872–75) and English (1887)
and the editions in German of Books II (1885 and 1893) and III (1894).
In addition, MEGA2 published all the manuscripts that Marx wrote for
the composition of Capital, and the manuscripts that Engels wrote during
the period in which he was preparing the editions of Volumes II and III.
The implications these materials have for understanding Marx’s economic
work are considerable.
In regard to Volume II, Marx composed two complete drafts (in 1865
and in 1868–70) and several minor manuscripts written between 1867
and 1881, addressing different themes. He also wrote a longer text on
the problems that were to be addressed in the third section, including
the famous reproduction schemes. Comparing those versions with the
text that Engels established made it possible to detect how significant
Engels’ interventions had been far superior to what he gave to understand
in the preface of that volume: changes in structure, revision of stretches
of text, the terminology adopted, etc. Those interventions arose from a
difficulty that Engels did not mention: the fact that in many parts of the
manuscripts Marx was endeavoring to formulate new ideas but without
achieving any definitive conclusions regarding the problems in question
(Hecker 2009, p. 25).
11 That was a periodical edited by the IMES and associated with the MEGA2 project.
1
A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE CRITICAL EDITION …
21
As for Volume III, the comparison of the manuscripts with the edited
volume reveals similar problems but they are more outstanding and more
numerous. In addition to a more or less complete draft that Marx wrote
in 1864–65, we can now consult various manuscripts on surplus value
and profit, on the factors that govern the profit rate and on differential
rent, all written in different degrees of elaboration between 1867–68 and
1881. Once again it is glaringly obvious that in regard to many issues,
the analyses were ongoing without Marx’s having offered any definitive
conclusions. On the one hand, he appeared to be dissatisfied with the
1864–65 manuscript and had written other drafts for the initial sections
in which he explored an alternative sequence for the presentation of the
surplus value, profit and cost price concepts. In other manuscripts, he
dedicated himself to studying the laws that govern the movements of the
profit rate, exploring, in numerous mathematical exercises, the effects of
variations in the constant and variable capital, in the rate of surplus value
rate, etc.…12 Furthermore, we know that Marx was also dissatisfied with
the manuscript on ground rent. Even though he did not get to prepare
an alternative text that would complete his treatment of the issue in that
version, we can now get to know his studies on rent and on landed property through the contents of the notebooks of excerpts that he prepared
and the comments on them made in the course of his correspondence
(Roth 2009, pp. 33–37).
Finally, the themes of credit and interest, addressed in the fifth section
of Volume III and, strictly connected to them, the discussion on crises, are
also open-ended in the manuscript of 1864–65. Even Engels himself, in
his preface of 1890, acknowledged that the text of the manuscript related
to that section alternates passages in which we find a clear presentation of
the themes being addressed with others in which ideas and observations
are annotated with no concern whatever for their linkage with the rest of
the argument, showing it be much more of a working document than a
finished manuscript. Regarding credit, Marx seems to hesitate between
the intention revealed at the beginning of the manuscript, that is, to
refrain from making an analysis of credit and its instruments—because at
that time those themes lay outside the plan for the work—and the desire
12 These manuscripts have been published in Volume II.4.3 of the MEGA2 .
22
H. DA GAMA CERQUEIRA
he expressed some years later to produce a fifth section precisely dedicated to credit (Roth 2009, p. 37).13 Furthermore, from that time on,
and in connection with his studies on the 1866 crisis, he brought together
a large number of excerpts from journals and reading notes about the
movements of credit; material that he intended to use in a future revision
of the manuscript of Volume III (Paula et al. 2013, 2016; Heinrich 2007,
p. 198).
Those aspects, and others, are associated with the polemic about
Engels’ editing of Capital .14 The fragmentary nature of the manuscripts
that were composed for Volume III meant that Engels had to add some
passages and suppress others, include titles and text divisions and transpose parts of texts and rearrange them in such a way as to make the work
publishable. A significant part of those changes, however, were not identified in the published version and thus passed off as if they were decisions
that had been made by Marx himself15 whereas they actually represented
Engels’ interpretations of the proper meaning of those texts in his position as Marx’s editor and literary legatee. However, a consultation of the
manuscripts reveals other possible readings of them and above all identifies the incomplete and open-ended treatment Marx afforded to issues
such as the theory of crises or the role of credit and interest, divergent
in more than one sense from the impression given by the edited text
(cf. Müller et al. 2002; Vollgraf e Jungnickel 2002; Roth 2009, 2010;
Heinrich 1996/1997, 2007, 2013).
13 Heinrich (1996/1997, pp. 462–463) considered that the decision whether or not
to address the credit system involved by no means trivial problem of knowing whether
the laws that regulate its movements could be dealt with at the level of abstraction of
Capital or depended on historical-institutional elements that would make it unfeasible to
conceive of a general theory of credit.
14 This is an old polemic. Gide and Rist (1909, p. 520) already identified the difficulty
of precisely distinguishing the nature and dimension of Engels’ participation in Marx’s
work: “We must not forget that alongside Karl Marx, there was his inseparable friend and
collaborator Friedrich Engels, who, however, lived modestly in the shadow of the master.
It was he [Engels], however, who collaborated with the famous Communist Manifesto of
1848 and who, after Marx’s death faithfully gathered and published the three volumes of
his posthumouis works. It is hard to know which part is his in Marx’s work but it is not
likely to be negligible”.
15 Heinrich (1996/1997, p. 456) went so far as to state that “the comparison of the
original manuscript with Engels’ edition (…) shows that there are modifications to the
original text on practically each page that have not been indicated”.
1
A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE CRITICAL EDITION …
23
It must be underscored that what is involved here is not a depreciative
judgment of Engels’ work. Indeed, the fact is that the editing standards
of the day were far more flexible than those of any modern historical–
critical edition and Engels’ objective was to conclude the editing work so
as to provide the socialist movement with a decisive theoretical weapon
for the political dispute. That required interpreting those passages in the
manuscript which were far from being concluded or which had merely
been drafted (Heinrich 2007, p. 201).
Indeed, “we must not forget that it was an incredible achievement
to publish this manuscript, of which Marx had once said in a letter to
Engels that nobody at all could publish it in a readable form except for he
himself (letter on February 13, 1866)” (Heinrich 1996/1997, pp. 464–
465). The important thing is that any reading intended to reconstitute the
meaning of the argument no longer needs to be content with the edited
version of Volume III but can have recourse directly to the manuscripts
that Marx left, and which have finally been published in MEGA2 and
thereby seek to establish the ultimate meaning and the possibilities that
the text left open.
Conclusion
To sum up, the publishing of MEGA2 has provided an opportunity to
get to know previously unpublished manuscripts that reveal to us a Marx
critical of the limitations of his own work and permanently dissatisfied
with what he had written so far. He was always ready to revise and update
his formulations and to immerse himself in new empirical materials and
extract from them theoretical consequences and that largely explains the
fragmentary and provisional nature of many of his elaborations. The same
can be said of the extant research on other texts such as the Exzerpthefte
(Excerpt booklets) which the MEGA2 also plans to publish but which
so far remains unpublished. Preliminary investigations of those materials
have shown that they can offer interesting suggestions for understanding
the method of investigation that Marx adopted and for understanding his
research on credit and the economic crises, identifying elements that he
intended to address in his later revisions of the manuscript of Capital
(Paula et al. 2013, 2016).
In the contemporary context in which Marx’s works no longer bear
the onus of providing ideological support for authoritarian regimes and
in which a new crisis of the capitalist economies reveals the perennial
24
H. DA GAMA CERQUEIRA
pertinence of his thinking, the publishing of the MEGA2 opens up new
possibilities for reading those works. They are possibilities that are far
from having been fully explored or understood, but the first results have
proved to be promising and based on them, the efforts at interpreting
Marx’s thinking will surely advance in the course of the coming years.
Competing Interests The author has no conflicts of interest to declare that are
relevant to the content of this chapter.
References
Alcouffe, Alain; Wells, Julian. Marx, maths, and MEGA 2 . Paper presented at the
13th Annual Conference of the European Society for the History of Economic
Thought. Thessaloniki: ESHET, 2009.
Anderson, Kevin B.. Marx at the margins: on nationalism, ethnicity, and nonWestern societies. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010.
Bellofiore, Riccardo. Lavori in corso. Common Sense—Journal of the Edinburgh
Conference of Socialist Economists, v. 22: 43–60, 1999.
Bellofiore, Riccardo; Fineschi, Roberto. Introduction. In: Bellofiore, Riccardo;
Fineschi, Roberto (eds.), Re-reading Marx: new perspectives after the critical
edition. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
Carver, Terrell. The German Ideology never took place. History of Political
Thought, v. 31 (1): 107-127, 2010.
Cerqueira, Hugo. David Riazanov e a edição das obras de Marx e Engels.
Economia, v. 11 (1): 199–215, 2010.
Cerqueira, Hugo. Breve história da edição crítica das obras de Karl Marx. Revista
de Economia Política, v. 35 (4): 825-844, 2015.
Fineschi, Roberto. Un nuovo Marx: filologia e interpretazione dopo la nuova
edizione storico-critica (MEGA➁ ). Roma: Carocci, 2008.
Gide, Charles; Rist, Charles. Histoire des doctrines économiques depuis les physiocrates jusqu’a nos jours. Paris: Librarie de la Société du recueil J.-B. Sirey,
1909.
Hecker, Rolf. La seconda sezione della MEGA2 : verso Il completamento. In:
Alessandro Mazzone (ed.). MEGA 2 : Marx ritrovato. Roma: Media Print,
2002, 49-67.
Hecker, Rolf. New perspectives opened by the publication of Marx’s manuscripts
of Capital, vol. II. In: Riccardo Bellofiore; Roberto Fineschi. Re-reading
Marx: new perspectives after the critical edition. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2009.
Hecker, Rolf. The history and meaning of the MEGA project from its inception
until 1990. Marxism 21, v. 20: 281–292, 2010.
1
A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE CRITICAL EDITION …
25
Heinrich, Michael. Engels’ edition of the third volume of Capital and Marx’s
original manuscript. Science & Society, v. 60 (4): 452–466, 1996/1997.
Heinrich, Michael. Review of “Karl Marx. Das Kapital. Kritik der politischen Ökonomie. Dritter Band, Hamburg, 1894, In Karl Marx, Friedrich
Engels, Gesamtausgabe (MEGA). Zweite Abteilung. Band 15”. Historical
Materialism, v. 15: 195–210, 2007.
Heinrich, Michael. Crisis theory, the law of the tendency of the profit rate to fall,
and Marx’s studies in the 1870s. Monthly Review, v. 64 (11): 15-31, 2013.
Hobsbawn, Eric. A fortuna das edições de Marx e Engels. In: Eric Hosbawn
et al. O marxismo no tempo de Marx. (História do marxismo, vol. 1), Rio de
Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1983.
Hobsbawn, Eric. A influência do marxismo. In: Eric Hosbawn. Como mudar o
mundo: Marx e o marxismo 1840–2011. São Paulo: Cia das Letras, 2011.
Kautsky, Karl (ed.). Theorien über den Mehrwert aus dem nachgelassenen
Manuskript “Zur Kritik der politischen Ökonomie” von Karl Marx. (Volume 1:
Die Anfänge der Theorie vom Merhrwert bis Adam Smith; Volume 2. David
Ricardo; Volume 3. Von Ricardo zur Vulgärökonomie). Stuttgart: J.H.W.
Dietz, 1905–1910.
Mehring, Franz (ed.). Aus dem literarischen Nachlass von Karl Marx, Friedrich
Engels, und Ferdinand Lassalle, 4 volumes, Stuttgart: J. H. W. Dietz Nachf,
1902.
Müller, Manfred; Jungnickel, Jürgen; Lietz, Barbara; Sander, Christel; Schnickmann, Artur. General commentary to Marx’s manuscript of Capital, Book 3.
International Journal of Political Economy, v. 32 (1): 14–34, 2002.
Musto, Marcello. The rediscovery of Karl Marx, International Review of Social
History, v. 52: 477–498, 2007.
Musto, Marcello. Marx is back: the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA)
project, Rethinking Marxism, v. 22 (2): 290-291, 2010.
Musto, Marcello. New Profiles of Marx after the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe
(MEGA2 ), Contemporary Sociology, v. 49 (5): 407–419, 2020.
Paula, João Antonio de; Cerqueira, Hugo da Gama; Cunha, Alexandre M.;
Suprinyak, Carlos E.; De Deus, Leonardo G.; Albuquerque, Eduardo da
Motta. Notes on a crisis: the Exzerpthefte and Marx’s method of research and
composition. The Review of Radical Political Economics, v. 45 (2): 162–182,
2013.
Paula, João Antonio de; Cerqueira, Hugo da Gama; De Deus, Leonardo G.;
Suprinyak, Carlos E.; Albuquerque, Eduardo da Motta. Investigating financial
innovation and stock exchanges. Marx’s notebooks on the crisis of 1866 and
structural changes in capitalism. Beiträge zur Marx-Engels-Forschung, v. 2015:
194–217, 2016.
Riazanov, David (ed.). Gesammelte Schriften von Karl Marx und Friedrich Engels,
1852 bis 1862.. 2 volumes, Stuttgart: J.H.W. Dietz Nachf, 1917.
26
H. DA GAMA CERQUEIRA
Roth, Regina. Karl Marx original manuscripts in the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe
(MEGA): another view on Capital. In: Riccardo Bellofiore; Roberto Fineschi.
Re-reading Marx: new perspectives after the critical edition. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
Roth, Regina. Marx on technical change in the critical edition. The European
Journal of the History of Economic Thought, v. 17 (5): 1223–1251, 2010.
Rojahn, Jürgen. Publishing Marx and Engels after 1989: the fate of the MEGA.
s.l., 1998.
Takenaga, Susumu. Editorial work of MEGA2 in Japan. Paper presented at the
13th Annual Conference of the European Society for the History of Economic
Thought. Thessaloniki: ESHET, 2009.
Thomas, Paul. Critical reception: Marx then and now. In: Terrel Carver (ed.).
The Cambridge companion to Marx. Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1991.
Vollgraff, Carl-Erich; Jungnickel, Jürgen. “Marx in Marx’s words”? On Engels’s
edition of the main manuscript of Book 3 of Capital. International Journal
of Political Economy, v. 32 (1): 35–78, 2002.
Xiaoping, Wei. Rethinking historical materialism: the new edition of the German
Ideology. Science & Society, v. 74 (4): 489–508, 2010.
Zapata, R.. La publication des oeuvres de Marx après sa mort: 1883–1935. In:
Labica, G. (ed.), 1883–1983 L’Oeuvre de Marx, un Siècle Après. Paris: PUF,
1985.
CHAPTER 2
Dialectic of Unfinishedness: 150 Years
of Volume 1 of Capital
João Antonio de Paula
To Silvio Gesell and Major Douglas, this belated and useless tribute.
Introduction
The title of this essay refers to Adorno and Horkheimer’s important book,
both because it contains the word dialectic and because of the similarity
between the endings of the two words—enlightenment and unfinishedness. What’s more, it’s possible to say that the two texts are nothing more
than similar, in that Dialectic of Enlightenment is a radical denunciation
of the regressive aspects associated with the idea of “enlightenment”, of
“progress”, while Dialectic of Unfinishedness aims to discuss the various
meanings and implications of the “unfinishedness” of Karl Marx’s book
Capital , arguing, with a certain “what” of paradox, that in this case,
in the case of Marx’s work, this unfinishedness, if not a virtue, pushes
J. A. de Paula (B)
Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, Brazil
e-mail: jpaula@cedeplar.ufmg.br
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature
Switzerland AG 2025
J. A. de Paula et al. (eds.), Marx for the 21st Century, Marx, Engels,
and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22011-1_2
27
28
J. A. DE PAULA
the text toward permanent updating, permanent openness to incorporate the transformations that reality is experiencing, preventing an early
totalization, freezing of what is not yet ready for appeasement.
Contrary to certain interpretations, such as José Arthur Giannotti’s,
which attribute unfinishedness to a theoretical impasse—“There are indications that Marx had reached a theoretical impasse, since the analysis of
the grammar of capital was moving in a direction that would force him to
revise his old idea of Revolution”. In a nutshell, as the categories unfolded
and came closer (…).
It is immediately symptomatic that volume III comes to a halt in the
chapter on social classes. Instead of that polarization of the antagonistic
parts that leads to overcoming the contradiction thus achieved, there is a
kind of disintegration of their presupposed unities, so that the categories
fibrillate and tend to cease to be parameters of behaviour. (Giannotti 2000,
pp. 88–89)
Giannotti’s point is that Marx would have realized, as his analysis of the
contradictions of capital advanced, that “the basic contradiction between
capital and labor, instead of hardening into absolutely antagonistic poles,
erodes the profile of each of these themes” (Giannotti 2000, p. 63).
Hence, from the growing realization of an insurmountable theoretical impasse, Marx would have, from the 1870s onward, consciously or
unconsciously, adopted a strategy of procrastination, of postponing the
completion of a work which, if it were to happen, would be at the cost
of the deconstruction of its presuppositions, of the theoretical, political and ideological coherence of a proposal—the critique of political
economy, at once, and inextricably, theoretical and revolutionary. José
Arthur Giannotti relies on his description of the creative crisis that would
have afflicted Marx from 1870 onward on a single work—La vie de Karl
Marx. L’Homme et le Lutteur—by Boris Nicolaievski and Otto MenchenHelfen (Nicolaievski; Menchen-Helfen 1970). These biographers of Marx
say—"After 1873, Marx never regained his former capacity for work. He
remained the insatiable reader he had always been, he took countless
notes, he compiled new sources and organized them, but he no longer
had the power of synthesis”.
(...) Max learned Russian. England had served to illustrate the theoretical
developments of Volume I of Capital, Russia was to serve as the basis
2
DIALECTIC OF UNFINISHEDNESS: 150 YEARS OF VOLUME …
29
for the pages devoted to the rent of in the second volume (sic). Marx
accumulated all the documentation on Russia he could get his hands on.
After his death, Engels found two cubic meters of Russian statistics among
his papers. And it wasn’t just out of scientific conscience that Marx studied
new sources endlessly; in fact, he disguised for himself the paralysis of his
creative forces. (...) (Nicolaievski; Menchen-Helfen 1970, p. 417)
There is such an arbitrariness of interpretation in the above statement,
a kind of gratuitous psychologism, that further comment is unnecessary. In any case, even the defenders of a Marx who had exhausted his
creative force and his capacity for synthesis will find it difficult to deny
these qualities to two of Marx’s texts, produced during this so-called
period of creative crisis: from 1875, “Critique of the Gotha Program”,
which is, exemplarily, an extraordinary and unique, in certain respects,
explication of central characteristics of socialism (Marx 1971); and in
1881, “Marginal Glosses on Adolph Wagner’s Treatise”, which is a luminous resumption of the theory of value in the key of a comprehensive
synthesis, which, by affirming the centrality of the commodity category as
a starting point, as the object of Capital , both reiterates the specificity
of the critique of political economy as an “overcoming” (aufhebung ) of
political economy and makes explicit its rigorously dialectical methodological proposal, in the sense of refusing any arbitrary starting point.
Marx says: “First of all, I don’t start from ‘concepts’, nor, therefore, from
the ‘concept of value’, and so I must not in any way ‘divide’ this concept.
Where I start from is the simplest social form in which the product of
labor presents itself in today’s society, and this form is the commodity”
(Marx 1977a, p. 176).
If it is true that Marx published little after 1870, this did not correspond to a slowdown in the pace of his work, which continued to be
intense, this was not constrained by the health problems that always
accompanied him, nor did it mean a change in the general plan for the
elaboration of the “critique of political economy” in its cyclopean scope.
Michael Krätke says:
In biographical literature, this last period of his life is generally regarded
as a period of failure. Marx, for various reasons, failed to complete his
masterpiece, Capital. He would have resigned, accepted defeat, recognizing
his inability to carry out his great project of critique of political economy.
(...) Thanks to the ongoing work within MEGA, it is now possible to have
a more correct and precise idea of Marx’s scientific work during the last
30
J. A. DE PAULA
period of his life. In a few years’ time, most of his manuscripts, reading
notes and collections of material dating from this period will be published.
This will probably change one’s judgment of the last Marx." (...) "Because
Marx, as thousands of pages of writings left by him attest, did not give
up on his great project. He continued working with the same passion,
the same voracity that he had for the previous fifteen years." (...) "All his
unpublished writings bear witness to his constant efforts to bring Capital to
a successful conclusion and, above all, to provide a complete and perfect
vision of it. Let’s remember the almost last word of the last Marx, in
December 1881, on the subject of Capital, laconic but revealing: "It would
be necessary to take it all up again, entirely," Marx wrote to his friend and
collaborator Danielson. In fact, he had expressed this same idea ten years
earlier, in 1871. At that time, he began working seriously on a French
translation and, at the same time, on a new German version of Volume I.
(Krätke 2011, p. 14)
If it is possible to agree with Krätke when he says—"In fact, Marx never
completely renounced the plan of the six books” (Krätke 2011, p. 16)—it
is no longer possible to follow him or Michael Heinrich when they say:
[…] clearly, he modified the structure of the work, abandoning the
Hegelian dichotomy of capital in general versus individual capitals as the
organizing principle of the work. Consequently, he rearranged the structure of the exposition of Capital. Between 1863 and 1882, he became
aware of the scope and limits of his general theory of capitalism. With
regard to the issues studied in Volume III, such as credit, trade and land
rent, he did not come up with a definitive and satisfactory solution. He
probably decided to expand his presentation of the book on capital, in
which the original plan left little room. For example, the category of the
world market is already clearly present in Volume I - as is the section on
the world (or universal) currency – in chapter 3 see also an entire chapter
on ‘Differences in national wage rates’, chapter 22 of Volume I. (Krätke
2011, p. 16)
There is much to discuss about Krätke’s position as expressed in this
last text. Two preliminary observations should be made before a more
detailed examination:
I. It is difficult to accept as legitimate the affirmation of the existence of a “Hegelian dualism”. There is no room for dualism,
either in Hegel or in Marx. In fact, there is no “plane of capital
2
DIALECTIC OF UNFINISHEDNESS: 150 YEARS OF VOLUME …
31
in general ” and a “plane of the various capitals ”, but rather a
system of mediations, which make up the triad “generality - particularity - singularity”, in which the “various capitals” are the result
of the increasing complexification resulting from competition, in
other words, the singularities created by the presence of the state, its
policies and incentives; international trade and the regional-national
singularities of capital accumulation; the world market and crises as
traumatic and provisional solutions to intercapitalist contradictions
and the class struggle on a global scale.
II. The second point to note from Krätke’s text is that in Volume I of
Capital , all the determinations of capital are presupposed, that is,
they are presented in a high degree of abstraction, all the historicalconcrete content that typifies the plan of the various capitals,
without this constituting an adequate presentation of the categories
which, in order to be effectively realized, would have to fulfill that
classic requirement—"to be the unity of the diverse, to be the
synthesis of many determinations"—to be, in short, the concrete,
which can only be put forward as a result, as the totalization of
totalizations.
In fact, Volume I of Capital , on pain of extravagant restraint, could
not fail to present the various aspects of economic reality, even if this first
presentation could only be made in the abstract, which is the correct way
for categories to appear before the conditions are in place for them to
appear as singularities, as concrete realities.
In fact, in the thesis that the use of the vocabulary of political economy
is confused with the explanation of its dialectical developments, there is
the somewhat bizarre requirement of a kind of “quarantine” in which
certain words are prevented from being used except in very specific
situations. Now, the question in this case, i.e., with regard to the dialectical exposition of concepts, is not just about the vocabulary used, but
about the explicitness of the system of mediations that allows for the
apprehension of the concrete.
This text argues, in agreement with Krätke, that Marx did not abandon
the plan of the critique of political economy in six books—capital, land
ownership, wage labor, the state, foreign trade, the world market and
crises—and also argues, contrary to what Krätke and Michael Heinrich
say, in support of Rosdolsky’s position, that Marx did not abandon the
strategy that led to the exposition of the critique of political economy
32
J. A. DE PAULA
from the necessary mode of appearance of the categories, of abstract totalities , such as capital in general , which, through the work of mediations,
will be realized as concrete totalities, as various capitals, as singularities
resulting from the concrete movement of history.
This controversy was reported by Paul Burkett, in an article entitled “Some comments on capital in general and the structure of Marx’s
capital”—which, while relevant, adopts a qualification of the currents in
dispute that deserves to be rethought. If it is accurate to characterize as
“Analytical ” the current that “denies that dialectics plays any useful or
essential role in Capital or that it is a valid instrument for Marxian political economy today” (Burkett, p. 49); calling the current that defends the
centrality of dialectics in Capital “Fundamentalist” is far from a clarification free of prejudice, as it evokes certain negative aspects associated with
“fundamentalisms”—fanaticism, sectarianism, irrationalism. This is not a
dispute between an “analytical” current and a “fundamentalist” current,
but between an “analytical” current and an “ontological” current, which
is the central point that distinguishes the two currents; the understanding
that dialectics is not just a method, a sort of epistemological expedient,
but, as Hegel taught, the result of the effective intertwining of logic and
ontology.
Hegelian logic is not logic in the scholastic sense of the word, it is not
formal logic, but an indissoluble spiritual unity of logic and ontology. On
the one hand, the true ontological connections receive their proper expression in Hegel’s thought only in the form of logical categories; on the other
hand, the logical categories are not conceived as simple determinations of
thought, but must be understood as components of the dynamic essential
movement of reality, as degrees or stages on the path of the spirit to realize
itself. (Lukács 1979a, p. 27)
In turn, Marxian thinking about ontology, his ontology, has its starting
point in Hegel, in Hegelian philosophy:
And this, as we have seen, moves within a certain unity, determined by the
idea of the system, between logical ontology and the theory of knowledge;
the Hegelian concept of dialectics implies, at the very moment when it puts
itself forward, a similar verification and even tends to merge one thing with
the other. (Lukács 1979b, p. 11)
2
DIALECTIC OF UNFINISHEDNESS: 150 YEARS OF VOLUME …
33
The point here is not only to affirm the inextricable relationship
between Hegelian philosophy and Marx’s thought, which is to say,
to affirm the centrality of dialectics, Marx’s specific appropriation of
Hegelian dialectics:
[…] it is absolutely not a question of saying that dialectics is the last word
or that it is above all criticism What we mean is simply that any criticism
of Capital that does not take dialectics seriously as a discourse of contradiction can only lead to regression. It is this regression, this going back to
Marx that is in question, not the project of going beyond, which, on the
contrary, is the task of all of us. (Fausto 1983, p. 122)
If it is not the case to speak of an abandonment of dialectics in relation
to Heinrich’s thesis about a change that Marx would have made in his
methodology for presenting the critique of political economy between
1859 and 1867, this change, if it has indeed occurred, has profound
implications for the understanding of the whole of Marx’s work, and his
critique of political economy. Burkett says:
In opposition to Rosdolsky, Heinrich suggests that between the publication of the Critique of Political Economy and the writing of Capital, there
was a basic change in Marx’s methodological treatment of capitalism. In
particular, Marx’s attempt to maintain the conceptual distinction between
‘capital in general’ and ‘various capitals’ collapsed and Marx was forced to
bring elements pertaining to the level of ‘various capitals’ into the analysis of issues pertaining to the level of ‘capital in general’. Based partly
on Marx’s manuscripts of 1861-63, he argues that the basic problem with
‘capital in general’ is that it ‘involves specific contents, namely all the characteristics that appear in the real movement of capital, in competition, while
at the same time, whereas its content had been presented as a specific level
of abstraction more specifically, ‘capital in general’ is ‘abandoned because
it is not possible to elaborate all the determinations of form (Formbestimmung ) indispensable for the transition from ’generality’ to ’effective
movement’ without the movement of the many capitals. (Burkett, p. 50)
The course of this essay will be as follows: in the section that follows,
“A complete journey”, it will be argued that Volume I of Capital , on
which Marx wrote at least three complete editions, should be considered
finished, which did not exempt him from continuing to work on it until
the end of his life, either supplementing it or adding new elements to it.
34
J. A. DE PAULA
This effective completeness of Volume I, however, does not guarantee
that we have full access to what its author intended. Only now, with
the publication of MEGA, of all the materials relating to Capital , the
published texts, the unused versions of the texts, the marginalia, the notes,
the correspondence and the entire critical apparatus, will it be possible
to produce a “critical edition” of Volume I, Volume II and Volume III,
which in fact make up a whole and can only be properly understood both
in their conceptual, logical and effective connections and in the gaps,
absences and incompleteness resulting from the unfinished nature of the
work as a whole.
In this sense, it is possible to say, even with regard to Volume I,
published 150 years ago, that the much that is actually known about
it does not eliminate the many areas of shadow that make it, relatively
speaking, still a book to be deciphered in all its meanings and implications.
The second part of this essay is entitled “The other journeys” and
seeks to show the changes in Marx’s thinking, which will be reflected
in his work, which from a strongly Eurocentric moment, adept at Hegel’s
vision of the “peoples without history”, moved, from his involvement
with the International Workers’ Association, challenged to understand
the class struggle on a world scale, the differences between capitalism in
the center and the periphery, to an effectively internationalist, critical and
revolutionary position.
Finally, the third part of the essay, “What really is the name of the
country?”, will discuss the essential meaning of the book Capital, its
expository structure, its purposes and its place in history, based on the
assumption that it is the most important book of our time, in the sense
that it encompasses, in a comprehensive and comprehensive way, the
major contemporary issues resulting from the domination of capital .
A Complete Journey: Volume I of Capital
The journey we are talking about here is that of capital. In this other
odyssey, which is Capital, as Karel Kosik (Kosik 1976) rightly saw, we
are following a new journey, not of a cunning and curious hero, Ulysses,
but of a social relationship, which, seeing itself as a thing, a commodity,
condemns everything around him to a frantic search for greater power
over human life, transformed into permanent work for enrichment, for
the accumulation of wealth, of money, of those who subordinate the
condemned to work that they don’t choose, control or enjoy. At the end
2
DIALECTIC OF UNFINISHEDNESS: 150 YEARS OF VOLUME …
35
of the Odyssey, ten years after the Trojan War, Ulysses returned to his
native Ithaca, where he found his family, his wife and his throne, took
revenge on his enemies and allowed himself to be appeased. At the end
of the odyssey of the commodity, transformed into capital, a capital that
accumulates as an end in itself, in the validity of this limit form of “bad
infinity”, of irrationality with strong regressive contents, capital, disproportionate, unable to contain its hybris , sets in motion the disruptive
elements that at a certain moment will present themselves as crisis, as
violence, as destruction.
The theme of the “Odyssey” had considerable importance in European
culture in the second half of the eighteenth century, impacting literature
and philosophy. Kosik says:
Marx and Hegel, in constructing their works, start from a common
symbolic motif, diffuse in the cultural atmosphere of their time. This motif,
proper to the period of the literary, philosophical and scientific work, is the
odyssey. The subject (the individual, the individual conscience, the spirit, the
collectivity) must go on a pilgrimage through the world and get to know
the world in order to know itself. The subject’s knowledge is only possible
on the basis of the subject’s own activity on the world; the subject only
knows the world to the extent that who actively intervenes in it, and only
knows himself through an active transformation of the world. (Kosik 1976,
p. 165)
In such a way that the corollary shines through: to know the world is to
transform it, through a critical-practical activity that overcomes alienation,
bad faith and venality. This is an idea that had already appeared in Marx’s
first thesis on Feuerbach, from 1845/46—“Philosophers have hitherto
done nothing but interpret the world in various ways; it is, in fact, a
question of transforming it ” (Marx 1972, p. 668).
Literary theory has identified two types of epics: natural epics,
or true epics, and artificial epics, or epics of imitation. Natural epics
are: the Iliad and Odyssey, the Mahabharata, the Ramayana, the
Nibelungen and the Poem of the Cid Imitation epics: Pharsalia, The
Thebaidea, The Divine Comedy, Orlando Furioso, The Araucana, The
Lusiads. There’s no point in listing them all, here are some examples of epics: Latin—Virgil’s Aeneid and Lucan’s Pharsalia; Italian—
Dante’s Divine Comedy, Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso; Torquato Tasso’s
Jerusalem Liberated; Portuguese—Camões’ Os Lusíadas ; Spanish—Cid’s
Poem; German—The Nibelungs , Klopstock’s Messiah; French—Rolando’s
36
J. A. DE PAULA
Song , Voltaire’s Henriade; English—Beowulf’s Poem, Milton’s Paradise
Lost (Sainz de Robles 1949, pp. 429–433).
Karel Kosik drew attention to the fact that the epic went beyond its
formal field, influencing both the novel form, in particular, the so-called
formative novel , as well as philosophy and critical thinking: Rousseau’s
“The Story of a Human Heart” (Emile or Of Education) and the German
Bildungsroman in the classic version of Goethe’s “Wilhelm Meister” or
in the romantic version of “Heirinch von Ofterdingen”, Novalis, Hegel’s
Phenomenology of Spirit and Marx’s Capital are examples of the “odyssey”
motif in the various fields of cultural creation” (Kosik 1976, p. 166).
In this essay, whose purpose is to show that the unfinished nature of
Capital is not simply a defect or a gap, but has heuristic implications,
the reading of a recent text by Miguel Vedda, his analysis of Goethe’s
presence in Ernst Bloch’s philosophy, came in handy. In fact, what Vedda
shows us is how Goethe’s Faust is a superior form of dialectical presentation insofar as it is not content with limited totalizations, with occasional
appeasements:
Goethe was always a decisive influence on Bloch’s philosophy, Frederic
Jameson wrote that the whole of Bloch’s work could be interpreted as
an extensive commentary on Faust. For Bloch, Faust’s commitment to
rejecting any limited satisfaction is one of the most characteristic images of
the utopian impulse; the perpetual restlessness of the Goethean character,
who always seeks a new pinnacle after the one already reached, constitutes the overcoming of the antithesis embodied in the equally partial
extremes of abstract idealism (Don Quixote) and philistine conformism
(the Homeric Ulysses, after his return to Ithaca): oblivious to all unilateral
excess, Faust transcends the limits of given reality, but without abstractly
denying it, but rather preserving it as a valid inheritance. (Vedda 2006,
p. 216)
It is this example, that of Faust ’s permanent restlessness, that we want
to invoke here, as analogous to the movement in Capital . There, too,
there’s no end in a calming plenitude. In fact, peace in the world of capital
can only be achieved with its destruction, that is, with the emancipatory
revolution.
Capital, Volume I, was published in its first German version in 1867.
Between June 1872 and May 1873, a second German edition appeared,
with significant changes to the first four chapters and point 2 of Chapter
VII (Fineschi 2008, p. 109). In mid-1873, the second German edition of
2
DIALECTIC OF UNFINISHEDNESS: 150 YEARS OF VOLUME …
37
Volume I was published in one volume. The French version of the book,
translated by Joseph Roy, appeared in fascicles between August 1872 and
November 1875, with all the work supervised by Marx. Pedro Scaron’s
judgment on the quality of this edition is severe. He says:
It should be considered, for better or worse, as a new version, the third,
of Volume I of Capital. For worse, because Marx, who esteemed the
French as practical revolutionaries but not as theoreticians, simplified - for
a moment sweetened - many of the most complex and profound passages
of the original (...) To compensate, to a certain extent, for these simplifications, Marx grafted onto the main trunk of the French text a series of
additions, most of them very valuable, and reworked some passages in a
way that is reminiscent of, although not the same as, what was done in the
second German edition. (Scaron 1977a, p. VIII)
Volume I would have a third German edition, which came out in 1883,
after Marx’s death, and without him having followed the editing work,
and a fourth German edition, in 1890, which ended up being a kind
of “definitive” edition, even if it isn’t, insofar as both the 3rd and 4th
German editions were not edited by their author. In this sense, Pedro
Scaron has strong reasons for arguing that the edition to be considered
“definitive” of Volume I of Capital should be the second German edition
of 1873, not only because it was the last to be written and revised by him,
but also because it presents important improvements when compared to
the first edition.
The fact is that, despite this relative profusion, this continuous dwelling
on the work, Marx was never entirely satisfied with the result and
continued to work on Volume I until the end of his life. So much so that
it’s true to say that Volume I of Capital was written, rewritten, revised,
complemented, supplemented and yet remained unfinished.
There is no point in insisting, any more than necessary, that Volume I
of Capital is the realization of the moment of the project of elaboration of
the critique of political economy, in the sense of revealing an object in its
internal connections, in its multiple determinations, presented according
to the necessary way of exposing the categories along the path of their
mediations from the immediacy of generality, through the intermediate
instance of particularity, to its full realization as singularity, as concrete.
This syllogistic sequence of dialectical exposition was explained by Marx
both in the 1857 Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy, in the
38
J. A. DE PAULA
Introduction to the Grundrisse, and in the body of this text—"a logical
and demanding path, the exposition of the dialectics of capital presents
itself as the basic roadmap of Marxian discourse in Capital . In the Grundrisse, Marx is explicit in the presentation of his methodological roadmap,
a roadmap that he will have modified when writing Capital , without this
meaning any changes to the dialectical logic of the exposition.
I. General:
a. Formation of capital from money
b. Selling capital
c. Singularity of capital - capital and profit, capital and interest
II. Special features:
a. Capital accumulation
b. Competition between capitals
c. Concentration of capital
III. Singularities:
a. Capital as credit
b. Capital as share capital
c. Capital as a money market” (Paula 2014, pp. 157–158).
This is a dialectical syllogism, which, having been appropriate from
Hegel, was transfigured to express not the march of the spirit, but the
movement of the world dominated by capital, the world of commodities,
in its various stations, circumvolutions, metamorphoses, totalizations. In
fact, the expository structure of Capital, Volume I, is organized from a
set of totalizations that are placed like concentric circles, from a maximum
level of abstraction, in which all the categories are presupposed, through
the various partial totalizations, in which the categories are placed, until
the whole is reconstituted, no longer as an abstract, presupposed totality,
but as a placed, complex, concrete totality, as a result of the work of
history.
The exposition of Capital , Volume I, moves from the abstract to
the concrete, from the increasing levels of appearance and unfolding of
the object’s determinations. There are several categorical totalizations in
Volume I. The first totalization can be found in the very opening of the
book, in its first sentence, which like a bolt of lightning, in a single flicker,
exposes the whole complex plot that is about to unfold:
2
DIALECTIC OF UNFINISHEDNESS: 150 YEARS OF VOLUME …
39
The wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production dominates is presented as an ‘enormous accumulation of commodities’, and the
individual commodity as the elementary form of that wealth. Our investigation therefore only begins with the analysis of the commodity. (Marx
1977b, p. 43)
And then the main elements of the drama were presented—the
commodity, the elementary form of wealth in capitalism and the accumulation of commodities as the form of wealth in the capitalist mode of
production. From here on, until the end, until the close of Volume I,
and the unfinished Volumes II and III of Capital , we will see the various
incarnations of the real Vautrin, Capital , more insidious and perverse
than Balzac’s character. In The Human Comedy, which is as crowded
as any real country, Vautrin is evil personified, powerful and ubiquitous,
which he accompanies like a shadow, like a form of light in reverse and
like a negative force.
Vautrin appears in the same unforeseen and mysterious way as
Mephistopheles in Goethe’s Faust , or Lucifer in Byron’s Cain. And
Vautrin’s function in Balzac’s Human Comedy is identical to that of
Mephistopheles in the mysteries of Goethe and Byron (...) In Goethe’s
eyes, the great transformation of the world from the Renaissance onwards
has a positive value and Mephistopheles is only ‘a part of that force which
always wants evil, but has always done good.’ For Balzac, this Good does
not live now except in the dreams of fantasy. Vautrin’s Mephistophelian
reasoning is nothing more than the brutal and cynical formulation of what
everyone in this world does, everyone must do, if they don’t want to
perish. (Lukács 1965, pp. 110–111)
The appearance of Vautrin, who will appear under other names at other
times in The Human Comedy, is relatively discreet. At Madame Vauquer’s
boarding house, in Uncle Goriot, Vautrin is Rastignac’s tempter, the
master of his apprenticeship in social ascension, abstracted from any
scruples or morality. His appearance in Lost Illusions and Splendors and
Miseries of the Courtesans is coated with disruptive intensity. Now it’s
no longer a question of what is sought is to dominate the city, Paris,
to place it at the feet of his protégé, through talent, voluptuousness,
power and glory. Rastignac, in this sense, is a pale version of Lucien de
Rubempré’s voracity. Vautrin, who presented himself as a Spanish priest—
Carlos Herrera, like Jacques Collin, the “death-dealer”—is one of the
40
J. A. DE PAULA
most complex characters among the many created by Balzac. There were
those who didn’t appreciate him, seeing him as devoid of any real human
substance. There were also those who, like Paul Flat, saw him as:
Balzac’s greatest creation, but even so they recognize an abstract, symbolic
character”: ‘His most glorious creation, the one that ranks him without
equal among moderns and in fact an unparalleled rival to Shakespeare...
Vautrin belongs to that category of characters... in whom creators of exceptional genius have tried to embody the blind powers that drive the world.’
(...) (Rónai 1956, p. 11)
It is precisely from this last expression—“the blind powers that run the
world”—that the association between Vautrin and capital becomes most
visible. Balzac is surprised by the moment when money and capital took
over the world, the victory of the world of merchandise over the world
of the Ancien Régime. At the center of this new world there are money,
capital, merchandise, the creatures of Vautrin, the blind power that runs
the world with the black eyes of corruption and venality. Luciano de
Rubempré is finally defeated and commits suicide. He left a will and a
letter in which he confesses and reveals his Mephistophelean protector—
Vautrin/Carlos Herrera/Jacques Collin. In a letter to Father Herrera,
Lucien says:
You are descended from Adam through that line in which the devil
continued to blow the fire whose first spark had been thrown at Eve.
Among the demons of this filiation, there appear from time to time some
terrible ones of vast organizations, which sum up all human forces, similar
to those feverish desert animals whose life requires immense spaces.” (...)
‘Endowed with immense power over tender souls, they attract and crush
them. The genus is large and beautiful. It’s the richly colored poisonous
plant that fascinates children in the woods. It is the poetry of evil.’ (...)
Farewell then, farewell, grandiose statue of evil and corruption! (Balzac,
1956, 354, p. 355)
Capital is like the Human Comedy, which has followed the various
incarnations of Vautrin, that is, of his creatures—money, the commodity.
Capital’s first appearance is as a commodity, then it will experience its first
metamorphosis, unfolding into money, which, by appropriating a special
commodity, labor power, will become capital. But before this new totalization, which brings together commodity-money capital, there is another
2
DIALECTIC OF UNFINISHEDNESS: 150 YEARS OF VOLUME …
41
decisive totalization, which is the form of value. This problem, that of the
form of value, is the specifically Marxian novelty that Marx brought to
what can be called the theory of value.
Isaac Rubin has shown that Marx inherited two questions from the
classical theory of value—the question of the substance of value and
the question of the magnitude of value. Marx didn’t just give the same
answers to these questions that the classics, such as Ricardo, gave, he
modified them significantly, in the sense of greater precision to both
the question of substance and the question of magnitude; qualifying:
the value of a commodity is a social substance, produced by the abstract
dimension of labor, that is, it is the result of the fact that all human labor
is a fragment of human labor in general and that the magnitude of the
value of a commodity is the labor time socially necessary to produce it.
In fact, Marx perfected the labor theory of value, but he went beyond
that, he transformed the problem of value by introducing the question of
the form of value, a question totally strange to the theory of value. This
problematic, which appeared in the first edition of Volume I of Capital
as an appendix, was reworked in the second edition, becoming part of the
chapter on the commodity as item 3: “The form of value or the value of
exchange”. The procedure here is to apprehend the form of value, that is,
to follow the ways in which exchanges take place, from a simple, isolated
and fortuitous exchange, through the generalization of the exchange
process, to the money form of value, which is the most universal form in
which value can present itself (Rubin 1974). To explain something that
is not always clear at this point in the exposition of Capital. Contrary to
what certain theses seem to believe, which have clung to the idea that the
first section of Volume I of Capital , its first three chapters, concerns a
supposed “simple mercantile society”, there is no such thing in Capital .
Marx, like Adam Smith, does not assume that there is a need to use a stage
prior to capitalism, the world of Robinson Crusoe, a “crude and primitive state”, to postulate the “conditions of possibility for the emergence of
capitalism”, before capital existed. Marx, on the other hand, starts from
capitalism, from fully constituted capitalism, from the universalization of
the exchange system, but he does this by considering the reality of capitalism in its most abstract forms of existence, as presuppositions. This is
why, as early as Chapter 1, not only can the money form of value appear,
but also the price form of value: “The simple relative expression of the value
42
J. A. DE PAULA
of a commodity, for example cloth, in the commodity that already functions as a money commodity, for example gold, is the price form. The ‘price
form’ in the case of cloth will therefore be:
20 m. of cloth = 2 ounces of gold
Or rather, if the monetary denomination of two ounces of gold is two
pounds sterling:
2 m. of cloth = 2 pounds sterling.” (Marx, 1977b, p. 86)
The point here is to understand the price form as a presupposition,
since its effective position would imply, for example, the state as the
manager and issuer of legal tender money, such as the pound sterling.
At this point in the exposition, in the context of Volume I of Capital , it
is not only impossible to concretely address the question of price, because
all the necessary determinations for the entry into the scene of competition, of the various capitals , are still absent, which even in the context
of Volume III of Capital , cannot be effectively realized because essential dimensions of the concrete dynamics of capital are absent—the state,
foreign trade, the world market and crises, as Marx projected from the
sequels to the critique of political economy.
The second section of Volume I of Capital consists of a single chapter,
IV—“How Money Becomes Capital”—which is a new totalization, still
abstract, of capital. The discovery that a commodity, labor power, has,
and only has, as its use value, to generate other values and more value,
dispelled the secret, and exposed the genesis of surplus value, opening
the way both to the explanation of the specific forms of surplus value
extraction, and to the final end of capital’s first complete journey, to the
concrete conditions of capital accumulation, the realization of capitalism’s
essential desideratum.
The seventh and final section of Volume I of Capital is made up of five
chapters that summarize, both in terms of form and content, the odyssey
of the commodity, its realization as the accumulation of capital, based
on a rigorous dialectical presentation. The order of the exposition of this
section follows the syllogistic triad—generality, particularity, singularity—
which, with regard to the accumulation of capital, is as follows: Chapter
XXI—Simple Reproduction, i.e., the conditions for the possibility of any
process of accumulation; Chapter XXII—Transformation of surplus value
into surplus value, i.e., the conditions for the possibility of any process of
accumulation. In the chapter Capital , which describes the various forms,
2
DIALECTIC OF UNFINISHEDNESS: 150 YEARS OF VOLUME …
43
including the non-canonical ones, those which violate the requirements
of equivalence in exchange, and the particular forms of surplus value
extraction and capital accumulation, Marx says:
In dealing with the production of surplus value, we have always assumed
that wages have a value at least equal to that of labor power. The compulsory reduction of wages below this value, however, plays too important
a role in practice for us not to dwell for a moment on its analysis.
Within certain limits, this reduction effectively transforms the consumption fund necessary for the maintenance of the worker into a fund for the
accumulation of capital. (Marx 1968, Volume I, vol. 2, pp. 696–697)
This passage, taken from Volume I of Capital, in the context of “general capitalism”, makes explicit the mobilization of the question, which,
in its particularity, in its transgression of the exchange of equivalents, is a
problem confined to the sphere of intercapitalist competition, to the plane
of the “various capitals”, without this betraying the rigorous demand of
the dialectical logic of the exposition. In fact, what Marx said verbatim
is—this question is too important in the process of the real accumulation
of capital to be omitted, even if all the determinations necessary for a fair
exposition of the question are not yet fully in place. To omit the question of the spurious, but frequent and important, forms of accumulation
resulting from the transgression of the exchange of equivalents, from the
effective theft of the workers’ consumption fund, in order to guarantee a
kind of expository purity, would not only be an extravagance, a fetishization of the method, but an impoverishment of the content of the matter
in question.
Chapter XXIII of Volume I of Capital, “The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation”, is the concluding moment of the synthesis of the
process of capital production, the singular moment of the syllogistic triad,
in which the Capital finally sets out the concrete determinations, which in
Chapter I could only appear as presuppositions. Now, the formulation that
opens Capital —wealth in the capitalist mode of production—has gained
historical concreteness and can finally be put into practice: all the contradictions contained in the commodity have been put into practice, they
have unfolded, they have brought about the first global totalization of
capital, the production of capital in general. In addition to Chapter XXIII,
Section 7 of Volume I of Capital still has two more chapters—XXIV,
“The So-called Primitive Accumulation of Capital ”; and XXV, “Modern
44
J. A. DE PAULA
Theory of Colonization”. These last two chapters are somewhat disconcerting for those who cling to linear narratives. In Capital , Marx went
absolutely against linearity, leaving for the last two chapters material that
chronologically precedes the process of capital production, that is, the
historical conditions of its emergence and the historical genesis of the
capitalist mode of production. The course of the exposition of Capital
is not from pre-capitalism to fully constituted capitalism, but follows
a different expository strategy: from the most abstract, but generically
universal conditions of the existence of capital, to the most concrete forms
of its existence, with a system of mediations running through it, systematically adding the determinations that enrich the categories until they are
realized as concrete universals, as singularities.
In this sense, Chapters XXIV and XXV are not out of place, but must
be understood as part of the moment of concreteness of the process
of capital production, the one that must encompass the singularity of
capital, including its own concrete historical formation, as the primitive
accumulation of capital.
Maximilien Rubel’s edition of Volume I of Capital was based on the
French translation by Joseph Roy, which was first published in fascicles,
between 1872 and 1875. Rubel adopts the somewhat arbitrary procedure
of reversing the order of the last item in the book, arguing that this was
Marx’s original intention, which he could not carry out for fear of interference from censorship, since the chapter that originally closed the book
was a passionate call for social revolution. Rubel says:
Capital closes all previous editions with a chapter entitled ‘The Modern
Theory of Colonization’, followed by a chapter on ‘The Historical Tendency
of Capitalist Accumulation’. A close examination of these pages suggests
that Marx reversed the order of the two chapters at the time of publication.
He would have done this - either on his own or at the behest of his editor
- in order to foil the censors’ suspicions. The apocalyptic paragraphs of
the conclusion were removed from the end of the volume and replaced by
more professorial considerations. (Rubel, 1965, p. 541)
Whether arbitrary or not, Rubel’s reordering of the text allows us to
restore, in its entirety, the exposition plan of Volume I, which begins
with the commodity and ends with the chapter “Historical Tendency of
Capitalist Accumulation”, which in current versions of the text appears
2
DIALECTIC OF UNFINISHEDNESS: 150 YEARS OF VOLUME …
45
as item 7 of the chapter on “Primitive Accumulation of Capital”. In this
text, Marx says that capitalism:
[…] having reached a certain degree of development, this mode of production generates the material means of its own annihilation. From that
moment on, forces and passions are stirred up within society which feel
themselves chained to it. It must be destroyed and is destroyed. (Marx
1968, Volume I, vol. 2, p. 880)
In this chapter, “The Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation”,
it is the whole process of capital production that is presented, as capital
in general: social classes are assumed there, the class struggle as struggles between capital and the proletariat taken in their universal forms, as
generalities devoid of particularities regional, cultural, gender differentiation, level of information and politicization, experiences of struggle and
organization.
Chapter XXIII of Volume I of Capital, “The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation”, is the central chapter of the capital production
process. Its structure, which is also dialectical, has the same triadic form
as the dialectical syllogism—generality, particularity, singularity, which in
this case looks like this: generality—1. The composition of capital does
not change, the demand for labor power increases with accumulation;
particularity—2 and 3. Relative decrease of a variable part of capital with
the progress of accumulation and the concentration that accompanies
it; progressive production of a relative overpopulation or an industrial
reserve army; singularity—4 and 5. Forms of existence of relative overpopulation. The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation, Illustration of
the General Law of Capitalist Accumulation.
Here, at last, is the conclusive totalization of the production process
of capital, of capital in general. Capital and labor have come face to
face, surplus value has been extracted and accumulated, the class struggle
has manifested itself in the confrontation of opposing and irreconcilable
complexes, the concrete prospect of the revolutionary transformation of
the mode of production:
Once the old society has been disintegrated from top to bottom by this
process of transformation, once the workers have been converted into
proletarians and their working conditions into capital, once the capitalist mode of production has set out on its own feet, another stage
46
J. A. DE PAULA
unfolds in which the socialization of labour, the conversion of the soil and
other means of production into collectively employed means of production in common, and consequently the expropriation of the private owners
continue in a new form. (...) In the past, the masses were expropriated by
usurpers; today, it is a question of expropriation. It is the expropriation of
a few usurpers by the mass of the people. (Marx 1968, Volume I, vol. 2,
pp. 881–882)
Let’s return to an issue mentioned earlier in this text. At the end of
Volume I of Capital , Marx presents its annihilation, its destruction as the
result of the revolutionary action of the class that opposes capital, a class
taken here as a generality, as a universality.
In fact, Volume I of Capital was a complete journey, the production
of capital was presented in its entirety, and yet this completeness only
achieved a first set of totalizations, which set out capital as a generality,
as a universality, immune to the action of time, indifferent to the complications arising from the materiality of the commodity. In this context,
capital is presented as a homogeneous whole confronted by a proletariat,
also taken without any real concrete historical differentiation, by regional,
cultural or political particularities. In short, the movement of the production of capital has apprehended it in its condition as capital in general ,
the spectacle, at this point, has not yet revealed all its contents, only those
that result from the pure objectivity of the categories, from what cannot
fail to manifest itself as abstract essence, as immediate universality.
Other Trips
There are many who, in an attempt to enhance Marx’s work, present it
as a kind of monolith, perfect, finished, free of ambiguities and misunderstandings. This image of a perfectly accomplished work that has already
said all it has to say will be contradicted in this text by the mobilization
of another image of Marx’s work, which has undergone significant transformations throughout its development, moving from a version tributary
to a problematic Eurocentrism, a development centrism and an uncritical adherence to the Hegelian thesis of “peoples without history”, to
a comprehensive openness to the incorporation of internationalism, of
the specificities of the periphery of capitalism, to the class struggle as a
concrete historical phenomenon.
2
DIALECTIC OF UNFINISHEDNESS: 150 YEARS OF VOLUME …
47
Pedro Scaron established a periodization of Marx’s and Engels’
thinking on the national question and on the extra-European capitalist
reality, which is worth remembering. The first stage, says Scaron:
[…] has an imprecise start date, but no later than 1847, and ends approximately with the end of the Crimean War (1856). What is characteristic
of this period is that Marx and Engels combine moral repudiation of the
atrocities of colonialism with a more or less veiled theoretical justification
for it. The famous articles on British domination in India notably enunciate
this position, summarized thus by Marx himself in a letter of 14 June 1853
to Engels: ‘I have continued this hidden war (in favour of centralization)
with a first article on India, in which the destruction of vernacular industry
by England is presented as ’revolutionary’ . This resulted in a ‘shock’ (for the
editors of The New York Daily Tribune, the American periodical in which
Marx collaborated).’ (...) ‘In the opinion of Marx and Engels, the developed capitalism of countries like England exerted a ‘civilizing’ influence
(on certain occasions they themselves put this word in inverted commas)
on the ‘barbarian countries’, which were not yet capitalist; they pulled
them out of their inertia (a very Hegelian inertia, to put it in parentheses)
to violently precipitate them onto the path of historical progress.’ (Scaron
1974, pp. 6–7)
In 1856, says Scaron, a new stage opened up in Marx and Engels’
thinking on the national and colonial question. This stage lasted until the
founding of the AIT—International Workers’ Association, the so-called
First International.
This was a transitional phase. Marx and Engels do not clearly change their
theoretical conceptions of the relationship between the great European
powers and the colonial and semi-colonial world, but in their writings on
the subject, the aspect that prevails, in most cases, is the denunciation of
the abuses of those powers and the vindication of the rights of the Chinese,
Indians, etc. to resist foreign aggressors and occupiers. (Scaron 1974, p. 9)
The third period took place from 1864 until Marx’s death.
If, from a certain point of view, it is true that Marx is one of the
main founders of the International, it is no less true that the International contributed, although not to founding, but to developing Marx’s
internationalism, freeing him from the contradictory elements of his internationalism. Marx’s change of position on the Irish question during this
48
J. A. DE PAULA
period is remarkable. (...) The free-trader (‘only in the revolutionary sense’)
from 1848 to 1867 becomes a lucid expositor of the need for countries
like Ireland to defend themselves against British competition by erecting
protective barriers for their incipient industries. No less profound was
the evolution of Marx’s thinking with regard to India."(Scaron 1974,
pp. 9–10)
The fourth stage, from the death of Marx in 1883 to the death
of Engels in 1895. Although in particular respects there were effective
conceptual improvements on the national problem, “in general this phase
was marked by stagnation, if not conceptual involution” (Scaron 1974,
pp. 13–14). Regarding Marx and Engels’ thinking on Latin America,
Scaron said:
Does the previous periodization of Marx and Engels’ writings on Latin
America fit? In general terms, yes, and particularly with regard to the first
two stages. The classics of Marxism went from categorically and enthusiastically supporting North American expansion, (...) between 1847 and
1856, to criticizing it in the period from 1856 to 1864. In 1861 and
the following years, Marx resolutely opposed the Anglo-Franco-German
intervention in Mexico", even though his arguments were hardly ‘Marxist’, being very reminiscent of "the old law of nations. (Scaron 1974,
pp. 15–16)
Even more significant and problematic than Marx’s position on Latin
America was his intransigent, incomprehensible and prejudiced assessment
of Simon Bolivar (Aricó 1982).
In fact, what deserves to be emphasized at this stage is that Marx’s
thinking changed over time, as a result of the progress of his studies, with
his experience as leader of the International having a particular influence
on this and the obligation, in this capacity, to consider the class struggle
on a world scale in its concrete form.
The debate on the Eurocentrism of Marx and Engels is not new,
although some authors suggest that the issue is exclusive to them. While
effectively helping to overcome problematic aspects of Marxism, some of
these texts end up making important mistakes:
I. Affirmed the monolithic nature of Marx’s work on the national
question and colonialism;
2
DIALECTIC OF UNFINISHEDNESS: 150 YEARS OF VOLUME …
49
II. They affirmed an irremediable Eurocentrism present in Marx’s
work, which prohibited any possibility for Marx’s thought to
adequately consider the reality of peripheral countries;
III. They presented themselves as the inaugurators of the denunciation
of Eurocentrism and colonialism in Marx’s thought.
The mistakes listed here are perfectly well documented in various
works by Edgardo Lander. Let’s start with an analysis of a text published
in 2006—“Marxism, Eurocentrism and Colonialism” (Lander 2006), in
which all three of the misconceptions mentioned are present. The bibliography cited by the author is not particularly rich, but it is significant that
two of the main authors who have written critically about Marx’s relationship with Latin America are not mentioned. Both Pedro Scaron and
José Aricó, in the 1970s, had already begun an important and informed
critique of the Eurocentrist elements present in parts and at certain times
of Marx’s work. Thus, there is nothing new in pointing out the analytical
deficits and distortions caused by the moment, rare in Marx’s work as a
whole, of significant misunderstanding of issues such as the national and
colonial question. What is new, in this case, is Edgardo Lander’s peremptory conviction that Marx’s misunderstandings on these issues jeopardize
his work as an instrument for the emancipation of peripheral societies.
Lander bases his analysis of Marx’s Eurocentrism on three authors—
Enrique Dussel, Anibal Quijano and Walter Mignolo—all of whom are
relevant and effectively contribute to the critique of Eurocentrism, of
“coloniality”. The point is that the three authors mentioned made their
contributions from the 1990s onward, long after Scaron and Aricó, for
example, who wrote in the 1970s, had made their interventions, which,
although older, are still relevant because they avoid affirming a monolithic
and closed view of Marx on the issue in question.
This is about questioning the inescapable judgment expressed in this
sentence: “Marxism, the most radical critique of capitalist society, does
not escape the Eurocentrism and colonialism characteristic of hegemonic
modern knowledge” (Lander 2006, p. 208). The basic problem with this
statement is not its criticism of Marxism, which in order to be legitimate
will have to overcome the reductionism with which it is presented, as
a left-wing view of European modernity: “Marxism is the most finished
synthesis of both the values and the ways of knowing dominant in the
West in recent centuries” (Lander 2006, p. 210). Lander recognizes the
50
J. A. DE PAULA
existence of various formative sources of Marx’s thought and the tensions
arising from the various appropriations of these sources. Overall, he says:
[...] many of the main ideas on which Marx’s theoretical edifice is built,
the most significant and exciting ideas of the 19th century (progress; science;
progressive development of the productive forces; industrialism; truth and
happiness through abundance) have fallen by the wayside. Those ideas
which, synthesized and articulated, constituted the pillars of an astonishing
theoretical edifice, those formations which constituted the fundamental
force of this extraordinary work of synthesis, have today become their
opposite. What was a source of strength yesterday is now a source of
weakness. (Lander 2006, pp. 213–214)
In order to sustain this view of Marx’s thought, it is necessary to
transform it into a whole, homogeneous piece—a kind of conceptual
crystal that is permanently identical to itself in all its moments and parts.
However, such a crystal does not exist, even if its author himself believed
in its existence for a while. It turns out that this petrified face has been
overcome. Daniel Bensaid says:
Marx often showed great admiration and respect for the results of the
positive sciences, or the English ones for that matter. They are a necessary
moment in the movement of knowledge. As long as it doesn’t stop there
(...) Marx’s ’science’ is indeed a baffling science. In a prodigious search for
the living, where the conceptual order unravels without interruption in the
carnal disorder of combat, it never stops mixing synchrony and diachrony,
the universal of structure and the singularity of history. (Bensaid, 1999,
p. 288 and 284)
The issue being discussed here, already complex in itself, becomes even
more difficult because we can’t help but feel a certain perplexity, especially for those of us who live on the periphery of capitalism, heirs to
a colonial experience, when faced with the unshakeable fact of Marx’s
Eurocentrist moment, of uncritical affiliation to the thesis of “peoples
without history”, forgetting that Marx, in doing so, was in step with
his time, and in fact it is more remarkable and significant that he was
able to overcome this phase. “In the last period of his work Marx took a
further step toward a more complex and more realistic conceptualization
of the worldwide heterogeneity of social forms, their dynamics and their
interdependence. The change in Marx’s perspective came as a result of
2
DIALECTIC OF UNFINISHEDNESS: 150 YEARS OF VOLUME …
51
reflection on Capital, Volume I (published in 1867) and highlighted the
new experience and testimony of the 1870s.
Four events appear as milestones in the political and intellectual context of
Marx’s thought in this period. Firstly, the Paris Commune in 1871 offered
a dramatic lesson and a type of revolutionary power not known until then.
(...) It also brought the final crescendo to Marx’s activities in the First
International, which ended in 1872, to be followed by a period of reflection. Secondly, during the 1860s and 1870s, a fundamental event took
place within the social sciences: the discovery of prehistory, which ‘would
expand the notion of historical time by tens of thousands of years and
which placed primitive societies in a new context’. In the circle of historical studies, combining the study of material remains with ethnography.
(...) Thirdly, and linked to the studies of prehistory, was the expansion of
knowledge about non-capitalist rural societies in the interstices of the capitalist world, especially tributary to the works of Maine, Firs and others on
India. Finally, Russia, the Russians, offered Marx a powerful combination
of all of the above: a wealth of evidence in relation to rural communes
(‘archaic’ but evidently alive in a world of capitalist hegemony) and direct
revolutionary experience, together with the theory and practice of Russian
revolutionary populism. (Shanin 1990, pp. 18–19)
Reflecting on this same theme, the changes in perspective of Marx’s
thought, his overcoming of Eurocentrism, José Aricó established a
synthetic framework based on seven basic questions:
I. Rejection of the attempt to transform Marx’s theory on the
genesis of capitalism in Western Europe into a general historicalphilosophical theory;
II. Recognition of the unequal and contradictory nature of the
economic development of the Western and non-Western worlds
and their conflicting interdependence. Recognition, therefore, of
the subordination of the surplus accumulation process of nonEuropean countries in relation to Europeans and of the colonial
character of the political link between them;
III. Forecasting the shift of the center of the revolutionary process
from the Western world to the non-Western world and the constitution of the national revolution of the dependent countries
conditioned to the social revolution of the European countries;
52
J. A. DE PAULA
IV. Examining the historical possibility of the passage of non-capitalist
societies to socialism without the necessary passage through the
capitalist stage;
V. Identification, especially in the case of Russia, of peasant community institutions as the axis of transition from non-capitalist to
socialist societies;
VI. Perception of the different historical subjects of the revolutionary
movement in Asian and/or colonial societies (peasantry, intellectuals, petty bourgeoisie, embryonic working class) compared to
those in European and capitalist societies;
VII. Affirmation of the distinct nature of the tasks necessary for the
transformation of Asian and/or colonial societies (political independence, agrarian revolution, industrial and commercial protection) in comparison with those to be carried out in European and
capitalist societies” (Franco 1892, pp. 22–23).
Marx’s relationship with Russia is exemplary of the movement of his
thought, of the transformations he experienced from a blatant incomprehension of realities foreign to Western Europe to an equally strong
discovery of the emancipatory possibilities of a society with such deep
communitarian roots as Russia.
Towards the end of the decade (1860), Marx became increasingly aware
that alongside the official Russia, which he had so often attacked as the
center and guardian of European reaction, there had emerged a different
Russia of revolutionary allies and radical scholars, increasingly committed
to their own theoretical work. The first translation of Capital was into
Russian, a decade before the English translation came out. The hopes
that were rekindling in Western Europe after the Paris Commune were
even more auspicious. […] In 1870-1871, Marx studied Russian on a
self-taught basis, with the aim of directly approaching the facts and the
debate published in that language. [...] Marx proceeded with similar vigor
to study Russian sources and effectively converted the books of Russian
radical intellectuals into textbooks for learning the language, starting with
Herzen and paying particular attention to Flerovski and Tchernichevsky.
(Shanin 1990, pp. 19–20)
Marx more than once expressed his interest in the work of Tchernichevsky, one of the great names of the so-called “Russian populism”.
2
DIALECTIC OF UNFINISHEDNESS: 150 YEARS OF VOLUME …
53
Even stronger was his relationship with Nicolai Frantsevich Danielson,
called Nicolai-on, the first translator of Capital :
In the 1870s and 1880s he was considered the greatest exponent of
Marxism in Russia. He maintained an extensive correspondence with Marx,
who urged Danielson to write General Lines on our Economy after the
Reformation (as an article in 1880 and published as a book in 1893).
Danielson believed that the socialization of labour could take place without
going through the capitalist phase of development if the state carried out
the unification of agriculture and industry. Plekhanov chose Danielson as
the target of his attacks in Our Differences (1884), as did Lenin later in The
Development of Capitalism in Russia (1899). (Sanders 1990, pp. 220–221)
The important thing to note is that Marx and Marxism arrived in
Russia at the hands of the populists. It was the populist theoreticians
and militants; it was the populist political organizations that projected
Marxism in Russia. That the Bolsheviks later made the attack on the
populists one of the central points of their political struggle is a fact that
has at least two aspects worth highlighting: (1) on the one hand the
attack. The Bolsheviks’ fierce confrontation with the populists reflected
the tactical need of the then minority current, the Bolsheviks, to dispute
the hegemony of the Russian revolutionary process with the majority and
deep-rooted current, populism; (2) on the other hand, the radical separation that was established between the Bolsheviks and the populists, not to
mention the exclusion of other revolutionary currents, such as the anarchists and the Mensheviks, in other words, the affirmation of Bolshevik
exclusivism, meant the adoption of a revolutionary path that was not only
not the only one possible, but also excluded the participation of the rich
and diverse contribution of the other revolutionary currents in Russia at
the time. In the specific case of the populists, the interdiction of the
Bolsheviks meant depriving the Russian revolutionary process not only
of relevant popular experience, but also of their particular sensitivity in
dealing with issues of agriculture and nature, largely in tune with the most
advanced contemporary perspectives on ecology and the environment.
The fact is that Marx was a permanent interlocutor of the populists,
and he considered the development of Russian communal property with
particular interest:
On the basis of this theoretical premise, Tchernichevsky thought that, given
the development of the advanced West, it would be possible for Russia
54
J. A. DE PAULA
to jump directly from communal land ownership to socialism. (...) Marx
was deeply impressed by these ideas. In my opinion, Marx went as far as
to consider them rational and also to conceive as possible that given the
existence of the advanced West as a precondition, Russia could start from
its peasant commune and move immediately to socialism. (Wada 1990,
pp. 69–70)
This is the theoretical context in which, in 1881, Marx responded to
Vera Zasulich’s question:
The analysis of Capital, therefore, does not provide reasons neither for nor
against the vitality of the Russian commune. However, the special study I
have made of it, including the search for original material, has convinced
me that the commune is the fulcrum for Russia’s social regeneration. But
in order for it to function as such, the weedy influences that assail it from
all sides must first be eliminated and then it must be guaranteed the normal
conditions for its spontaneous development. (Marx 1990, p. 162).
We know that Volume III of Capital is an approach to the concrete,
to the world of the “various capitals”, to the singularity of the movement
of capital. We also know that it was left unfinished, and that even if it had
been included, at the limit of what it could advance, the full realization
of the critique of political economy, that is, the realization of capital as a
concrete and complex totality, would not have been achieved because it
still needed to be put into place: the state, foreign trade and the world
market and crises, that is, the conditions of possibility for the realization of competition, the full functioning of the world of various capitals.
It is in this light that Marx’s intention “to use Russia for Volume III
of Capital , just as he had used England in Volume I, takes on particular significance” (Shanin 1990, p. 9). In other words, the periphery of
capitalism and its historical and structural singularities as indispensable
components for thinking about the concrete movement of capital in its
entirety.
For some authors, Marx’s unequivocal overcoming of his Eurocentrist
moment was not complete. Carlos Franco, for example, analyzing Marx’s
position on Latin America, says that Marx was only partially able to overcome Eurocentrism. He changed his position with regard to Russia, India,
China, Ireland and Turkey, for example, but he would have maintained an
incomprehension, that is, a basic prejudice with regard to Latin America.
The reasons for this, for Carlos Franco, were psychological:
2
DIALECTIC OF UNFINISHEDNESS: 150 YEARS OF VOLUME …
55
[…] in the final analysis, Latin America’s ambiguity (multi-ethnic popular
field, elites foreign to the popular body, low national density, artificial
states, power crises, etc.) subjected tension to the capacity of Marxian
thought to reorient itself, its willingness to put its theory back into an original problem field. And this is where Marx reveals what psychologists call
’intolerance of the ambiguous’, which is a kind of horror of what challenges
and questions all the coordinates on which we base our understanding of
reality. (Franco 1982, pp. 25–26)
In fact, Carlos Franco’s thesis on:
[…] the flaws of the Marxian approach to Latin America seems correct in
general terms. On the other hand, it is not possible to follow him in some
of his main implications: it doesn’t make sense, as Franco would have it, to
say that Marx "avoided the Latin American problem. (Franco 1982, p. 27)
In fact, he dealt with the issue at various times. All of these interventions have been gathered together in a volume organized by Pedro
Scaron, with around 350 pages (Marx and Engels 1974a). It is possible
that Franco considers 350 pages to be an insufficient treatment of a
complex reality such as that of Latin America, in the same way that Marx
and Engels’ treatments of, for example, Spain (293 pages), Ireland (390
pages) and the national question and the formation of states (268 pages)
would have to be classified as insufficient (Marx and Engels 1979, 1980a,
1980b). In all three cases, the topics required greater care. However, it
is a mistake to say that Marx avoided these themes, and Franco’s assertion about the existence of a “definitive mismatch between Latin America
and Marxism”—“a kind of mutual and secret repulsion, which would
distance Latin America from Marxism (i.e. the reality from theory) and
expel Marxism from Latin America (that is, theory from reality)” (Franco
1982, p. 11). There is no point in repeating José Aricó’s decisive analysis,
which has already been reported here.
In fact, at various points in his work, especially in his journalistic
output, Marx considered the reality of Latin America with positions that
ranged from profound incomprehension to a more understanding and
balanced moment. Latin America was not the only region in which Marx
made mistakes before overcoming his initial misconceptions and prejudices. What seems to escape Franco is that even if Marx had not failed
in his analysis of Latin America, as he did of other peripheral realities,
his analysis of these realities would still always have fallen short of what
56
J. A. DE PAULA
was necessary to grasp their historical specificities, remaining abstractly
grasped realities, in which the determinations capable of giving life to
concepts are only presupposed. In fact, the task of moving from generality to singularity, of establishing a set of mediations capable of pulling
the concept out of its conformity with itself and realizing it as a concrete
thought, is a task that José Carlos Mariátegui set himself, in his 7 Essays on
Peruvian Reality (1928) and Lenin with his Development of Capitalism
in Russia (1899), which prove Marxism’s ability to appropriate historical realities foreign to Western Europe, to the process of the constitution
of capitalism in its pioneering version, which should not, therefore, be
considered a necessary and unavoidable historical path. In fact, Marx’s
phrase, which is in the preface to the first edition of Volume I of Capital,
from 1867,
The classical seat of this mode of production is, to this day, England.
[interrupt the quote to say that Marx admits that there could be another
‘classical seat’ of the capitalist mode of production, and indeed there was,
the United States.] This is the reason why, in developing my theory, I
have used this country as the main point of examples. [again I interrupt the
quotation to underline the word examples ]. However, if the German reader
pharisaically shrugs his shoulders at the situation of the English industrial
or agricultural workers, or if he consoles himself with the optimistic idea
that in Germany the crises are far from having deteriorated so much, I
would be obliged to warn him: ‘De te fabula narratur’ [‘History is about
you’] (Marx 1977b, pp. 6–7)
That should not be understood as a kind of historical condemnation, a
linear and rigid scheme of stages, to which all countries would be subject.
It is absolutely essential here to recognize that the concept of history that
is important to highlight is far removed from a teleology, where everything is moving toward an end that has already been predicted, either
precisely because of the centrality of the class struggle, which means that
the future is open, subject to surprises, to the inapprehensibility of the
human imagination.
Thus, the Latin phrase quoted by Marx only makes sense as a general,
abstract description of the tendencies of capitalist development:
Accumulation of wealth at one pole is at the same time accumulation of
misery, of tormenting work, of slavery, ignorance, brutalization and moral
degradation, at the opposite pole, constituted by the class whose product
2
DIALECTIC OF UNFINISHEDNESS: 150 YEARS OF VOLUME …
57
becomes capital. (...) It follows that, to the extent that capital accumulates,
the situation of the worker must worsen, whether his pay rises or falls.
(Marx 1968, Volume I, book. 2, pp. 748–747)
It’s worth highlighting the meaning of the expression “whether your
wages go up or down” as proof that Marx admitted, at the very moment
he presented the “general law of capitalist accumulation”, that there is
no tendency toward absolute pauperization in his strategic vision, that
wages can go up, but that, even so, the situation of workers will worsen,
either because there is a permanent deepening of the alienation of labor or
because there is greater concentration and centralization of capital, and to
the same extent that it increases the industrial reserve army. Once again,
it is pointless to insist on how exuberantly present these processes are in
contemporary times.
Each country, each concrete society experiences the manifestations of
capital’s domination in its own way, in a process in which the general
forces of capital do not act in a vacuum, in an undifferentiated space,
but must interact in a concrete historical, social and natural environment,
which results in obstacles, resistance, friction, as well as opportunities and
advantages.
In any case, what needs to be said to conclude the discussion proposed
by Carlos Franco is that Marx, in the context of Volume I of Capital, and
even in Volumes II and III, could not give detailed treatment to Latin
America, nor to any other peripheral reality, as required by the method of
exposition of Capital .
It is known that Marx prepared to make Russia, a peripheral country,
the privileged field of empirical investigation in Volume III, as an approximation to the exposition of the “various capitals”. He worked until the
end of his life to accumulate information on Russia, but he didn’t consider
what he had accumulated to be sufficient. Having much less detailed
information on Latin America, and still attached to certain Eurocentrist
remnants, Marx’s position on the subject didn’t advance as much as in the
case of Russia. In any case, there is no reason to consider Marxist thought,
the critique of political economy as a project under construction, open
and emancipatory, as capable of grasping Latin American reality.
58
J. A. DE PAULA
What Is the Name of the Country?
Marxology studies have received important contributions in recent times,
with important contributions such as those by Maximilien Rubel, Roman
Rosdolsky, Ernest Mandel, Pedro Scaron, José Aricó, Enrique Dussel,
Rolf Hecker, Michael Heinrich, Michael Krätke, Carl-Erich Volgraf,
Regina Roth, Susumu Takenaga, Fred Moseley and Roberto Fineschi,
among other significant names. The effective progress that has been made
in understanding Marx’s work and his complex writing as a result of
MEGA’s work has not prevented the continuation of certain polemics
and even the creation of new ones. Two of these controversies will be
revisited here: that of whether or not Marx had abandoned the plan to
write the critique of political economy in 6 books, replacing this first idea,
present as early as 1857, with the writing of Capital , with the subtitle
Critique of Political Economy, in 4 books; and a second polemic, an
offshoot of the first, which defends the idea that Marx had abandoned
the structure of the exposition of Capital , which at first consisted of the
presentation of capital in general, based on the content of Volumes I and
II of Capital , reserving for Volume III the emergence of the “various
capitals”, of “competition”.
This kind of controversy doesn’t seem to be able to be resolved with
definitive textual or testimonial evidence. After all, this is a project that
was formulated in 1857, modified in 1865/66, and which throughout
Marx’s life experienced variations and adaptations. Roman Rosdolsky,
who tackled the question of the modifications to the plans for structuring the Critique of Political Economy, offers a convincing approach
to the question that could be summarized as follows: (1) Marx would
have modified the 1857 plan, that of the six books of the Critique
of Political Economy, in 1865/66, by incorporating Volume I of the
Critique of Political Economy into Volume II. Themes that should have
been included in the books on land ownership and wage labor; (2) on
the other hand, the books on the State, Foreign Trade and the World
Market and Crises were not abandoned, but “they were destined to be
an offshoot of the work” (Rosdolsky 2001, p. 58), which ended up not
happening, which does not prevent it from being done, or need to be
done, thus confirming that, in fact, even if Marx had written those three
books, they would not have exhausted the need to update the analysis
of the state, foreign trade, the world market and crises at each moment
2
DIALECTIC OF UNFINISHEDNESS: 150 YEARS OF VOLUME …
59
of capital’s structural transformation, at each new phase of the historical process; (3) Rosdolsky emphatically argues that Marx maintained
the expository structure of capital as having two necessarily articulated
moments: the exposition of capital in general , a precondition for the
plurality of capitals, the various capitals. For Rosdolsky, this structure,
explicitly presented in the Grundrisse, was not abandoned when Capital
was written. Rosdolsky says:
Like the Grundrisse, the first and second volumes of Capital are limited,
in the final analysis, only to ’focusing abstractly, in a pure form, on the
phenomenon of the formation of capital’ and analyzing the process of
circulation and reproduction in its fundamental form, reduced to its most
abstract expression", in other words, to considering capital in general.
[Hence, too, the general assumption that commodities are sold for their
value.] The actual methodological difference only begins in the third
volume. Although the Grundrisse also deals, in its last section, with profit,
the general rate of profit and the tendential fall in this rate, the focus
remains on “profit in general”, on the ‘profit of the capitalist class’, and
not on the profit of ‘one individual capital at the expense of another’.
(Rosdolsky 2001, p. 56)
Michael Heinrich, one of the most significant names among specialists
on Marx’s thought since MEGA, has contested Rosdolsky’s position in at
least two important respects: (1) he maintains that Marx abandoned the
six-book plan at least as early as 1862 (Heinrich 2014, pp. 18–19); (2)
and he argues that Marx modified his methodological proposal between
1859 and 1867 when he realized the impossibility of rigorously exposing
capital in general , that is, his spurious invasions of characteristics typical
of the various capitals (Burkett, p. 50).
Heinrich says—“At the end of 1862, Marx decided to replace his
project of a critique of political economy in six books (announced in
1859, in the preface to the first notebook) with the elaboration of a new
work: Capital ” (Heinrich 2014, pp. 18–19). As proof of his argument,
he cites Marx’s letter to Kugelmann, dated 28 December 1862. However,
this letter does not authorize Heinrich’s interpretation, as Marx writes:
I was delighted to see, on reading your letter, that both you and your
friends have taken an affectionate interest in my ’Critique of Political
Economy’. The second part is now finally finished, that is, it remains to
be cleaned up and given the final touches with a view to printing. It
60
J. A. DE PAULA
will be about 30 sheets long. It is the continuation of fascicle I, but the
work will appear separately under the title Capital, and ‘Contribution to
the Critique of Political Economy’ will only appear as a subtitle. In fact,
the work does not include more than the third chapter of the first part:
‘Capital in general’. Neither capital competition nor credit are included.
This volume comprises what the English call ‘The Principles of Political
Economy’. It is (together with the first part) the quintessence, and the
development of what follows could be carried out by others on the basis
of what has already been written. (Marx/Engels 1974a, b, p. 102).
Based on the text of this letter, it seems excessive to conclude that
Marx abandoned the project of the six books, but rather that he said
that based on what had already been written, others would be able to
write what was missing. It is possible that Marx greatly underestimated
the difficulties and the amount of research and effort it would require. In
any case, not only did he not abandon the six-book project, but he didn’t
rule out the possibility of taking up the task himself.
Michael Krätke partially agrees with Heinrich when he says that Marx
modified the structure of the work, “abandoning the Hegelian dichotomy
of general capitalism versus individual capitals as the principle of the
work’s organization”; but he differs from him when he says that “Marx
never completely renounced the plan of the six books” (Krätke 2011,
p. 16).
Let’s dwell a little more on the discussion of how difficult it is to
resolve polemics such as those in question, especially about a vast and
unfinished work, that is, questions of a methodological nature, which
are not restricted to details or factual aspects, resorting to one or other
piece of textual evidence. Take the question of the Introduction to the
Grundrisse, written in 1857, rightly regarded as an attempt to present the
methodology of the critique of political economy. In 1859, Marx says:
I have suppressed a general introduction which I had sketched, since, on
closer reflection, it seems to me that any anticipation would disturb the
results still to be proved, and the reader who is willing to follow me will
have to decide to ascend from the particular to the general. (Marx 1974a,
p. 134)
It would seem that the issue has been resolved; the author himself,
Marx, spoke out on the subject in 1859. As it turns out, Marx lived
much longer, and during this time he modified, improved, researched
2
DIALECTIC OF UNFINISHEDNESS: 150 YEARS OF VOLUME …
61
and learned a great deal. So what was suppressed in 1859 reappeared in
Marx’s notes in 1863, when he mentioned the need for a methodological
introduction (Rosdolsky 2001, p. 481).
In fact, what really underlies the controversy that has called Rosdolsky’s
interpretation into question, which includes authors such as Krätke and
Heinrich, is that they believe it is necessary to purge Marx’s work of
its “Hegelian dialectical excesses”, emphasizing its “scientific” dimension.
Krätke says:
We therefore have four or five different versions of Marx’s critique of political economy. (...) There is no clear break between these different versions.
(...) The most radical self-critical remarks are to be found in the manuscript
of 1857-58. In this manuscript, in trying to present the system of economic
categories in a ‘dialectical’ way, Marx comes up against the limits of the
dialectical method and achieves a mode of systematic exposition that seems
appropriate to the requirements of a social, historical and political science
such as political economy. He takes up and takes further his critique of
Hegel and Hegelian mannerism, moving further and further away from an
unconditional dialectic. He finally arrives at a very reduced and measured
dialectic, which he does not consider to be a slide towards a popularization
or vulgarization of his theory. (Krätke 2011, pp. 15–16).
This reservation about dialectics in Marx’s work is not a recent
phenomenon. Before Krätke, there were currents and authors—the
Austromarxists, the disciples of Galvano Della Volpe, Althusser and his
collaborators—who contested the Hegelian influence on Marx, looking
to Kant, for example, as an antidote to the Hegelian dialectic and its
metaphysical and anti-scientific contaminations.
This issue, that of the “scientific” gains of Marx’s work by abandoning Hegel, appears, exemplarily, in the French version of Capital , in
which Joseph Roy, with Marx’s agreement, introduced several changes
to the text in order to eliminate certain “unnecessary philosophical
complications”:
The intention to bring the text up to the philosophical level of the French
reader - a level that Marx did not think was particularly high - is undoubtedly due to the pruning of many of the passages in which Hegel’s influence
on the author of Capital was most evident. (...) The result is a French
edition which, while at times has passages that surpass the German version,
in general suffers from serious defects that would recommend another
62
J. A. DE PAULA
translation into French. Pedro Scaron says: There are no more legitimate reasons than emotional ones to continue publishing Roy’s defective
version instead of a scientific translation of the book. There, researchers
like Althusser - whose anti-Hegelian theses benefit directly, so to speak,
from the de- Hegelianization of the French text - recommend - “to those
who can - reading the ‘German text’. (Scaron 1977, p. XXXVII).
The opponents of the Hegelian presence in Marx’s work have two
issues to debate: on the one hand, they believe that dialectics would be
incompatible with a specifically scientific treatment of reality; and on the
other hand, they also see incompatibility between the need for empirical enrichment of research, of the critique of political economy, and the
dialectical way of exposing the matter apprehended in the context of
empiricism, of research. If the first objection to dialectics can have some
rational support by attributing an unavoidable metaphysical vice to dialectics, even the Marxian one, the second option is somewhat gratuitous.
After all, why would the mobilization of empirics, facts, events, concrete,
quantitative, factual, documentary, statistical analysis, legislation, etc., be
incompatible with dialectical exposition and, even more seriously, incompatible with the production of knowledge? Krätke is convinced that if
Marx, at the end of his life, i.e., after having had time to take up Capital
and rewrite it entirely, this finished version of the book:
[...] would have become an even richer book than the one we know. It
would have contained far fewer ‘general laws’ and far more reservations
about their validity. “ (...)” Certainly, Marx would not have renounced his
“genetic” method of "developing" the categories. However, during the
work carried out over his last fifteen years, he did not miss a single opportunity to realize ever more clearly the “limits of the dialectical method”
(Krätke 2011, p. 27).
We agree with Krätkev on the importance of its empirical, factual
enrichment for the full realization of Capital . On the other hand, there
is no reason to accept the thesis that the presence of dialectics was a
hindrance, an inconvenience that compromised the full elaboration of
the critique of political economy, except as the result of idiosyncrasy or
prejudice.
In the opposite direction, it is argued here that if it is possible to
speak of science, legitimately, in the field of Marxism it will have to be
compatible with dialectics as Marx appropriated it.
2
DIALECTIC OF UNFINISHEDNESS: 150 YEARS OF VOLUME …
63
But there is another aspect to consider when establishing this disjunctive between a Marxism with and a Marxism without dialectics. Consider
the theoretical, philosophical, political and ideological implications of the
various versions of Capital and its translations. Take, as a particularly
sensitive example, the various ways in which a single, important word
from Volume I of Capital has been translated into French, Spanish,
English, Portuguese and Italian. The expression in question can be found
in item 4 of Chapter I of the second German edition of Capital, entitled:
“the fetishistic character of the commodity and its secret” (Marx 1977b,
pp. 87–102).
What we want to show is that this expression has been translated in
various ways, taking into account both the competence and experience of
the translators and, above all, their philosophical choices. The passage in
which the expression appears is the following: “Eine Ware scheint auf den
ersten Blick ein selbstverständliches, triviales Ding. Ihre Analyse ergibt,
dass sie ein sehr vertracktes Ding ist, voll metaphysischer Spitzfindigkeit
und theologischer Mucken” (Marx; Engles 1987, p. 102). The expression
we want to highlight is “vertracktes Ding”. To this end, we will present
a table listing the translations of this expression into French, English,
Spanish, Portuguese and Italian (Table 2.1).
You don’t have to overdo it to recognize that the profusion of different
meanings that the same expression in German—ein sehr vertracktes
Ding—received in their translations is far from being the result of chance
or the idiosyncrasies of the translators. In fact, what is present in this case,
in the different ways in which a German expression has been translated, is
the explicitness of the political, ideological and philosophical biases that
each of us carries, and which in the case of translation means, for better
or worse, often, regardless of the translator’s qualifications, removing
the text from its original bed, by altering its diction, its consonances,
its affinities. Of the ten translations listed, two have a great affinity in
their metaphysical suggestions: Juan B. Justo and Pedro Scaron chose to
translate the German expression, “objeto endemoniado” and “cosa endiablada”, remembering that Juan B. Justo translated from the 4th German
edition, while Scaron made his translation from the 2nd German edition.
The most curious and surprising translation, but suggestive and revealing
of a central dimension of the commodity, its violence, is that of Manuel
Pedrosa—“cosa muy truculenta”. The translation into French by Joseph
Roy, authorized by Marx, establishes a certain interpretative pattern
64
J. A. DE PAULA
Table 2.1 Translations of the expression “vertracktes Ding” in Chapter I of
Volume I of Capital
Language
Translator
French
J. Roy
English
Castilian
Castilian
Castilian
Portugues
Castilian
Portuguese
Italian
Portuguese
Edition
1st edition in
French 1872/75
Samuel Moore and
3rd German
Edward Aveling
edition—1883
Juan B. Justo
4th German
edition—1890
Manuel Pedroso
4th German
edition—1890
Wenceslau Roces
4th German
edition—1890
Reginaldo Sant’Anna 4th German
edition—1890
P. Scaron
2nd German
edition—1873
Régis Barbosa and
4th German
Flávio Kothe
edition—1890
Roberto Fineschi
4th German
edition—1890
Rubens Enderle
4th German
edition—1890
Date
Translation
1872/75
“chose très
complexe”
“very queer
thing”
“cosa
endiablada”
“cosa mui
truculenta”
“objetos mui
intrincados”
“algo muito
estranho “
“objeto
endemoniado “
“coisa muito
complicada “
“cosa
imbrogliatissima”
“coisa muito
intrincada”
1886
1898
1931
1935/46
1968
1975
1983
2008
2013
Source Prepared by the author (Marx and Engels, 1969, 1906, 1946, 1945, 1973, 1968, 1977b,
1983, 2008, 2013)
whose basic meaning, one could say, was to minimize the philosophical resonances of the text, its approximation to the current language of
science, translating the German expression into “chose três complexe”, Roy
inaugurated a line that brings together Wenceslau Roces—“objetos muy
intincados ”; Regis Barbosa and Flávio Kothe—“coisa muito complicada”,
Rubens Enderle—“coisa muito intincada”. The English translation by
Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling and the Portuguese translation by
Reginaldo Sant’Anna converge in adding a certain air of mystery to
the expression—“very queer thing” and “something very strange”. It
should be noted that the English word “queer” has taken on even greater
complexity in contemporary times as it is used by transgender culture.
Finally, Roberto Fineschi’s Italian translation stands out for the superlative he uses—“cosa imbrogliatissima”—which ends up adding an extra
layer of expressiveness to the text.
2
DIALECTIC OF UNFINISHEDNESS: 150 YEARS OF VOLUME …
65
“The most important book of our time”, said Pedro Scaron of Capital .
In what sense? In many ways, of course. But above all, because it remains
the most insightful tool, both for understanding the contemporary world
and for overcoming it through critical-practical emancipatory action,
which, claiming to be socialist, does not hesitate to recognize both the
theoretical weaknesses it has suffered from, which go back a long way,
Marx’s time, as well as important political missteps, which, if tragic as
in the case of Stalinism, were not restricted to this brutal form of “barracks socialism”, which also great names in revolutionary Marxism, such
as Lenin and Trotsky, were not immune to important political mistakes.
In any case, Marxism remains powerful and current in its ability to
grasp capitalist reality in its entirety. Aspects, manifestations, which, in
day-to-day events, appear to be isolated, independent phenomena, the
critique of political economy manages to explain their hidden connections, their structural determinations, as results of the contradictory
dynamics of capitalist development. Take two phenomena, which are not
only very evident in Brazil today: speculation and corruption. Taken in
themselves, in their phenomenal aspects, speculation and corruption seem
to be contingent manifestations, foreign to the domain of capital, transgressive figures both in the logic of capital accumulation and in bourgeois
legality. Marx showed, in a particularly exemplary page of his analytical
acuity, the organic articulations between s peculation and corruption as
expedients recurrently mobilized by capital to try to compensate for the
effects of the fall in the rate of profit. In the same way, we must see
both capital’s mad dash to destroy nature, the various forms of job insecurity and permanent imperialist violence as manifestations of the same
general mechanism, the unreasonable quest to compensate for the fall in
profitability, which does not hesitate to use instruments that are alien to
morality, ethics and legality. Marx says:
With the fall in the rate of profit, the minimum amount of capital that must
be in the hands of each capitalist for the productive use of labor increases;
the minimum required to exploit labor in general, and also so that the
labor time applied is that necessary for the production of commodities,
not exceeding the average labor time socially necessary to produce them.
At the same time, concentration increases, because beyond certain limits.
Large capital with a low rate of profit accumulates faster than small capital
with a high rate. At a certain level, this growing concentration of capital
in turn leads to a further fall in the rate of profit. The mass of dispersed
66
J. A. DE PAULA
small capital is thus pushed into the peripeties of speculation, of fraudulent
maneuvers with credit and shares, of crises. (Marx 1974b, Book III, vol.
4, p. 288)
Volume III of Capital was published in 1894, probably written largely
between 1864 and 1865, and we then discovered to our bewilderment
that the relationship established by Marx between speculation—fraud with
credit and shares—crises is an accurate description of the adventures of
financialized capital, of globalitarian globalization from the 1980s until
the “final laugh” between 2006 and 2008.
Some people have rightly associated Capital with Hegel’s
Phenomenology of Spirit . Less often, if at all, is the search for Diderot’s
Capital, in particular, his satire/romance Rameau’s Nephew. And yet this
relationship does exist. Marx, in an inquiry that promoted his daughter,
said that his favorite prose writer was Diderot (1713–1778), the great
name of the French Enlightenment and the main person responsible for
the Encyclopédie, the great achievement of the eighteenth-century spirit.
Diderot was important not only for Marx, but also for other names in
German culture such as Goethe (1749–1832) and Hegel (1770–1831).
Goethe translated The Nephew Rameau into German in 1805 from an
incomplete manuscript before it was published in full in French, which
only happened in 1823. The interest in Diderot, in The Nephew of
Rameau, was also strong in Hegel. This is the only text by a modern
author cited in the Phenomenology of Spirit of 1807, read in Goethe’s
translation. Vincenzo Cicero, in his edition of the Phenomenology of
Spirit, says:
Hegel was largely inspired by Rameau’s Nephew, a work still unknown in
France, to illustrate the moment of the language of disintegration. (...)
For his analysis of the decadence of pre-revolutionary society, Hegel takes
Rameau’s Nephew as his literary model. (Cícero 2008, pp. 1079–1080)
An expert on Diderot, Henri Bénac, gave us an important analysis of
the meaning of Diderot’s book, he says:
Diderot had serious reservations about the solidity of the social order
underway and foresaw, as the results of the French Revolution would
confirm, a new society based solely on money; of this he gives us a caricatured and burlesque vision, Balzac seriously unravels its laws, but at heart
it is the same thing. (Bénac 1962, p. 188)
2
DIALECTIC OF UNFINISHEDNESS: 150 YEARS OF VOLUME …
67
Or again, says José Henrique Santos—“Hegel makes use of Diderot’s
satire, The Nephew of Rameau, which Goethe had translated in 1805, to
express the absolute powerlessness of the individual in dealing with the
polis modern…” (Santos, 2007, p. 291).
It is, therefore, a question of seeing Marx’s Capital as the comprehensive and critical apprehension of the world dominated by money,
which Diderot foresaw, which Hegel analyzed from its implications for the
freedom of the individual, which Balzac inventoried in its characteristic
human types, and which Marx embraced in its multiple determinations,
as an instrument for its full historical overcoming, through the realization
of freedom and equality.
Competing Interests The authors have no conflicts of interest to declare that
are relevant to the content of this chapter.
References
Aricó, José. Marx e a América Latina. Trad. port., Rio de Janeiro, Paz e Terra,
1982.
Balzac, Honoré de. Esplendores e Misérias das Cortesãs. Trad. port., vol. IX. A
Comédia Humana. Rio de Janeiro, Porto Alegre/São Paulo, Editora Globo,
1956.
Bénac, Henri. “Introdução” a Diderot, O Sobrinho de Rameau, trad. port., Obras
Romanescas II , São Paulo, Difusão Europeia do Livro, 1962.
Bensaid, Daniel. Marx, O Intempestivo. Grandezas e misérias de uma aventura
crítica (Séculos XIX e XX). Trad. port., Rio de Janeiro, Civilização Brasileira,
1999.
Burkett, Paul. Some comments on ‘capital in general and the structure of Marx’s
capital’. In Capital & Class.
Cícero, Vincenzo. “Introduzione, traduzione, note e apparatti” a Hegel, G. W. F.
Fenomenologia dello Spirito. Trad. italiana, Milão: Edizione Bompiani, 2008.
Fausto, Ruy. Marx: Lógica & Política. Tomo I, São Paulo: Editora Brasiliense,
1983.
Fineschi, Roberto. Un nuovo Marx. Filologia e interpretazione dopo la nuova
edizione storico-critica (MEGA2). Roma: Carocci editore, 2008.
Franco, Carlos. “Apresentação” a Aricó, José. Marx e a América Latina. Op.
cit., 1892.
Giannotti, José Arthur. Marx. Vida & Obra. Porto Alegre: L&PM Editores,
2000.
68
J. A. DE PAULA
Heinrich, Michael. Prefácio – O Livro II de O Capital. In: Marx, Karl. O Capital,
Livro II . Trad. port., São Paulo: Boitempo Editorial, 2014.
Kosik, Karel. A Dialética do Concreto. Trad. port., 2ª edição, Rio de Janeiro,
Paz e Terra, 1976.
Krätke, Michael. O último Marx e O Capital. In: Aliaga, Luciana, Amorim,
Henrique e Marcelino, Paulo (Orgs.). Marxismo. Teoria, História e Política.
Trad. port., São Paulo, 2011.
Lander, Edgardo. Marxismo, Eurocentrismo e Colonialismo. In: Boron, Atilio,
Amadeo, Javier e González, Sabrina (Orgs.). A Teoria Marxista Hoje. Problemas e Perspectivas. Buenos Aires/São Paulo: CLACSO/Editora Expressão
Popular, 2006.
Lukács, Georg. Ensaios sobre Literatura. Trad. port., Rio de Janeiro: Editora
Civilização Brasileira, 1965.
Lukács, Georg. Ontologia do Ser Social. A Falsa e a Verdadeira Ontologia de
Hegel. Trad. port., São Paulo: Livraria Editora Ciências Humanas, 1979a.
Lukács, Georg. Ontologia do Ser Social. Os Princípios Ontológicos Fundamentais
de Marx. Trad. port., São Paulo, Livraria Editora Ciências Humanas, 1979b.
Marx, Karl. Capital. A critique of political economy. The process of capitalist
production. Trad. inglesa, tradução de Samuel Moore e Edward Aveling, New
York, The Modern Library, 1906.
Marx, Karl. El Capital. Livro I, Tomo I . Trad. esp., tradução de Manuel Pedroso,
México, Ediciones Fuente Cultural, 1945.
Marx, Karl. El Capital. Edição completa dos três livros, trad. esp., Livro I,
Tradução de Juan B. Justo, Buenos Aires, Biblioteca Nueva, 1946.
Marx, Karl. O Capital, Livro I, vols. 1 e 2. Trad. port., tradução de Reginaldo
Sant’Anna, Rio de Janeiro, Civilização Brasileira, 1968.
Marx, Karl. Le Capital. Livre 1. Trad. francesa, tradução de Joseph Roy, Paris,
Flammarion, 1969.
Marx, Karl. Crítica do Programa de Gotha. Trad. port., Porto, Portucalense
Editora, 1971.
Marx, Karl. La Ideologia Alemana. Trad. esp., 4ª edição, Montevidéu/Barcelona,
Ediciones Pueblos Unidos/Ediciones Grijalbo, 1972.
Marx, Karl. El Capital. Livro I . Trad. esp., 8ª reimpressão, tradução de
Wenceslau Races, México, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1973.
Marx, Karl. Para a Crítica da Economia Política. Trad. port., São Paulo, Abril
Cultural, 1974a.
Marx, Karl. O Capital. Livro III, vol. 4. O Processo Global de Produção
Capitalista. Trad. port., Rio de Janeiro, Civilização Brasileira, 1974b.
Marx, Karl. Glosas marginales al ‘Tratado de economia política’ de Adolph
Wagner. In: Dobb, Maurice e outros (orgs.). Estudios sobre “El Capital”. Trad.
esp., México, Espanha, Argentina, Colômbia, Siglo XXI Editores, 1977a.
2
DIALECTIC OF UNFINISHEDNESS: 150 YEARS OF VOLUME …
69
Marx, Karl. El Capital. Tomo I/Vol. 1, Libro I. O Proceso de Producción del
Capital. Trad. esp., tradução de Pedro Scaron, 5ª edição, México, Espanha,
Argentina, Siglo XXI Editores, 1977b.
Marx, Karl. O Capital, Livro I, vol. 1. Trad. port., tradução de Regis Barbosa e
Flávio Kothe, 1983.
Marx, Karl. La Respuesta a Zasulich. In Shanin, Theodor. El Marx Tardio y la
Via Rusa. Marx y la periferia del capitalismo. Trad. esp., Madrid, Editorial
Revolución, 1990 (org.).
Marx, Karl. Il Capitale. Critica dell’economia politica. Libro primo. Il processo di
produzione del capitale (1863–1890). Tradução italiana, tradução de Robert
Fineschi, Napoli, La città del Sole, Editori Riuniti, 2008.
Marx, Karl. O Capital. Livro I. O Processo de Produção do Capital. Trad. port.,
tradução de Rubens Enderle, São Paulo, Boitempo Editorial, 2013.
Marx, Karl; e Engels, Friedrich. Cartas sobre “El Capital”. Trad. esp., Barcelona,
Editorial Laia, 1974a.
Marx, Karl, e Engels, Friedrich. Materiales para la Historia da América Latina.
Trad. esp., Córdoba, Cuadernos Pasado y Presente, n. 30, 1974b.
Marx, Karl; e Engels, Friedrich. Imperio y Colonia. Escritos sobre Irlanda. Trad.
esp., México, Cuadernos Pasado y Presente, n. 72, 1979.
Marx, Karl; e Engels, Friedrich. La Cuestión Nacional y la formación de los
Estados. Trad. esp., México, Cuadernos Pasado y Presente, n. 69, 1980a.
Marx, Karl; e Engels, Friedrich. La Revolución na España. Trad. esp., Moscou,
Editorial Progreso, 1980b.
Marx, K.; Engels, F. (1987) Gesamtausgabe, v. II.6. Berlin: Dietz Verlag.
Nicolaievski, Boris; Menchen-Helfen, Otto. La vie de Karl Marx. Trad. francesa,
Paris, Gallimard, 1970.
Paula, João Antonio. Crítica e Emancipação Humana. Ensaios Marxistas. Belo
Horizonte, Autêntica Editora, 2014.
Ronái, Paulo. “Introdução” a Esplendores e Misérias das Cortesãs. In Balzac,
Honoré de. Op. cit., 1956.
Rosdolsky, Roman. Gênese e Estrutura de O Capital de Karl Marx. Trad. port.,
Rio de Janeiro, EDUERJ/Contraponto, 2001.
Rubel, Maximilien. Notice. In: Marx, Karl. Ouvres Economie I (org.) Rubel,
Maximilien, Paris, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, NRF, Gallimard, 1965.
Rubin, Isaak. Ensayos sobre la Teoria Marxista del Valor. Trad. esp., Buenos Aires,
Cuadernos Pasado y Presente, n. 53, 1974.
Sainz de Robles, Federico Carlos. Ensayo de un Diccionario de la Literatura.
Tomo I, Madrid, Aguilar Ediciones, 1949.
Sanders, Jonathan. La escena rusa: Nota biográfica. In: Shanin, Theodor. El Marx
Tardio y la Via Rusa. Op. cit., 1990.
Santos, José Henrique. O Trabalho do Negativo. Ensaios sobre a Fenomenologia
do Espírito. São Paulo, Edições Loyola, 2007.
70
J. A. DE PAULA
Scaron, Pedro. A modo de Introducción. In: Marx, Karl, e Engels, Friedrich.
Materiales para la Historia de América Latina. Op. cit., 1974.
Scaron, Pedro. Advertencia del Traductor. In: Marx, Karl. El Capital, Tomo I/Vol.
1, Libro I, El Proceso de Producción del Capital. México, Espanha, Argentina,
op. cit., 1977.
Shanin, Theodor. El Marx Tardio y la Via Rusa. Op. cit., 1990.
Vedda, Miguel. La Sugestión de lo concreto. Estudios sobre Teoria Literaria
Marxista. Buenos Aires, Editorial Gorla, 2006.
Wada, Haruki. Marx y la Rusia revolucionaria. In: Shanin, Theodor. El Marx
Tardio y La Via Rusa, op. cit., 1990.
CHAPTER 3
Notes on a Crisis: The Exzerpthefte
and Marx’s Method of Research
and Composition
João Antonio de Paula, Hugo da Gama Cerqueira,
Alexandre Mendes Cunha, Carlos Eduardo Suprinyak,
Leonardo Gomes de Deus,
and Eduardo da Motta e Albuquerque
Introduction
The purpose of this paper is to explore the historiographical possibilities
of a large set of manuscripts composed by Marx: the Exzerpthefte, or
excerpts notebooks. During the latter decades of his life, while he worked
This text was originally published by The Review of Radical Political Economics
(Paula et al. 2013). The research was partially funded with financial support
from CNPq and Fapemig. The authors would like to thank Research Assistants Guilherme Habib Santos Curi (FACE-UFMG) and Marco Túlio Vieira
(FACE-UFMG) for their important help in the preparation of this paper.
J. A. de Paula · H. da Gama Cerqueira · A. M. Cunha · L. G. de Deus ·
E. da Motta e Albuquerque (B)
Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, Brazil
e-mail: albuquer@cedeplar.ufmg.br
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature
Switzerland AG 2025
J. A. de Paula et al. (eds.), Marx for the 21st Century, Marx, Engels,
and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22011-1_3
71
72
J. A. DE PAULA ET AL.
on the composition of Capital, Marx would record his readings and investigations in a series of notebooks, excerpting the source materials of his
research, and occasionally adding his own comments. These documents
have obvious implications for our understanding of Marx’s method of
investigation, as it is hoped the following pages will illustrate through
a case study of Notebook B113. When the contents of this Exzerptheft,
which was elaborated by Marx in the late 1860s, are seen against the
background of other events which were taking place in Europe at that
time, it becomes evident that, rather than an unsystematic collection of
reading appointments, Notebook B113 is a research study coherently
organized around a central theme: current developments in European
We would also like to thank the International Institute of Social History (IISG),
in Amsterdam, curator of the Karl Marx/Friederich Engels Papers (http://www.
iisg.nl/archives/en/files/m/10760604.php), for its authorization to use images
from Notebook B113 in this paper, as well as the staff at the IISG Library, who
kindly helped us getting copies of Notebooks B108 and B113. A meeting with
Michael Krätke (Lancaster University) during his participation in the Seminar
on the 150 years of the Grundrisse (Cedeplar-UFMG, Belo Horizonte, Brazil,
October 17th, 2008) helped us to organize our visit to the Internationl Institute of Social History. Comments by Professor Rolf Hecker (President of the
Berliner Verein zur Förderung der MEGA-Edition) during our Workshop on Notebook B113 (Cedeplar-UFMG, Belo Horizonte, Brazil, March 17th-18th, 2011)
contributed to improve the paper. Finally, we thank three referees for their
comments and suggestions. The usual disclaimer holds.
João Antonio de Paula
e-mail: jpaula@cedeplar.ufmg.br
Hugo da Gama Cerqueira
e-mail: hugo@cedeplar.ufmg.br
Alexandre Mendes Cunha
e-mail: alexandre@cedeplar.ufmg.br
Leonardo Gomes de Deus
e-mail: leodedeus@cedeplar.ufmg.br
C. E. Suprinyak
The American University of Paris, Paris, France
e-mail: csuprinyak@aup.edu
3
NOTES ON A CRISIS: THE EXZERPTHEFTE AND MARX’S …
73
financial practices and their impact over the patterns of economic crises,
as evidenced by the English financial crisis of 1866. As is well-known,
finance and crises were topics analyzed by Marx in Volume III of Capital,
a book which he was not able to prepare adequately before his death. In
that sense, Notebook B113 acquires additional significance as a potential
source of revisions for this part of Marx’s wide-reaching enterprise.
The argument is structured around five sections. The first one briefly
discusses the efforts and challenges involved in the edition of Marx and
Engels’ complete works, with particular emphasis on the place occupied
by the excerpts notebooks in the documental corpus left by the two
authors. Section two describes the main aspects of Marx’s biography in
the period 1868–69, when Notebook B113 was composed. Section three
presents a preliminary description of Notebook B113, whereas section
four shows how some of the information contained in it was used by Marx
in the composition of Volume II of Capital. Section five contextualizes
the research notes and excerpts contained in Notebook B113, showing
how the several issues raised by the collapse of Overend, Gurney & Co.,
and the financial crisis which it triggered in England served as gravitational center for Marx’s investigations at that time. Some concluding
remarks summarize the argument and close the paper.
Editing Marx And Engels’ Work
After almost 130 years of Marx’s death, a significant part of his writings remains unpublished, and therefore, unknown to the vast majority of
researchers of his work. Indeed, the problem of publishing Marx’s writings goes back to the long and hard work done by Engels to edit and
publish the fourth edition of Capital, Volume I—released in 1890 and
considered for a long time as a standard or “definitive” version—and to
assemble Volumes II and III from Marx’s drafts, released, respectively,
in 1885 and 1894. During this period, the rise of the socialist movement awakened a growing interest in the work of Marx and Engels, which
motivated the translation of some of their classical writings, such as The
Communist Manifesto, into various languages. It also induced Engels to
try to systematically publish a significant part of their joint work in its
original language, giving birth to new editions of sold-out books, and
74
J. A. DE PAULA ET AL.
also prompting the appearance in print of texts that were left unpublished by Marx1 and of new writings by Engels.2 However, there was no
intention of publishing all of Marx’s writings at that time, nor, for that
matter, of editing his writings in a way that would allow reconstituting the
genesis and development of his thought. The volumes edited by Engels
were intended primarily to make available to socialist militants a group of
theoretical writings which constituted, in his opinion, the finished corpus
of the doctrine elaborated by himself and Marx (Anderson 2010, p. 247;
Hobsbawm 1983, p. 427).
The idea of publishing a critical edition of Marx’s complete works goes
back to December 1910, when it was discussed by a prominent group of
Austro-Marxists. The plan for the so-called “Vienna Edition”, however,
did not take place, due to difficulties with funding and the problems
created by the outbreak of the First World War. Even so, the number of
available writings by Marx and Engels was increased through the efforts
of scholars such as Karl Kautsky,3 Franz Mehring4 and David Riazanov5
(Rojhan 1998, p. 3; Hecker 2010, p. 282). By the time of the First World
War, Riazanov was already one of the greatest, if not the greatest experts
in Marx’s literary legacy. The contacts which he established with Auguste
Bebel and Karl Kautsky granted him access to the manuscripts of Marx
and Engels, which were in possession of the German Social-Democratic
Party (SPD), as well as to Marx’s writings preserved by Laura Lafargue.
With the Russian Revolution of 1917, he had the opportunity to engage
in the first attempt to produce a complete critical-historical edition of
Marx and Engels’ work, the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA). Put
in charge, by Lenin, of establishing and directing the Marx-Engels Institute, Riazanov obtained significant material and financial support for his
organization, as well as some autonomy to recruit his staff among the
1 For instance, Critique of the Gotha Program, and the second and third books of
Capital.
2 Such as Anti-Duhring and The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.
3 Between 1905 and 1910, Kautsky (1910) published a part of the 1861–63
manuscripts known as Theories of Surplus Value.
4 Mehring (1902) edited a compilation of texts written by Marx and Engels during the
years 1841–50, in addition to letter from the period 1849–62.
5 Two volumes were published by Riazanov (1917) containing the articles written in
1850 by Marx and Engels for newspapers such as the New York Tribune and the People’s
Paper.
3
NOTES ON A CRISIS: THE EXZERPTHEFTE AND MARX’S …
75
available specialists. He assembled a wide net of correspondents across
Europe and established an intensive cooperation with the Institut für
Sozialforschung (Institute of Social Research), in Frankfurt, which at the
time was under the direction of Carl Grünberg. Thus, he could gather
the material needed to start editing the MEGA: originals or photocopies
of letters, manuscripts and other documents deposited in the archives of
the German Social-Democratic Party in Berlin.
The editorial plan for the first MEGA foresaw the preparation of
42 volumes divided into four sections, containing the whole of Marx
and Engels’ writings and correspondence. Of the planned total, only 11
volumes appeared between 1927 and 1935, including the first editions
of Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts and The German Ideology.
To them were added a special volume containing Engels’ Anti-Dühring,
published in 1935, and the two volumes of Marx’s manuscripts from
1857 to 58, the Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie, which
appeared in 1939 and 1941 in the same format as the MEGA volumes
(Cerqueira 2010, pp. 208–12).
For what matters to the purposes of this article, it is important to
emphasize that, despite the rigorous philological and editorial criteria
adopted by Riazanov and his team, the MEGA project did not foresee the
publication of a significant part of Marx’s manuscripts—his excerpts notebooks. These were collections of long fragments taken from the works
that Marx studied throughout his life, excerpts that he copied, summarized and commented upon over the course of tens of volumes written for
his own use. In a 1923 report, Riazanov already mentioned the existence
of these notebooks which, in his opinion, would be useful especially to
Marx’s biographers, but the publication of which was not contemplated
in the MEGA project.6 In fact, the nature and content of some of these
notebooks caused surprise in Riazanov:
If in 1881–82 he [i.e., Marx] lost his ability for intensive, independent,
intellectual creation, he nevertheless never lost the ability for research.
Sometimes, in reconsidering these Notebooks, the question arises: Why
did he waste so much time on this systematic, fundamental summary, or
expend so much labor as he spent as late as the year 1881, on one basic
6 With the exception of “some math books” by Marx which were edited in the 1920s
by Julius Gumbel, a young German mathematician, but which were only published in
1968.
76
J. A. DE PAULA ET AL.
book on geology, summarizing it chapter by chapter. In the 63rd year of
his life – that is inexcusable pedantry. Here is another example: he received,
in 1878, a copy of Morgan’s work. On 98 pages of his very miniscule handwriting (you should know that a single page of his is the equivalent of a
minimum of 2.2 pages of print) he makes a detailed summary of Morgan.
In such manner does the old Marx work. (Riazanov apud Anderson 2010,
pp. 248–249)
Over time, Riazanov’s position concerning the notebooks seems to
have evolved. In a text of 1929 he recognized that, given the work
method adopted by Marx, it was sometimes difficult to distinguish what
should be considered an excerpts notebook from what could be considered a notebook of “preparatory work”. The reason was that, even
on notebooks that barely contained Marx’s own comments, the items
collected were so closely grouped around a particular issue that they
should be considered as “preparatory work” for an already planned
research. Moreover, in many of these notebooks, the excerpts were intermingled with Marx’s observations, whereas in others he developed long
digressions that were already an expression of his thoughts. Aware that
the study of the genesis of Marx’s critique of political economy could not
forbear the exam of these notebooks, Riazanov expressed his hope that
the progress of the historical-philological research on Marx’s works would
be such that soon the necessity would be felt for a complete edition of
the excerpts notebooks (Hecker 2002, pp. 50–51).
The MEGA editorial effort, however, succumbed in the 1930s as a
victim of both Nazism and Stalinism, thus postponing the appearance
of a complete edition of Marx and Engels’ works. It was only with
the death of Stalin, and the political overturn which followed it, that
it became possible once again, in the 1950s, to discuss the plan for a
critical edition both in Moscow and in Berlin. Problems related to this
initiative were manifold, starting with the high cost of the project, but
also involving ideological concerns—the fear that such an edition could
weaken the primordial function which the texts of Marx and Engels
served for communist parties and Eastern European governments, as an
intellectual support for Marxism-Leninism. By the end of the 1960s,
overcoming much resistance, the Marxism-Leninism Institutes (IML) of
Moscow and Berlin began the edition of a second MEGA (Bellofiore;
Fineschi 2009, p. 8; Rojhan 1998, p. 3 ss.).
3
NOTES ON A CRISIS: THE EXZERPTHEFTE AND MARX’S …
77
Among the editorial principles that should rule over the new MEGA,
it was established that it should be absolutely complete, including the
whole of Marx and Engels’ excerpts and notebooks, as well as the letters
authored by third parties and addressed to both. Thus, the second MEGA
was scheduled to contain over 100 volumes,7 divided into four sections:
the first, with texts and drafts not related to Capital; the second, with
the various editions of Capital and the preparatory material related to the
book; the third, with Marx and Engels’ complete correspondence and the
fourth, containing excerpts, annotations and marginal notes.8
The execution of this project, however, depended crucially on the
cooperation of the Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis
(International Institute of Social History), the IISG, keeper of most of
Marx and Engels’ original manuscripts. After Hitler’s rise to power, the
papers which were under possession of the German Social-Democratic
Party were taken abroad, being later acquired by a Dutch insurance
company, which donated them to the newly established IISG, where they
remain until today (Rojhan 1998, pp. 3–4).9 The institute’s Karl Marx/
Friedrich Engels Papers collection covers a vast amount of material,10
7 Each volume consists of two tomes, one containing the texts, and the other with the
edition’s critical apparatus.
8 At the time of writing (early 2011), 55 volumes have been published. Of the 32
volumes planned for the first section, 17 are available. Regarding the second section,
work is further ahead: of all the 15 planned volumes, only the last part of Volume 4,
containing the manuscripts of 1863–67, remains to be published, thus completing the
project. 12 of the 35 volumes planned for the third section have already been published.
Finally, 11 of the 32 volumes planned for the fourth section have been released until
today (cf. Anderson 2010, pp. 251–252 and the Internationale Marx-Engels-Stiftung and
Akademie Verlag websites).
9 At this point, Bukharin sought to acquire the papers for the Soviet archives, acting
under Stalin’s directions. The attempt was unsuccessful, being later used as part of the
charges made against him at his trial (Hecker 2010, pp. 284–5).
10 Among Marx’s papers, one can find: personal documents; correspondence with
Engels, Bruno Bauer, Nikolai Danielson, Moses Hess, Ludwig Kugelmann, Ferdinand
Lassalle, Wilhelm Liebknecht, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Arnold Ruge and many others;
manuscripts of his doctoral thesis; parts of the manuscripts for Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and The German Ideology, among others texts; the economic manuscripts of
1857–58 and parts of Capital, including corrections and additional notes for the second
edition of Volume I, made on a printed copy and almost 200 notebooks with excerpts
from books and other publications on economics, history, philosophy and other scientific
disciplines. Among Engels’ papers, there are: private documents; his correspondence with
Marx, Victor Adler, August Bebel, Eduard Bernstein, Karl Kautsky, Antonio Labriola,
78
J. A. DE PAULA ET AL.
including the manuscript collections of excerpts among which Notebook
B113 can be found. With a total of 139 pages, it contains excerpts in both
English and German prepared by Marx in 1869, covering five different
topics: reports by the Bank of England; notes taken from The Economist
(1868); notes taken from The Money Market Review (1868); notes about
the book The Theory of Foreign Exchange, by G. J. Goschen (1862) and
notes about the book Kaufmänische Rechnung, by Feller & Oderman
(1866). By analyzing the contents of Notebook B113 and of the source
materials which were used in its composition, our aim is to suggest the
relevance of this manuscript source for an adequate understanding of the
prominent place occupied by monetary and financial issues amidst Marx’s
investigations in the late 1860s.
Marx in 1868–69
In April 1867, Marx traveled to Hamburg to deliver to his publisher, Otto
Meissner, the originals of Volume I of Capital. Relieved and satisfied with
the outcome, Marx could, after years, rest in the company of his friend
Kugelman and his family in Hanover, while waiting for the proofs of his
work. After a really insane task which, as he put it, “sacrificed his health,
happiness and family”, these weeks spent in the company of his friend
were a peaceful and joyful time. After coming back to London, Marx
corrected the proofs and sent them to his editor on 16 August 1867. The
book was finally published in the third week of September 1867, with a
print run of 1.000 copies. However, the relief (or as he called it, “the
nightmare’s suspension”) which the book’s publication brought was only
partial and temporary. The recurring problems soon started to anguish
him again. At this time, not only his health was deteriorating, but Marx
was also facing increasing material difficulties, in spite of Engels’ support.
After the publication of Volume I, which dealt with the production of
capital, Marx turned his attention to the elaboration of Volumes II and
III (on the circulation of capital and on the global process of production
and circulation, respectively), previously drafted between 1865 and 1866.
Paul Lafargue and Georgij Plekhanov; the manuscripts of Dialectics of Nature; preparatory works for Anti-Dühring; as well as notes, book excerpts and other publications. This
material was organized by the IISG between 1959 to 1965, and it is divided in 18 parts,
identified by letters from A to S. More information is available at the IISG website:
http://www.iisg.nl/archives/en/files/m/10760604full.php.
3
NOTES ON A CRISIS: THE EXZERPTHEFTE AND MARX’S …
79
Marx focused on new materials and sources and made some progress with
empirical research on issues that would be addressed in both volumes:
ground rent, the monetary and banking systems, the duration of fixed
capital and capital turnover. Both Marx’s correspondence and the copious
notes he took during the period are evidence of the vigorous resumption
of his studies and research in the British Museum. It is interesting to highlight, in particular, the increase in his correspondence on issues relating
to Capital, as evidenced in Table 3.1. In effect, between 1868 and 1869,
Marx wrote 19 letters, most of them to Engels, discussing and developing arguments, asking for information, and testing hypotheses. Such
is the case of the letter to Engels dated 30 April 1868, in which Marx
presented the draft structure he intended to use for Volumes II and III;
there, he expounded the core of his theory of profit, of the rate of profit
and of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, and also introduced issues
related to commercial capital, the division of profit into interest and profit
of enterprise, interest-bearing capital and the transformation of surplus
profit into ground rent (Marx 1974, pp. 163–68).
Both 1868 and 1869 were years of intense research and of permanent concern with political-organizational issues within the International
Workingmen’s Association (IWA). It is in this period that the political dispute with the Proudhonian currents intensifies, the fight against
Bakunin and his partisans begins and the attempts to unify the German
Table 3.1 Marx’s
active correspondence
about Capital,
1843–1881
Years
Letters
1845–1850
1851–1855
1856–1860
1861–1865
1866–1870
1871–1875
1876–1880
1881
2
10
20
19
60
12
2
3
Source Marx; Engels (1974), authors’ elaboration
80
J. A. DE PAULA ET AL.
communist movement are pursued.11 These were also years of intensifying international conflicts. There was, for instance, the threat of
war between England and the United States. In England, Gladstone’s
reformist policy was defeated and there was a return to Disraeli’s conservatism in government. While in France Napoleon III entered a terminal
crisis, Bismarck’s Prussia advanced, striving to bring hegemony to Europe.
The Austro-Hungarian Empire, defeated by Prussia in 1866, functioned
as a counterbalance for Italy, which could never unify and modernize
itself.
On the other hand, the IWA and the labor union movement in
general experienced their heyday. The Basle Congress, in September
1869, received 78 delegates representing 9 countries. It occurred at a
favorable moment for the socialist struggle in many European countries
and even in the United States. Marx’s report in the name of the General
Council to the Fourth Annual Congress held at Basle bears testimony to
how his intellectual efforts during those years were in tune with the dedication to the political and organizational issues of the IWA, concretely
expressing the inseparable character of theory and practice which was a
distinctive trait of his activities.
Notebook B113, The Economist
and The Money Market Review
It was within this broad context that Notebook B113 came to life.12 As
is clear from the dates of the excerpts from The Economist (TE) and The
Money Market Review (TMMR), Marx read the whole volumes which
compiled the 1868 issues of these two business newspapers, taking notes
about the topics which he found relevant. The notes taken from the 1868
issues of TMMR are located between pages 19 and 58, while the ones
related to TE can be found between pages 59 and 86. On pages 87, 88
and 89, Marx organizes his own notes in an index. Figure 3.1 shows the
first page of this index in his own handwriting (Notebook B113, page 87).
11 The communist movement in Germany was divided, at this time, both by sectarianism and legitimate disputes, but also fragmented under the figures of Becker, Hess,
Borkhein, Bebel, Schweitzer and Liebknecht.
12 According to a chronology prepared for the new German edition of Marx und Engels
Werke (MEW), it was during January and February 1869 that Marx read and excerpted
The Economist and The Money Market Review.
3
NOTES ON A CRISIS: THE EXZERPTHEFTE AND MARX’S …
81
The index is organized primarily around countries. On page 87, Fig. 3.1
shows the first part of the entry related to the United Kingdom. In its
turn, this entry is divided into four sub-parts: (1) money market, Bank
of England, currency, exchange; (2) crisis of 1866 “und Nachwirkungen”
(utter consequences); (3) commercial morality and (4) railways. Each of
these sub-topics contains specific entries about subjects which deserved
attention, in Marx’s opinion. For instance, under sub-topic 2 (crisis of
1866), the second line reads: “causes of present depression” (22, 25).
These numbers refer to the pages of Marx’s notebook where the excerpts
related to the relevant item can be found. Page 22 is shown in Fig. 3.2,
containing an excerpt from an article published in the 18 January 1868
issue of TMMR. The title used by Marx is “causes of present commercial depression”, and it refers to a piece which appeared on page 59
of the aforementioned issue of TMMR, under the heading “What are
the causes of the present depression in the commercial world, and what
their probable duration?”. The original article is partially reproduced in
Fig. 3.3.
By confronting the manuscript notes with the original sources from
where the excerpts were taken, it has been possible to elaborate a preliminary transcription of Marx’s index, which is shown in Fig. 3.4. This
transcription reveals what Marx thought to be the most important issues
in his notes. The topics, as previously mentioned, are organized around
countries and subjects. There are notes about nine countries: the United
Kingdom, Italy, Russia, Belgium, France, the United States, India, South
Africa, and Australia. The largest entry is about the United Kingdom,
followed by France, the United States, India and Australia. In the case
of the United Kingdom, the entry is divided into ten sub-topics, with a
clear preponderance of monetary and financial themes—railways, as will
be discussed later on, seem to matter because they were at the avant-garde
of institutional and financial changes which were taking place at that time.
Figure 3.4 is important, therefore, because it offers a window into Marx’s
work process, but also because it shows which were the most important
topics of Marx’s research according to his own point of view. In this sense,
it confirms the opinion of Krätke (2005, p. 149), who argued that Marx
has returned to the British Museum in order to resume his investigations
about money, finance and crises—a fact which may signal his intentions
for the future edition of Volumes II and III of Capital.
82
J. A. DE PAULA ET AL.
The Manuscripts of Volume II
and The Money Market Review
According to Rosdolsky (2001, p. 27), the definitive plan for Capital
was announced by Marx in a letter to Engels in 1865. However, this plan
had been established during the writing of the Economic Manuscript of
1861–1863, as evidenced in the section “The revenue and its sources”,
where Marx exposes the complete logical system of Capital. In fact, many
important questions were set during this period, and only then would
Marx write and rewrite his work in a way that resulted in the three
complete volumes. At first, he worked on the manuscripts that resulted
in the 1867 publication of Volume I (MEGA II/4.1),13 and then on a
series of manuscripts that were used by Engels to publish the two other
volumes in 1885 and 1894. These manuscripts are now available for the
assessment of Engels’ work, and also to find out if Marx actually pursued
the plan set out in the 1860s. Regarding Volume I, the creative process
and all the manuscripts have been known for quite a while,14 and thus the
greatest interest still centers around the recently published manuscripts of
Volumes II and III. For the purposes of this paper, we intend to examine
Volume II/11 of MEGA as, for example, Volume II/3 was once examined. Indeed, in the Manuscript of 1861–1863, Marx took important
notes that were to appear in a very synthetic way in Volume I of Capital,
such as those on the Factory Reports. The editing of the preparatory
manuscripts for Volumes II and III allows us to adopt the same analytical
procedure.
It is quite evident from the Grundrisse that Marx developed the
contents of Volume III prior to those of Volume II, and that he did so
as late as 1863–65, when he wrote important manuscripts (MEGA II/
4) shortly after finishing the so-called Theories of Surplus Value (MEGA
II/3). Nevertheless, after the editing of Volume I in 1867, he changed
his approach and began with subjects related to Volume II. In 1868,
the notes he took were thus meant to help in the writing process of
13 Figure 3.5, in the Appendix, presents the description of the Second Section of
MEGA, with its 15 volumes, related to Capital and preparatory works.
14 Although the materials relevant for Volume I have been published for some years
now, MEGA’s fourth section remains unfinished and thus may still disclose new aspects
of the Marxian research process.
3
NOTES ON A CRISIS: THE EXZERPTHEFTE AND MARX’S …
83
Volume II, and he kept quoting his Exzerpthefte in his manuscripts of
that period.15
The manuscripts related to Volume II were written from 1865 to 1881,
and they display a remarkable unity of content, making things easy for
Engels when the time came to publish the book. The sole interruption
occurred during the years of 1866 and 1867, when Marx worked once
again on Volume I.16 He worked on Volume II in two different periods,
in 1868 and 1876–81, writing a set of eight manuscripts. In 1868, he was
able to solve many theoretical problems which he had not been able to
cope with back in 1865, such as the turnover of capital, the exchange of
capital against capital and revenue, the reproduction schemes17 and the
circulation of capital with and without money. On the other hand, from
1876 to 1886, in Manuscripts V to VIII, Marx could establish a difference
between the monetary and capital functions of the money capital, and also
the particular nature of the circuit of the commodity capital. Finally, in
Manuscript VIII Marx was able, for the first time, to make a comprehensive critique of Smith’s dogma of revenue and its sources, which led him
to new considerations about the total reproduction schemes and also the
circulation of money.
When Engels had to edit Volume II for publication, he had an immense
amount of writing that showed the demarche of a thought, but never a
chaotic one. It was the object itself that took so much of Marx’s time to
be developed, but his methods of work were the main cause of delay in
the publishing of Capital. Marx took many notes on any subject which
concerned his book, an example of modesty and rigor that is not comprehensible under contemporary academic standards. Exzerptheft B113, for
instance, which is quoted throughout the manuscripts of Volume II,
contains many examples of this procedure.
At the beginning of Manuscript II, one of Marx’s main concerns was
with fixed capital and its depreciation. He quoted many articles about
15 There was even a reference by Marx in his version of Volume II, which Engels left
out of his edition. In MEGA II.11, p. 194, there is a reference to an article from TMMR
(19 December, 1868 issue) which was excerpted by Marx on p. 56 of Notebook B113.
The Heaton Process was mentioned in the 19 November 1868 issue of TMMR, and also
excerpted by Marx on p. 49 of Notebook B113. In MEGA II.12 and II.13, the references
to the process (and to the TMMR article) were suppressed by Engels.
16 Not to mention the years of political turmoil in France.
17 Cf. MEGA II/11, Apparat, p. 852 and ss.
84
J. A. DE PAULA ET AL.
railways and their maintenance, including TMMR (MEGA II/11, p. 121
e ss.). It is exactly the same procedure he had adopted years earlier in
the Manuscript 1861–1863, a text which contains pages and pages on
every theme concerning absolute and surplus value, sometimes only for
his own information.18 But Marx had something else in mind besides selfclarification when he took the notes that would appear in the preparatory
manuscripts, and eventually in the book published by Engels.19 Marx left
behind his plan for the six books and incorporated all of them as categories within the main theme of Capital. At this stage of his reasoning, he
was about to develop important questions on credit, crises and the circuit
of capital. All those themes should be treated in his book on capital, and
would emerge from the circulation of capital—that is, in Volume II. His
research and careful notes on railways were one of the starting points on
that matter, which had even been referred to in Volume I and on the
Manuscript of 1865. Throughout all the manuscripts of Volume II, Marx
continuously developed a reflection about credit, which allowed capital to
perform its circuit by keeping the reproductive process in motion while
capital had to circulate as money, surplus value and commodities. This
process generated moneyed capital (zinstragendes Kapital ), concentration
of capitals and stock markets.
In sum, these manuscripts show how Marx was pursuing exactly the
plan established around 1865 (or even before that), and also that, at each
step, the details of the whole enterprise demanded more of his efforts—
including the major research undertakings which are registered in his
Exzerpthefte.
Notebok B113: A Study on Finance and Crises
The discussion about Volume II shows that a reasonably well-organized
edition was available to Engels after Marx’s death. It also shows that,
while reworking the original manuscripts, Marx had included information
gathered in Notebook B113, among other places. This level of preparation for Volume II may be contrasted with the equivalent for Volume
III. In his introduction to the first edition of the latter, in 1894, Engels
18 In Manuscript II , while considering the difference between labor and production
time, Marx used the example of a chemical process applied to steel-making which spared
time, also described in TMMR (MEGA II/11, 194).
19 The notes would eventually appear in the book in an abbreviated form.
3
NOTES ON A CRISIS: THE EXZERPTHEFTE AND MARX’S …
85
described the state of the manuscripts he had found. Now, after the publication of Volumes II/4.2, II/14 and II/15 of MEGA, it is possible
to follow what Engels had described in his well-known introduction,
where he explained his editorial challenges. It is noteworthy to mention
that, although difficulties permeated the whole editorial process, Engels
stressed that “it was Part Five that presented the major difficulty, and
this was also the most important subject in the entire book. Marx was
engaged in elaborating precisely this Part, when he was attacked by one
of the serious illnesses referred to above” (Marx 1894, p. 94). Part Five
deals with “the division of profit into interest and profit of enterprise”,
with chapters on “interest-bearing capital”, “credit and fictitious capital”, “accumulation of money capital”, “the role of credit in the capitalist
production”, “banking capital’s components parts” and “precious metals
and the rate of exchange”.
The aforementioned remark by Engels about Marx’s engagement with
this subject is important, because Notebook B113 may serve to demonstrate how Marx’s effort to prepare Volume III was left incomplete. A
comparison of Volumes II/4.2, II/14 and II/15 shows that Marx had
reworked passages of Volume III, but that he had not yet reached Part
Five. Through an analysis of Volume II/14, one can see that Marx’s
revisions between 1870 and 1882 were concentrated in Parts I, II and
III,20 and that he had not, therefore, touched on the topics comprising
Part V, which was kept as originally conceived (see Volume II/4.2). The
conjecture of this section is simple: Marx meant to use the notes taken in
Notebook B113 for a revision of Part Five, but unfortunately, given time
and health problems, he could not properly use them.
Why can we speculate that such was the case? In the published version
of Volume III, Marx quotes statistics about bullion and bank notes from
sources such as the Bank Committee of 1858 and also mentions examples
of “credit swindles” taken from an 1847 issue of The Economist (pp. 629–
31). Now, Marx had fresher data from 1866 to 68, as demonstrated by his
notes on the reports of the Bank of England (Notebook B113, pp. 3–18)
20 The topics revised by Marx were: “formulas and calculation for the rate of surplus-
value and the rate of profit”, “rate of surplus-value and rate of profit”, “rate of surplusvalue and rate of profit mathematically examined”, “differential rent and rent as pure
interest from capital incorporated in land”, “formulas of surplus-value and rate of profit”;
“on rate of profit, turnover of capital, interest and discount”. There is one reference to
Feller and Oderman under this topic (MEGA II/14, p. 155).
86
J. A. DE PAULA ET AL.
and by the information contained in articles he had read in TMMR (see,
for instance, the article of January 4, 1868, p. 5—“the Bank of England
accounts for the past year”); he also had excerpts containing information about more modern and complex swindles such as the one involving
Overend, Gurney & Co. Why, then, would Marx not use them?
The Failure of Overend, Gurney & Co
The case of Overend, Gurney & Co. is a telling example of unused available information prepared for Volume III. It seems warranted, therefore,
to delve a little deeper into the specifics of this rather peculiar financial episode. In 1867, in the first edition of Capital, Marx had already
included a note about the very recent, at that point, crisis of 1866, where
he stressed its particular nature: “the crisis assumed this time a predominantly financial character” (MEGA II/5, p. 540). Accordingly, the crisis
was rooted in the collapse of a specific financial institution: “[i]ts outbreak
in May 1866 was signalled by the failure of a giant London bank, immediately followed by the collapse of countless swindling companies”. The
editors of MEGA II/8 (p. 1289) explain that this “giant London bank”
was Overend, Gurney & Co., whose bankruptcy took place on 10 May
1866.
Overend, Gurney & Co. was a traditional and prestigious London
discount house, which had dominated the market for broking and
discounting bills of exchange in England during the first half of the nineteenth century. By the 1850s, however, the company had engaged in a
series of ill-fated ventures and found itself on the verge of bankruptcy
(Barnes 2007, p. 34; Wood 2000, p. 207). In a bold attempt to rescue
the business, the directing board decided in 1865 to float its capital as
a limited company, under the provisions of the 1862 Act of Companies. This piece of legislation, which expanded and amended previous acts
promulgated in 1855 and 1856, made it possible for business enterprises
to issue shares for private investors with limited liability over the company’s obligations—a remarkable legal innovation which resulted, among
other things, in the separation between ownership and control of firms
and the emergence of a class of investors which had little or no expertise
in the technical aspects involved in the business ventures they took part
in (Barnes 2007, pp. 32–33; Foucaud 2006, p. 6).
Overend, Gurney & Co., capitalizing on its solid reputation, carried
out a very successful public subscription, raising around £1,500,000 in
3
NOTES ON A CRISIS: THE EXZERPTHEFTE AND MARX’S …
87
new capital—a result greeted with mixed reactions by the specialized
press. However, the financial strains through which the company went
at the time were not appropriately disclosed to prospective investors, and
from the last months of 1865 onward a conjunction of adverse factors
started to put pressure on its operations. The railway contracting company
Watson Overend & Co.—which, despite its name, had no connection
whatsoever with Overend, Gurney—went bankrupt, taking with it JointStock Discount, the discount house which supported its operations. This
crash introduced a premium on liquidity in a financial system which was
already tight due to imbalances in foreign exchange markets—the Bank
of England’s discount rate had risen from three to seven percent during
the last months of 1865, and then to eight percent after the failure of
Watson Overend. The new scenario made unviable the operations of
numerous companies which had been formed in the speculative boom
which followed the introduction of limited liability in share-ownership,
and a general downward pressure was felt on the valuation of shares of
all companies which adopted such structure. With the failure of Pinto,
Perez & Co., a Spanish merchant firm with which Overend, Gurney had
close business associations, and the judicial liquidation of its holdings of
railway company shares on May 9, public confidence was shaken for good.
Depositors frantically searched for liquidity and the company crashed on
May 10, leading to a widespread run on the English banking system
on “Black Friday” May 11 (Barnes 2003, pp. 8–10; Kindleberger 1993,
pp. 199, 269).
The collapse of Overend, Gurney & Co. and the systemic complications it occasioned offered glaring evidence of some of the features and
difficulties associated with the developing structure of financial markets
in Britain—an event which must have certainly caused a strong impression on such a close and interested observer of monetary and financial
phenomena as Marx. In fact, the episode brought to public attention
several issues of agency, informational asymmetry and moral hazard which
were embedded in the limited liability company structure in its rudimentary stages. Limited companies were offered for public subscription
by means of a prospectus, and with the help of specialized professionals
known as promoters or financial agents.21 The process was, in its essence,
21 See the article “Limited liability, the real and the true, the false and delusive”
(TMMR, January 11, 1868, p. 34), which was excerpted in Notebook B113, p. 21
as “Contract Corporation (Limited)”—a subject broached therein.
88
J. A. DE PAULA ET AL.
one of advertising, but with the significant difference that those in charge
of the advertising were also directly financially involved in the dealing—
the promoters actually purchased the business from its original owners
before reselling it to private investors. Thus, there was a strong incentive
to highlight the positive aspects of a given business’ performance while
omitting structural frailties which might afflict it. The legislation on jointstock companies did not, at that time, regulate the elaboration of business
prospectuses; even more importantly, it did not offer any rules regarding
the disclosure of financial information for prospective investors or current
shareholders. Private investors were thus at a clear disadvantage toward
company management, who could benefit from their privileged access to
information. The conversion of Overend, Gurney & Co. into a limited
liability company was one such case. Although The Economist expressed
doubts at the time about the company’s financial health, the prestige it
had acquired in the past was enough to attract a vast number of investors
who were not aware of the company’s present difficulties (Barnes 2007,
p. 34).
One of the consequences of the Overend, Gurney collapse was a
sudden shift from enthusiasm to distrust in the public attitude toward
limited liability companies. In a subsequent judicial decision regarding the
legality of collections of outstanding calls on shareholders, it was stated
that, although the subscription process had been morally objectionable,
there was no evidence to implicate the company with intentional defraudation (Barnes 2007, p. 35). It thus became clear that the regulatory
framework for the operation of limited liability companies was defective, and in the absence of significant legal amendments, public concern
was naturally geared toward a more strict control of business practices.
This meant, in practice, a growing reliance on professional auditors and
more adequate accounting procedures—something which had only been
pursued in very rudimentary forms prior to the Overend, Gurney crisis. It
seems reasonable to speculate that part of the interest in accounting that
Marx demonstrated in Notebooks B113 and B114 had its roots in his
recognition of the need to understand the shady deals which culminated
in the financial collapse of 1866. But there is yet another issue brought
to light by the dramatic events of that year that seems to have exerted a
strong impact on his mind.
The generalization of limited liability in Britain from 1862 onward
induced the proliferation of financial companies which followed the model
3
NOTES ON A CRISIS: THE EXZERPTHEFTE AND MARX’S …
89
offered by the Crédit Mobilier in France.22 For all practical purposes,
these were banking institutions, which collected local deposits in order
to offer credit, but which, in contrast to the traditional banking houses,
enjoyed the privileges of limited liability in share-ownership (Foucaud
2006, pp. 5–6; Kindleberger 1993, p. 95). Consequently, the financial
companies exhibited less risk-aversion in their credit operations than their
traditional banking counterparts, therefore being more prone to invest
in speculative ventures. The main effects of this change in regulatory
standards and the consequent expansion of financial companies were
felt in the finance conditions which prevailed in the railway sector. The
railway business was, at that time, becoming increasingly dominated by
the activities of so-called “contractors”—public-works entrepreneurs who
engaged in partnerships with railway companies, accepting their payment
in companies’ shares and securities. Up until 1864, while the railway
sector went through an expansionary phase, contractors were mostly
limited to their role as railway constructors, with the companies issuing
shares and raising capital directly on financial markets. However, the
market for railway equity suffered a reversal in 1864, forcing companies
to seek alternative sources of credit (Foucaud 2006, pp. 8–9).
Railway contractors started developing close connections with the
flourishing financial companies, which were still willing to pour resources
into the railway business due to their bias in favor of speculative investment. The financial companies emitted bills of exchange which the
contractors could discount for liquidity, taking their railway shares as
collateral. Thus, even if the financial company did not have capital at its
disposal, it could offer credit against future assets which were linked to the
very enterprise being financed. The problem with this practice, of course,
was that if the business failed, the value of its assets would drop until
they eventually became unrealisable. This was exactly what happened in
Britain throughout 1865–66. As already mentioned, the failure of Watson
Overend & Co. brought about the crash of Joint-Stock Discount and
put an initial strain on the British money market. Other financial companies failed during the next months, triggering a cumulative process where
financial tightness made it impossible for unsound railway companies to
continue operating, and the consequent fall in the valuation of their assets
22 Marx’s interest in the Crédit Mobilier is well-known (cf. articles in the New York
Tribune and references in the Grundrisse and in Capital ), and also a feature of Notebook
B113 (Fig. 3.4 exhibits six entries on the French bank).
90
J. A. DE PAULA ET AL.
caused the bankruptcy of financial partners who held them as collateral for
past loans.
The Overend, Gurney crisis thus reflected the workings of two novel
features of the developing British financial system. First, it put into
evidence the agency and informational problems which were occasioned
by the separation between ownership and control brought about by the
limited liability principle. In that sense, the events of 1866 resulted in
increased public awareness with respect to fraudulent corporate behavior
and the need for more adequate accounting and auditing procedures.23
Second, the crisis was the climax of a systemic failure which had its roots
in the over-speculative behavior of new financial institutions which had
not yet been properly regulated and could thus get deeply involved in the
financing of unsound ventures in a fragile economic sector.24
Marx’s interest in this particular bankruptcy is clear from the references
revealed in his own index, and also from the newspaper articles which
dealt directly or indirectly with this key event in the crisis of 1866 (see
Fig. 3.4). Furthermore, his interest in the episode can also be inferred
from his correspondence (Marx and Engels, 2010, p. 599). Four different
letters make reference to the Overend, Gurney failure, and there is also
a revealing letter from Jenny Marx to Kugelman (December 27, 1869)
in which she writes: “I have looked through several hundred newspapers
in order to make extracts from them to the Moor of financial swindling
concerns etc.(Overend & Gurney)” (Marx and Engeks, 2010, p. 548).
And, it must be stressed once again, his attention to this case was already
evident in the 1867 edition of Capital (MEGA II/5, p. 657).
23 The need for business regulation was debated in the article “Railway reform, uniform
accounts, and a government audit” (TMMR, 11 January, 1868, p. 31), excerpted by Marx
under the heading “state control” (see Fig. 3.4).
24 The systemic nature of the crisis initiated with the failure of Overend, Gurney &
Co. was stressed in a comment by Marx in the first edition of Capital (MEGA II/5,
p. 657). Articles from TMMR excerpted by Marx also stressed the same issue (see, for
instance, the article published in January 4, 1868, p. 3).
3
NOTES ON A CRISIS: THE EXZERPTHEFTE AND MARX’S …
91
Central Banking, Railways
and the Art of “Cooking” Accounts
Apart from the excerpts and notes taken from TE and TMMR, two other
items stand out in the table of contents for Notebook B113: Marx’s
notes about Goschen’s The Theory of Foreign Exchange (1862) and about
Feller & Oderman’s Kaufmänische Rechnung (1866). Bearing in mind
the context which surrounded Marx’s activities at that time, it is possible
to better understand his interest in both these items.
George Joachim Goschen—who would later enter the peerage of the
Kingdom of England—belonged to a London merchant family, and his
business experience earned him a position as a director of the Bank of
England during the late 1850s. From the 1860s on, he entered a prolific
public career, joining parliament on several occasions as a member of
the House of Commons, and eventually becoming Chancellor of the
Exchequer in 1887. In 1862, Goschen published The Theory of Foreign
Exchange, a book which aimed to provide a theoretical framework to
support the Bank of England’s role as lender of last resort. At the time
of the 1866 financial collapse, the Bank of England actually hesitated to
provide additional liquidity to the nation’s banking system, maintaining
for some time its strict adherence to the precepts of the Bank Charter
Act of 1844 (Wood 2000, p. 207). This led some voices—chief among
them that of Walter Bagehot—to argue that the Bank was actually responsible for aggravating the financial turmoil, turning it into a system-wide
crisis. Goschen’s book served as a standard reference for those who advocated a fundamental role for the Bank of England in times of financial
strain. One such occasion, obviously, had come about with the failure of
Overend, Gurney & Co., and Goschen was duly invoked in the public
arena—as, for example, in the article published by TE in the issue of 2
June 1866, entitled “The Money Market”, where his “valuable treatise”
was extensively quoted. Given that Goschen was such an important theoretical reference in the debates about the crisis, it was only natural that
Marx would be interested in his work.
Furthermore, the references to the crisis of 1866 in Notebook B113,
in which the Overend, Gurney & Co. episode occupied such an important place, can support a conjecture about why Marx had read and taken
notes from Feller & Oderman’s book. Marx read Kaufmänische Rechnung (1866) with attention and care, reviewing it in Notebooks B113
92
J. A. DE PAULA ET AL.
(30 pages) and B114 (36 pages). The question then is: why was Marx so
interested in a book about basic accountancy?25
A preliminary reading of the news articles reviewed by Marx suggests
that his interest had something to do with the peculiar nature of the
recent crisis. Through his index (Figs. 3.1 and 3.4) we learn how
important for him were the crisis of 1866 and related issues about “commercial morality” (this expression was taken from TMMR, April 11, 1868,
p. 419, “Commercial credit and morality, and the new bankruptcy law”).
Tracking the articles excerpted in his notebook, it is possible to learn from
TMMR about an important new feature of this crisis: accountancy tricks.
Notebook B113, p. 19, presents Marx’s notes about an article published
in the issue of 4 January 1868—entitled “The year 1867 in its commercial
and financial aspect – its lessons and its warnings”—which commented
on the failure of Overend, Gurney & Co. “and the enormous amount
of their uncovered liabilities, together with that of Joint Stock Discount
Company, and other financial associations”. The article mentions that
“there was a general suspicion and distrust of the boards of directors of
joint stock companies, and that distrust has continued throughout the
year”. Those directors had developed a new art, according to TMMR:
“[t]he art of deceiving by fictitious reports and ‘cooked’ accounts and
balance-sheets seems to have been well studied by them, and proficiency
in it appears to have been regarded as a high recommendation”.
This article also helps to understand why Marx paid so much attention to railways in a notebook focused on monetary and financial matters.
According to TMMR, “[i]n no branch of joint-stock enterprise has this
break-down been more conspicuous than that in which we might have
expected it would have been least conspicuous, viz., the railways”. And
the article presented a long list of related “embarrassments”: “London,
Chatter and Dover Co.”, “London, Brighton and South Coast Railway”, “North British Co.”, “Great Eastern”, “Caledonian” and “Great
Western Co.”. Accounting procedures, especially in their connection with
current practices in the railway sector, were greatly relevant to understand
the development of the recent financial collapse, and as such were duly
incorporated into Marx’s inquiries.
25 It is important to stress that there are both a previous reference (MEGA II/4.2,
p. 386) and a later reference to Feller & Oderman’s book within Marx’s writings (MEGA,
II/14, p. 155). Regarding the latter, the MEGA editors mention that Marx would have
resumed his reading of this book in 1878 (MEGA, II/14, pp. 390–391).
3
NOTES ON A CRISIS: THE EXZERPTHEFTE AND MARX’S …
93
Concluding Remarks
The contents of Notebook B113 disclosed in this paper put in evidence
its nature as a coherent arrangement of readings and research notes
on a specific theme: developments in financial practices and institutions
which were taking place in Europe during the late 1860s. It seems that
the five different sources used by Marx in this notebook—articles from
The Economist and The Money Market Review, reports from the Bank
of England, and the books by Goschen and Feller & Oderman—were
all closely articulated around an attempt to grasp the workings of the
1866 crisis, and its specific nature. Moreover, this excerpt notebook offers
a revealing window into Marx’s method of research and composition,
an aspect which could be further explored through a similar analysis of
other notebooks which contain excerpts from similar sources—such as,
for instance, Notebooks B108 and B109, where issues of the two business newspapers from the period 1866–67 are also extensively excerpted.
Given the initial findings of this paper, it can be expected that the
Exzerpthefte will become, in the near future, a crucial source in Marxian
historiography. Finally, one cannot avoid the question of what would be
the use envisaged by Marx for all the information he gathered on the
current state of Europe’s financial system. Although no single reference
to the 1866 crisis can be found in the edited version of Volume III,26
the meaning and significance of this event were very clear to Marx, as
shown by the reference to it in the first edition of Capital. Given that
finance and crises were themes congenial to Part Five of Volume III, it
seems reasonable to suppose that Notebook B113 was originally prepared
26 The only reference to the crisis of 1866 in Volume III appears in the Appendix
written by Engels (Supplement to Volume 3 of Capital, p. 1046). When MEGA II/15 is
searched for the crisis of 1866, no reference can be found—in this case, the Supplement is
in MEGA II/14. Engels, too, had a clear understanding of the meaning of that episode.
Writing in 1893, he discussed the “significantly increased role” of the “stock exchange
of today” (p. 1045), and mentioned that “since the crisis of 1866, accumulation has
proceeded at an ever growing pace”. Those were times of institutional change, as Engels
noted, where “in order to aid the investment of the mass of money capital thus afloat,
new legal forms of company with limited liability were devised wherever they did not exist
yet…” (p. 1046).
94
J. A. DE PAULA ET AL.
as raw material for a deep revision of that section which Marx could not
accomplish in his lifetime.27
This revision might have led to a very different version of Volume III,
with a more elaborate discussion of financial and credit issues and their
potential impact on the patterns of capitalist crises. An interview given
by Marx to John Swinton (published by The Sun, September 6th, 1880)
points in this direction. On the occasion, Marx mentioned plans to write
a trilogy on “capital, land, and interest”, and stated that the discussion of
credit would be illustrated by the United States, “where credit has had
such an amazing development” (Marx & Engels, 1989, p. 584). Marx’s
growing attention to monetary and financial issues has also been stressed
by the editors of MEGA 2 (II. 4, p. 455). Notebook B113 and other
similar manuscripts could thus provide hints about Marx’s unfulfilled
theoretical plans, as well as further insights into his method of research
and composition.
Competing Interests The authors have no conflicts of interest to declare that
are relevant to the content of this chapter.
Appendixes
27 In private conversations, Rolf Hecker has suggested that other uses besides changes
in Part Five could have crossed Marx’s mind, including the preparation of a whole new
volume dedicated to the study of crises—a possibility sustained by sources such as Notebook B91, entitled “The book of commercial crisis”. Hecker has also given notice of an
initiative by the MEGA project to edit these so-called “Books of Crisis”.
3
NOTES ON A CRISIS: THE EXZERPTHEFTE AND MARX’S …
95
Fig. 3.1 A reproduction of Marx’s index for his notes on
The Economist
and The Money Market Review (Source
Notebook B113, p. 22. Karl Marx/Friederich Engels Papers, International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam [see http://www.iisg.nl/archives/en/files/
m/10760604.php])
96
J. A. DE PAULA ET AL.
Fig. 3.2 Marx’s notes on “Causes of present commercial depression”
3
NOTES ON A CRISIS: THE EXZERPTHEFTE AND MARX’S …
97
Fig. 3.3 Partial reproduction of the 18 January 1868 issue of The Money
Market Review (p. 59)
98
J. A. DE PAULA ET AL.
Fig. 3.4 A transcription of Marx’s index for his notes on The Economist
and The Money Market Review (Source Notebook B113, pp. 87–
89
Karl
Marx/Friederich
Engels
Papers,
International
Institute of Social History, Amsterdam (see http://www.iisg.nl/archives/en/
files/m/10760604.php), authors’ transcription.)
3
NOTES ON A CRISIS: THE EXZERPTHEFTE AND MARX’S …
99
Appendix: MEGA Second Section: “The Capital” and Preparatory works
MEGA II.1: Karl Marx: Economic Manuscripts 1857/58.
MEGA II.2: Karl Marx: Economic Manuscripts and Writings 1858-1861.
MEGA II.3: Karl Marx: A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy
(Manuscripts 1861-1863).
MEGA II.4: Karl Marx: Economic Manuscripts 1863-1867.
MEGA II.5: Karl Marx: Capital. Critique of Political Economy. First Volume, Hamburg
1867.
MEGA II.6: Karl Marx: Capital. Critique of Political Economy. First Volume, Hamburg
1872.
MEGA II.7: Karl Marx: Le Capital, Paris 1872-1875.
MEGA II.8: Karl Marx: Capital. Critique of Political Economy. First Volume, Hamburg
1883.
MEGA II.9: Karl Marx: Capital. A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production, London
1887.
MEGA II.10: Karl Marx: Capital. Critique of Political Economy. First Volume,
Hamburg 1890.
MEGA II.11: Karl Marx: Capital. Manuscripts for second Volume 1868 bis 1881.
MEGA II.12: Friedrich Engels: Capital. Processed Manuscripts for second Volume,
1883/84.
MEGA II.13: Karl Marx: Capital. Critique of Political Economy. Second Volume.
Edited by Friedrich Engels. Hamburg 1885.
MEGA II.14: Karl Marx/Friedrich Engels: Capital. Manuscripts and Processed
Manuscripts for third Volume, 1867-1894.
MEGA II.15: Karl Marx: Capital. Critique of Political Economy. Third Volume. Edited
by Friedrich Engels. Hamburg 1894.
Fig. 3.5 Appendix: MEGA Second Section: “The Capital” and Preparatory
Works (Source International Institute of Social History [http://www.iisg.nl/
imes/mega2.php]).
100
J. A. DE PAULA ET AL.
References
Anderson, Kevin B. Marx at the margins: on nationalism, ethnicity, and nonWestern societies. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010.
Barnes, Paul. The origins of limited liability in Great Britain, the first “panic”, and
their implications for limited liability and corporate governance today. SSRN
Working Paper. Disponível em: http://ssrn.com/abstract=488703, 2003
Barnes, Paul. Minsky’s financial instability hypothesis, information asymmetry and
accounting information: the UK financial crises of 1866 and 1987. Accounting
History, v. 12 (1): 29-53, 2007.
Bellofiore, Riccardo; Fineschi, Roberto. Introduction. In: Bellofiore, Riccardo;
Fineschi, Roberto (eds.), Re-reading Marx: new perspectives after the critical
edition. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
Cerqueira, Hugo E. A. G. David Riazanov e a edição das obras de Marx e Engels.
Economia, v. 11 (1): 199–215, 2010.
Foucaud, David. Deréglementation et crise financière: une comparaison des crises
anglaises de 1866 et thaïlandaise de 1997 . Document de Travail, Université
de Paris 8, 2006.
Hecker, Rolf. La seconda sezione della MEGA2 : verso Il completamento. In:
MAZZONE, Alessandro (ed.), MEGA 2 : Marx ritrovato. Roma: Media Print,
pp. 49–67, 2002.
Hecker, Rolf. The history and meaning of the MEGA project from its inception
until 1990. Marxism 21, v. 20: 281–292, 2010.
Hobsbawm, Eric. A fortuna das edições de Marx e Engels. In: Hobsbawm, Eric
et al. (ed.), O marxismo no tempo de Marx (História do marxismo, v. 1). Rio
de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1983.
Kautsky, Karl (ed.). Theorien über den Mehrwert aus dem nachgelassenen
Manuskript “Zur Kritik der politischen Ökonomie” von Karl Marx. Stuttgart:
J.H.W. Dietz, 1910.
Kindleberger, Charles P. A Financial History of Western Europe. New York/
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.
Krätke, Michael. Le dernier Marx et le Capital. Actuel Marx, n. 37, 145–160,
2005.
Marx, Karl. Capital, Volume I . London: Penguin Books [1976], 1867.
Marx, Karl. Capital, Volume II . London: Penguin Books [1978], 1885.
Marx, Karl. Capital, Volume III . London: Penguin Books [1981], 1894.
Marx, Karl; Engels, Friedrich. Cartas sobre El Capital. Barcelona: Editorial Laia,
1974.
Marx, Karl; Engels, Friedrich. Collected Works. London: Lawrence & Wishart,
vol. 24, 1989.
Marx, Karl; Engels, Friedrich. Collected Works. London: Lawrence & Wishart,
vol. 43, 2010.
3
NOTES ON A CRISIS: THE EXZERPTHEFTE AND MARX’S …
101
Mehring, Franz (org.). Aus dem literarischen Nachlass von Karl Marx, Friedrich
Engels, und Ferdinand Lassalle, 4 volumes. Stuttgart: J.H.W. Dietz Nachf,
1902.
Riazanov, David (org.). Gesammelte Schriften von Karl Marx und Friedrich
Engels, 1852 bis 1862, 2 volumes. Stuttgart: J.H.W. Dietz Nachf, 1917.
Rojahn, Jürgen. Publishing Marx and Engels after 1989: the fate of the MEGA.
Disponível em: http://www.iisg.nl/imes/documents/mega-e98.pdf, 1998.
Rosdolsky, Roman. Gênese e Estrutura de O Capital de Karl Marx. Rio de
Janeiro: Contraponto, 2001.
Wood, Geoffrey E. (2000). The lender of last resort reconsidered. Journal of
Financial Services Research, v. 18 (2/3): 203-227.
CHAPTER 4
Investigating Financial Innovation and Stock
Exchanges: Marx, the Notebooks
on the Crisis of 1866 and Structural
Changes in Capitalism
João Antonio de Paula, Hugo da Gama Cerqueira,
Carlos Eduardo Suprinyak, Leonardo Gomes de Deus,
and Eduardo da Motta e Albuquerque
Introduction
This paper suggests that Marx’s Notebooks B102-B108, B101-B109 and
B105-B1131 constitute, in themselves, a systematic investigation of the
crisis of 1866. In this sense, one may compare the effort undertaken in
1 The double numbering refers to the different archival codes assigned to each Notebook. The first number is the one written directly in the Notebooks, and used in Takenaga
(2014), whereas the second one refers to the classification found in the index to the
This text was originally published by the Beiträge zur Marx-Engels
Forschung —Neue Folge 2014/15 (Paula et al. 2016). The authors would
like to acknowledge financial support from CAPES, CNPq and Fapemig.
We thank our research assistants Luise Soares, Giulia Tonon, Rafaella
J. A. de Paula · H. da Gama Cerqueira · L. G. de Deus ·
E. da Motta e Albuquerque (B)
Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, Brazil
e-mail: albuquer@cedeplar.ufmg.br
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature
Switzerland AG 2025
J. A. de Paula et al. (eds.), Marx for the 21st Century, Marx, Engels,
and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22011-1_4
103
104
J. A. DE PAULA ET AL.
their composition to Marx’s earlier notes on the Reports of the British
Parliament on the crises of 1847 and 1857, which were used in Das
Kapital ’s Volume III. Prepared between 1868 and 1869, one may also
read these Notebooks as notes that complete an analysis of a sequence of
capitalist crises—1847, 1857 and 1866.2
“Karl Marx/Friederich Engels Papers”, prepared by the IISG. In this paper, whenever we
use only one of these numbers, we are referring to the IISG classification.
2 To our knowledge, contrary to the crises of 1847 and 1857, there was no Parliamentary Report on the crisis of 1866. The archives available in the British Library (in October
2015) only lead to a Parliamentary Report on the Limited Liability Act of 1862—a financial innovation close related to the nature of the crisis of 1866. Marx was aware of this
Parliamentary Report, according to his excerpts from the period.
Carnevali, Tatiana Guimarães, Caroline Dussin and Manuel Bueno for their help
in the preparation of this manuscript. We thank the International Institute of
Social History (IISG), for kindly providing access to copies of Notebooks B102B108, B101-B109 and B105-B113, and for its authorization to use images from
those Notebooks. We thank Professor Susumu Takenaga for his very enlightening comments on a draft version of this manuscript, during a Workshop on
Marx’s Notebooks held at Cedeplar on 28 November 2013. Preliminary versions
of this paper were presented at the Historical Materialism London Conference
(London, 6 November 2014), at the International Conference “MEGA and
Marxian discourses on economic crisis” (Tokyo, Japan, 27 February 2015—1
March 2015), and at the Workshop on Crises and Transformation of Capitalism:
Marx’s investigations and contemporary analysis (King´s College London, 27–28
May 2015). Discussion and comments from participants in those conferences
helped to improve the manuscript. We also would like to thank Alex Callinicos
and Lucia Pradella for their criticisms and suggestions. The usual disclaimer
holds.
João Antonio de Paula
e-mail: jpaula@cedeplar.ufmg.br
Hugo da Gama Cerqueira
e-mail: hugo@cedeplar.ufmg.br
Leonardo Gomes de Deus
e-mail: leodedeus@cedeplar.ufmg.br
C. E. Suprinyak
The American University of Paris, Paris, France
e-mail: csuprinyak@aup.edu
4
INVESTIGATING FINANCIAL INNOVATION AND STOCK …
105
The notebooks on the crisis of 1866 had as predecessors the notebooks on the crisis of 1857. This might indicate that, when preparing
the former, Marx benefited from his previous organization of data and
information relating to a specific crisis. Block and Hecker (1991), Hecker
(2015), Krätke (1998) and Mori and Tamaoka (2015) have described
the notebooks of 1857, their scope and significance. These papers allow
a comparison between the two sets of notebooks. While Marx used the
data and information from his notebooks of 1857 in his articles for the
New York Daily Tribune, in 1868–1869, he prepared the notebooks after
the crisis and did not use them in any known work (Takenaga 2014,
p. 54). However, the notebooks of 1866 might have been more than a
“storage of knowledge”, to use an expression suggested by Michael Heinrich.3 Given the detail and organization of Marx’s readings from selected
newspapers (especially The Economist and The Money Market Review), one
may also suggest that they were made in preparation for further editorial
work on Das Kapital, since the topics broached in the notebooks were in
line with his 1863–1865 manuscripts for Volume III. The thread unifying
these different stages of Marx’s investigation may be his studies on capitalist crises and the role played therein by the credit system. The topic of
crises connects observations that appear in different parts of Volume III,
such as Section III (the tendential fall of the rate of profit) and Section V
(money, credit and finance in the global dynamics of capitalism).4
This paper also suggests that Marx recurrently stressed the changing
nature of capitalist crises—crises have different causes and unfold in
different ways. He was dealing with a capitalist system undergoing fast
and profound changes, as he noted in various places5 . This is why, since
his very first comments on the crisis of 1866, Marx highlighted what was
new: the crisis now assumed “[…] a predominantly financial character”
(MEGA2, II.5, Marx and Engels, 1983, p. 540). Finally, the paper shows
that, in the course of his investigations, Marx was critically dealing with
the contemporary literature on the 1866 crisis and its aftermath. In this
3 During the debates on a session dedicated to the notebooks (Tokyo, 28 March 2015).
4 For the connections between those two sections, see MEGA2, II.4.2, Marx and
Engels, 2012, p. 502, p. 531.
5 The increasing size of the accumulation of moneyed capital (MEGA2, II.4.2, Marx
and Engels, 2012, p. 503), new forms of property such as shares, state debts and others
(MEGA2, II.4.2, Marx and Engels, 2012, p. 530), and their impacts on the structure of
bank reserves (MEGA2, II.4.2, Marx and Engels, 2012, p. 520, pp. 524–525).
106
J. A. DE PAULA ET AL.
sense, Marx was at least partially involved in the same intellectual milieu
from which emerged both Juglar’s (1862, 1892) works on business cycles
and Bagehot’s (1873) study on financial regulation.
The paper is divided into three sections, besides this introduction
and some concluding remarks. The first locates the unfinished Volume
III of Das Kapital within Marx’s larger intellectual plans, highlighting
how the MEGA2 project has been enhancing our understanding of his
efforts toward completing his planned work. The second section deals
with Marx’s work on Volume III, showing how the analyses of the
crises of 1847 and 1857 found in part V might serve as a guide for
his investigations of the 1866 crisis. The third section contains a short
note on the singular nature of the crisis of 1866, and then presents a
summary of Marx’s readings from The Economist and The Money Market
Review. The starting point is Susumu Takenaga’s major stroke at unraveling the articulation and organization of Marx’s notebooks B102-B108,
B101-B109 and B105-B113. As Takenaga (2014, pp. 45–55) has shown,
Marx composed the indexes (Register) to his notes thoroughly and in
a crescendo, leaving footprints of his progress toward a fuller interpretation of the 1866 crisis. We deal, basically, with the outline prepared by
Marx in the index found in notebook B101-B109 (pp. 286–287), which
illustrates in broad lines the reasoning behind his interpretation of the
crisis. The paper suggests, in conclusion, that the notebooks of 1868–
1869 provided a further step in his understanding of capitalist crises, and
might have thus constituted essential material for a revision of Volume
III, making them essential for a proper understanding of its contents.
MEGA2, Volume III: Method
and New Investigations
The incomplete nature of Marx’s critique of political economy has raised
many controversies. The MEGA2 project has significantly expanded our
access to Marx’s writings, and the comparisons it now allows between
published and unpublished material have greatly enhanced our subsidies
for a comprehensive understanding of his work. When we follow the way
in which Marx used the notes and analytical schemes resulting from his
constant reading of different sources, we may now question the hypothesis that Marx had abandoned the original structural plan of his work,
drawn up in 1857, which foresaw the preparation of six books. Rather
than recasting Rosdolsky’s (2001) precious lesson on the subject, our
4
INVESTIGATING FINANCIAL INNOVATION AND STOCK …
107
intention here is simply to assert its continuing relevance as the MEGA2
studies advance.
Given this aim, it seems more useful to look for evidence of the firm
consistency with which Marx pursued his theoretical project, scrupulously
observing a method based on two orders of methodological and dialectical movements. What characterizes this methodological procedure is
the coalescence of a method of presentation and a method of inquiry,
in which the first must be presented as an irreversible journey of the
concept, from its most abstract to its most concrete forms. In the case
of the critique of political economy, the purpose is to make explicit the
journey of capital, the effective subject of capitalism, from its first and
most elementary form of existence as a commodity until its overwhelming
domination of the world.
Within the structural plan of the project, this moment of culmination
would be the subject of a book—World Market and Crises.6 It would
represent the complete actualization of capital as a set of singularities, of
the disruption that arose because of the growing dominion exercised by
capital over mechanisms earlier left to the free expression of the law of
value. As seen by Preobajensky, this dominion over the workings of the
law of value, the managing by the capital of what earlier promised to be
the “truth of value”, leads to the very destruction of the said law:
The relatively more perfect period for freedom of economic competition
on a world scale, and consequently more favorable for the workings of
the law of value, has been the classical era of capitalism, which preceded
the transition to the imperialist stage. [...] The restrictions in competitive
freedom also limit the workings of the law of value, causing it to meet with
a series of obstacles for its expression, thus being partially replaced with
that form of organization in production and distribution which capitalism
can attain while remaining capitalism. […] The law of value is reaching the
stage of its own transformation and gradual disappearance through its own
workings. (Preobrajensky 1979, pp. 171–178)
Marx’s dialectical exposition of the critique of political economy
begins, in Volume I, with the operation of the law of value in its purest
form: no concern for the effective differences between prices and values,
6 Michael Heinrich has put forward an interpretation that there are “two different
projects of Marx: the six-book plan from 1857 until 1863 and then on, as a new project,
the four-book plan of Capital” (Xiaoping and Heinrich 2011).
108
J. A. DE PAULA ET AL.
all production absorbed in the market, and crises considered only as a
possibility. In Volume II, there are now sources of disruption interposed
between production and circulation, with consequences over profits. In
this context, there emerges a view of crises that traces their occurrence
to disproportions among different productive sectors (Grespan 1998).
Volume III is the foyer for the emergence of a world of various capitals, where the differences among them—their organic compositions and
sectoral allocations—and the effective forms of competition cease to be
assumptions to become part of a concrete capitalist dynamic. Crises
emerge as a tendency counteracted only by mechanisms of protection that
arrest the law of value. These may involve the imposition of a managed
social order dominated by money and power, not excluding the possible
emergence of hybrid forms of social organization.
It is well known that Volume III remained incomplete, being the
object of Marx’s attention until the end of his life. The privileged themes
of these studies were economic crises; credit and banks; and land rents and
agriculture in the United States, Russia, India, and Ireland. The themes
that Marx continued to study after 1867 were not trivial. The choice of
economic crises as an object of inquiry meant also opting to learn from
the increasing complexity that every outburst of crisis brought along.
During his lifetime, Marx still witnessed two further crises, in 1873 and
1882. Equally significant is the choice of the agrarian structures of the
United States and Russia as objects for study7 facing non-canonical realities. In fact, Russia and the United States represented alternative paths of
capitalist development.8 Their choice as objects of inquiry meant studying
capitalism as a heteronomous and complex set, and thus striving to apprehend the concrete as “synthesis of multiple determinations, unity of the
diverse”.
The Drafts and the Exzerpthefte
One vantage point from which to understand Marx between 1866 and
1868 lies in the years immediately before, when he managed to build the
entire logical structure of his economic work. In fact, he only felt able
to publish his economic theory after he had its complete framework in
7 See Krätke (2011, pp. 17–18).
8 See Shanin (1990, p. 119).
4
INVESTIGATING FINANCIAL INNOVATION AND STOCK …
109
mind. After the MEGA2 edition of the four drafts of Das Kapital, one
can now access in detail the path toward the plan for the three books
that Engels would eventually follow in his editorial efforts. In order to
fully understand the Marxian approach to the 1866 crisis, we make two
assumptions: first, that Marx had already established, in 1863, a plan for
the third volume9 ; secondly, that this plan would demand a new research
effort when the time came to write the third draft, just in the eve of the
Panic of 1866.10
Shortly after concluding the Manuscript of 1861–1863, Marx drafted
what would become the second and third volumes of Das Kapital, from
1863 to 1868.11 Indeed, the Manuskript 1863–186512 contains the most
important draft of Volume III. It consists of seven chapters: (1) The
conversion of surplus value into profit; (2) Conversion of profit into
average profit; (3) The law of the tendency of the profit rate to fall;
(4) Conversion of commodity capital and money capital into commercial
capital and money-dealing capital or mercantile capital; (5) Division of
profit into interest and enterprise gains. (Industrial or commercial profit).
The interest-bearing capital; (6) Conversion of surplus profit into ground
rent; (7) Revenues and their sources.13 One can easily see that, although
much remained to be done, even before the publishing of the first volume,
Marx had a great deal of his “artistic totality” before his eyes. In addition,
even though he had developed many themes in the two first drafts, this
was the first time they were part of a logically coherent whole. When
the time came to study the crisis of 1866, Marx had probably established
the main structure of his theory, that is to say, he knew what he was
looking for in 1868. Since the first published edition of the Manuskript
9 See MEGA II/3.5, Marx and Engels, 1980, p. 1861.
10 It is not possible to approach here the entire developments from the Grundrisse
(first draft) until 1863 (second draft). MEGA II/3.3, Marx and Engels, 1978, pp. 1137ff
presents many determinations of a crisis analysis, but without precise conclusions. Marx
was able to grasp the problem in more detail since 1857, although the form remained
very tentative.
11 For the second book, he would write and rewrite its drafts until 1881. See MEGA
II/11 (Marx and Engels, 2008).
12 MEGA II/4.2, published in 1992, comprises the “Manuskript I”, which was the
basis for the publishing of Book III.
13 Those titles were attributed by the editors, following the structure of the text and
of the edition of Volume III.
110
J. A. DE PAULA ET AL.
1863–1865 emerged, more than twenty years ago, the so-called “MarxEngels problem” has occasioned many debates about the use made of
the drafts by Engels.14 It would be pointless to review this debate here.
Our purpose is solely to demonstrate how Marx himself followed the plan
of 1863, and how complex his efforts would turn out to be throughout
1865 and 1866.
Already in the Manuskript 1861–1863, specifically in the section “Revenue and its sources”, interest-bearing capital emerged as the “accomplished fetish”: the formula G-G’ is a synthesis of the entire movement
from production (G-W-G), through circulation, the average rate of profit
and finally, the ultimate fetish of capital (MEGA II/3.4, Marx and Engels,
1979, p. 1453). The reification of capital—or fetishism in general—was
precisely the point of view of vulgar political economy. In Manuskript
1863–1865, Marx departed from a similar point regarding joint-stock
companies. This form of capital, according to him, was “the suppression
of the capitalist mode of production inside the capitalist mode of production and thus one self-suppressing contradiction that expresses itself prima
facie as simply a point of departure to a new form of the mode of production” (MEGA II/4.2, Marx and Engels, 2012, pp. 502–503).15 This
new form would involve monopolies, state intervention and a new financial aristocracy, “private production without private property”. The credit
would come to embody social, not private risks.
For the purposes of this paper, we may point out how far Marx had
gone by 1866, and what he could expect from his studies about the
1866 crisis. This gives great importance to the fourth and fifth sections16
of the fifth chapter of the manuscript of 1865. Here, Marx described
The Economist as able to grasp the surface of the problem—the capital
fetish—but incapable of explaining its roots, that is to say, how interestbearing capital was the instrument connecting objectified labor and living
14 Some of the main contributions: Heinrich (1997), Vollgraf und Jungnickel (1995)
and Krätke (2006). Before 1992, the Rubel’s edition (Marx, 1968) also tackles the
problem.
15 This passage would become the Chapter 27 of the Book III.
16 The fifth chapter has the following division: (1) The interest-bearing capital; (2)
Division of profit. Interest rate. The natural rate of interest; (3) Interest and enterprise
gains; (4) Reification of surplus value and capital relations generally in the form of interestbearing capital; (5) Credit. Fictitious capital; (6) Pre-bourgeois.
4
INVESTIGATING FINANCIAL INNOVATION AND STOCK …
111
labor.17 Therefore, the main purpose of the analysis of credit in the 1863–
65 draft was to delve into specific aspects of capitalist production. Marx
still took notes in order to clarify and circumscribe his analysis, and the
Manuskript 1863–1865 sometimes presented a different order of exposition from that found in Volume III.18 It began with a description of
interest-bearing capital and its relations to productive capital, that is to
say, the relations between interest and profit. This allowed Marx to discuss
the role of credit in capitalist production and the subject of crises from
the perspective of the whole system. Following the order of exposition,
he should have also dealt with themes that would later become the fifth
part of Volume III, i.e., the relations among bank capital, money capital
and real capital. The manuscript, however, ended at this point, hence
warranting a closer examination.
One of the main features of the argument is the relation between credit
expansions or contractions (money acting as capital) and the productive
system, which includes money as a medium of circulation. In times of
prosperity, the velocity of circulation of money will increase due to a
growth in revenue, and the capitalist will demand more credit. This is the
period of “most elastic and easy credit” (MEGA II/4.2, Marx and Engels,
2012, p. 509). In other words, the same amount of money provides
a larger return for the many capitals; the capitalist’s return materializes
even before the actual sale of the commodity. This creates the illusion
that credit is responsible for the expansion and that a distinction really
exists between money for the circulation of revenue and credit money.
“The banks”, says Marx, “smell a rat while their customers return more
bills as money” (MEGA II/4.2, Marx and Engels, 2012, p. 510). In
times of adversity, money as a medium of circulation suffers a contraction due to falling prices, wages, and volume of transactions. This fall
in credit leads to increasing demand for “monetary accommodation”. In
Marx’s words: “There is no doubt that, with decreasing credit, which
itself coincides with the decrease in the process of reproduction, the
circulation mass (…) required for circulation decreases, while the one for
17 See MEGA II/4.2, Marx and Engels, 2012, p. 466.
18 The fifth section of Book III (fifth chapter of the draft) provides one of the best
examples of Engels’ procedure to establish the definitive edition. See MEGA II/14, Marx
and Engels, 2001, p. 230ff. He decomposed the text in order to reconstruct it, always
following the structure of the Manuskript I (1863–1865), but collecting and relocating
its many quotations.
112
J. A. DE PAULA ET AL.
credit increases” (MEGA II/4.2, Marx and Engels, 2012, p. 510). In a
crisis, credit works in order to guarantee that money functions primarily
as money capital, guaranteeing that part of the capitalist class has access
to a major portion of all social savings. In this scenario, the profit rate
has nothing to do with the level of interest. However, what Marx names
“pressure for pecuniary accommodation” does not concern capital itself,
but only banking capital, no matter what kind. State papers, securities,
bank notes and mortgages appear here only as money capital and, especially, as titles over capital itself: “This is very important; that such pressure
on banking capital and its relative scarcity in respect to the demand for it
is confused with a diminution of real capital that in such cases overstocks
the markets” (idem, p. 517). This causes a decrease in the banking capital
that is transformed again into money and the capital available in society
is turned into money capital, until its transformation into world money,
with the decrease in national reserves of gold. During a crisis, after all,
banks fear a drain of gold above everything else. Periods of crisis increase
the demand not for capital, but for money itself, which is evident from the
fact that crises exhibit an overstock of capital in all its forms. While it may
seem that the money supply has decreased, in fact, it is simply functioning
as a medium of payment. Here crises assume their most complete character, forcing capital and financial instruments to return to their existence
as money. Crises, therefore, bring about a fissure in the entire complex
of categories, made possible because the mass of capital (commodity or
money) is different from the stock of fictitious capital. Marx takes this
opportunity to explain the origins of this latter form of capital, be it public
or private, in which “all connections with the real process of valorization are lost until the last trace, and the representation of capital as an
automat that expands its own value is consolidated” (idem, p. 517). The
question is whether this capital relates to a real accumulation process, or
else to a plethora of overproduced capital. Marx considers that loanable,
moneyed capital increases after a crisis, since there is more money seeking
for investment opportunities that are no longer available. The contraction
of productive capital implies a relative or even absolute increase of capital
in its moneyed form.19 A crisis begins with a constraint in production and
a fall in the price level. This causes an increase in the mass of values of
19 Ib., p. 541.
4
INVESTIGATING FINANCIAL INNOVATION AND STOCK …
113
use in many nations at the same time, resulting in generalized balance of
payments problems.20
Marx wanted to stress, firstly, the meaning of a crisis and its point of
departure, and secondly, how it affected the money supply, credit and
the balance sheets of banks. According to him, “after each crisis, the
highest level of loanable capital of the previous industrial cycle becomes
the basis or the lowest level for the next”.21 It is important to notice that,
from this point onwards, the focus of the manuscript was mainly on two
questions: money supply and quantity of circulation, and the volume of
loanable capital. This implied a study of international bullion movements
and bank ledgers—phenomena that lay on the border between productive
capital and loanable moneyed capital. One can thus see that Marx built
his own approach toward capital and credit markets in 1865, when he
wrote the fifth chapter of Manuskript 1863–1865. For him, 1865 would
mark a new departure, as he announced to Engels in a letter from 19th
August: “The critique of this sauce [the confusion] I can only give in
a later writing” (MEGA III/13, Marx and Engels, 2002, p. 539ff). His
research on specific aspects of the credit system and their relation to crises
began simultaneously with the third draft.
In fact, with the third draft, Marx had established an agenda for
further research: at that point, his theory met its object at a new level,
different from the Grundrisse and the Manuskript 1861–1863.22 The
achievement of a logical structure that managed to connect commodity
to class, as tentative as it was from Marx’s “artistic” perspective, provided
him with a new framework.
20 “Altogether the movement of moneyed capital (as it expresses itself in interest) is
the contrary of productive capital.” (Ib., p. 542).
21 Ib., p. 553.
22 The last part of the fifth section of the Manuskript 1863–1865—the so-called “the
confusion” (MEGA II/4.2, Marx and Engels, 2012, p. 561ff)—comprises a series of
notes where Marx reiterated his perspectives on the money market, credit and crises. The
selection of notes follows a few themes: (1) circulation of bills and bank notes; (2) drain
of bullion; (3) exchange rates; (4) quantity of money and (5) international trade. Three
reports occupy most of the space: the 1848 Report from the Secret Committee of the House
of Lords appointed to inquire into the causes of distress […], reprinted in 1857, the Report
from the select committee on bank acts (1857) and Report from the select committee on
bank acts (1858), both published by the House of Commons.
114
J. A. DE PAULA ET AL.
Marx’s Notebooks
and the Analysis of the 1866 Crisis
Analyses of the crisis of 1866 relate it with the development of the
railway business—in other words, with a new capital market opened from
the 1850s onwards. Takenaga (2014, pp. 36–45) presents an updated
summary and reviews this literature. He describes how the “collapse of
the stock market from the end of 1865 to the beginning of 1866 and
the failure of the two large railway companies in which Overend and
Gurney invested most of its funds […] could not but reveal the difficulties in the management of Overend and Gurney”. Relatedly, Cottrell
(2004) explores the relationship between railways, the money market,
stock exchanges and the crisis of 1866. For him:
[…] the contractors’ use, or rather misuse, of bills of exchange to sustain
their activities became increasingly difficult from autumn 1865 as interest
rates rose. Unable to raise further credit, many went bankrupt, with the
greatest shock produced by the failure of Peto & Betts, major contractors.23 Their collapse triggered on ’Black Friday’, 10 May 1866, the
closure of Overend, Gurney, the biggest London discount house, causing
the worst panic since 1825. (Cottrell 2004, p. 259)
The author also describes the institutional development of financial markets, with special attention to limited liability firms, dividing
their history into two phases: initial adoption (1855–85) and wider
dissemination (1885–1914).
Regarding the relationship between railways and finance, Ville (2004,
p. 306) explains how “[r]ailways played an initiating and facilitating role
in many capital market developments. […] The railway companies themselves were the largest private business organizations of the mid-Victorian
period and pioneers of many advances in the corporate form”.24 These
companies, according to Chandler (1990, p. 253), contributed to the
evolution of capital markets, as “the new demand for railroad capital did
lead to the development of new financial instruments—preferred stocks
23 Marx did follow footprints of a chain that lead to the crisis (B101-B109, pp. 102,
211–212, 220 and B108, p. 52).
24 See Chandler (1977, pp. 79–206) and the railways as the first modern industrial
enterprises.
4
INVESTIGATING FINANCIAL INNOVATION AND STOCK …
115
and debentures”.25 Acheson et al. (2009, p. 1111) present data on the
London Stock Exchange between 1825 and 1870 that indicates that railways were the most important security traded at the time: their sample
of 681 companies (including banks and mining) contains 180 railway
companies, the latter responsible for 329 out of 1015 securities.
These studies help us identify the specific economic context experienced by Marx during 1868–69. The footprints he left, interpreted and
organized by Takenaga (2014), illustrate the development of his studies.
In Section II, we suggested that Marx knew clearly what he was looking
for in his excerpts. The starting point is in the index to Notebook B108
(pp. 84–86), where he organized data from the Bank of England and
excerpted articles from the 1867 editions of The Money Market Review.
This material came under five headings: (1) Bank of England and money
market; (2) Stock and share markets Investments etc.; (3) Companies;
(4) Trade and (5) Railways (Takenaga 2014, pp. 46–47). Railways alone
occupy a full page. The weight of statistical data indicates the empirical
nature of this material: out of 86 pages, 56 contained tables of some sort.
This structure suggests the importance of monetary and financial
matters from the start. His writings on the “role of credit system” in
MEGA II.4.2 (Marx and Engels, 2012, pp. 501–505) may have been
the starting point for his research. Here, it seems likely that more was
at stake than simply grasping the 1866 crisis—Marx would have certainly
been curious to understand how the credit system allowed for the formation of railways.26 As Takenaga (2014, pp. 45–46) has shown, Marx
transcribed data regarding the ups and downs of the Bank of England
discount rate during the 22 years since the Bank Act of 1844 (Fig. 4.1).
This would later be resumed in B101-B109, as a systematic search for
episodes where the discount rate reached 10%—the level defined by the
Bank of England after 11 May 1866, as a reaction to the bankruptcy of
Overend, Gurney & Co. Throughout that whole period (1193 weeks), as
Marx’s table showed, the rate was at 10% for only 20 weeks and 2 days.
Of these, 13 weeks came after 1859.
25 According to Mitchel (1964, p. 333), “probably the major influence of the coming
of the railway was on the development of capital market and on the level of savings”.
26 Marx had already pointed out in Book I (p. 436) that railways were a product of
credit and stock markets. In his manuscripts of Book III, he discussed the “role of the
credit system in capitalist production”.
116
J. A. DE PAULA ET AL.
Fig. 4.1 Marx’s reproduction of “Analysis of the Bank Rates of Discount for
22 years” (Source B102-B108, p. 14)
Marx also excerpted an article published in TMMR on 12 January
1867, describing 876 companies with “joint-stock shares, chiefly with
limited liability”, classified according to their activities: 283 companies
appear as “manufacturing and trading”, 147 as “mining”, 108 as “banking” and “financial” and 44 as “railways”. The table, reproduced as
Fig. 4.2 below, gives us a good picture of the state of stock markets circa
1860–1866. On the other hand, Michie (1999, p. 88) presents figures
on the different sectors of the London Stock Market: in 1863, railways
were around 25% of the stock market (and British government securities around 57%). Therefore, it is not surprising that Marx in 1868–69
devoted his attention to the nexus between railways and stock exchanges.
Armed with broad pictures of two key aspects under his investigations (the money market and stock exchanges), Marx prepared Notebook
B109, where excerpts from The Economist appeared first. In this notebook, the index to the excerpts listed 17 headings, now including a
specific topic on the “crisis of 1866” (Takenaga 2014, pp. 47–48). Here,
Marx fully transcribed the table published by The Economist on 19 May
4
INVESTIGATING FINANCIAL INNOVATION AND STOCK …
117
Fig. 4.2 Marx’s reproduction of a table on the “State of the Stock Market
(1860–1866)” (Source B102-B108, p. 26, The Money Market Review, 12 Jan
1867, p. 37)
1866 (pp. 57–58).27 The introduction to the table stated: “[I]t will be at
once evident how much more rapid the calamity has been on this occasion
than on any previous one” (p. 586).28 This table illustrates two signs of
a crisis: a reduction in the reserve notes held by the Bank of England and
an increase in the “minimum rate of discount”—8% in 1847 and 10% in
1857 and 1866. Together with his earlier notes on the Bank of England
discount rate “in the last 22 years” (B102-108, pp. 12, 14), Marx’s notes
integrated fluctuations in discount rates with the development of three
crises.
In the same notebook, Marx took notes from The Money Market
Review—a more technical newspaper, according to Takenaga (2014,
p. 45). His index was more elaborate, and the synthesis of his readings
was under the topic “Crisis of 1866”, composed of seven headings: (A)
Bank of England, Bank Act of 1844; (B) Theory of Panic; (C) Securities and Panic; (D) Joint-stock banks and other companies; (E) Railways;
27 The title of the article is “The rapidity of the panic in 1866 as compared with that
of 1847 and 1857”. Marx writes in the top of his copy of the table: “Figures relating the
Panic of 1847, 1857 and 1866” (B101-109, p. 55).
28 As put forward in section II, Marx followed the size of the Bank of England
reserves. In the published edition of Book III, there is reference to the “entire reserve of
the Bank of England” being only £580,751 on 12 November 1857 (Marx and Engels,
2004, p. 631). The table transcribed by Marx shows that the amount of “reserve notes
held by the Bank” on 14 November 1857 was £957,710.
118
J. A. DE PAULA ET AL.
(F) Plethora of Money and (G) Limited Liability Act of 1862 (B101B109, pp. 285–287). As the subjects indicate, Marx was now dealing
with capitalism that had monetary and financial institutions at its core.
In fact, under heading A, Marx listed excerpts dealing with the actions
of the Bank of England and the consequent debates on the Bank Act of
1844, which touched on the growing complexity of the British financial
system, and the new developments necessary to cope with it. The second
heading contained broader analyses of the nature of crises in general, and
the crisis of 1866 in particular. TMMR reviewed at least three books in
articles excerpted by Marx: The crisis of 1866, published by W. Fowler in
1866 (B101-B109, pp. 238–240); Financial Lessons of 1866, by an anonymous “city manager” (B101-B109, pp. 266–267) and Monetary panics
and their remedy, with special reference to the panic of 11th May, 1866, by
J. P. Gassiot (B101-B109, p. 278).
Fowler (1866) recognized a pattern in the recurring crises of the past
decades: some isolated events spread distrust among the public, who
looked for liquidity and thus caused unsound financial institutions to fail;
these failures further undermined public confidence, bringing about a fullfledged panic. However, the distinctive features of the crisis of 1866 were
its magnitude and suddenness. The event that triggered the panic was
the failure of one of the longest-standing, most prolific discount houses
of London, and the measures required to deal with it were accordingly
severe, all of which contributed to making the crisis a remarkable event.
In Fowler’s words: “A Crisis marked by the largest failure ever known,
and by a continuance of a ten percent rate for fourteen weeks, will always
be memorable” (1866, p. 1). Fowler was an adherent of the Currency
School, and as such, he defended the appropriateness of the Bank Act of
1844 as an instrument of financial policy. In order to further his position, he drew extensively on the evidences presented before Parliament
by both Lord Overstone and the Governor of the Bank of England on
the aftermath of the crisis of 1857.
Financial Lessons of 1866 presented a different point of view, presented
by TMMR in two parts. The first part was a long digression on limited
liability companies, using letters written to The Economist before the panic
in order to show how the Companies Act Companies of 1862 fostered
the creation of “bubble companies” (p. 25). The author focused his analysis on “bad business”, “which produced, or at least greatly aggravated
last year’s crisis” (p. 6). To him, attention should be concentrated on
businesses that raised funds relying on the 1862 Act (p. 7)—a legislation
4
INVESTIGATING FINANCIAL INNOVATION AND STOCK …
119
that allowed the creation of fraudulent schemes such as the “London,
Chatham, and Dover Railway” (p. 17). TMMR showed how the book
made “suggestions for the amendment of the Companies Act 1862”
that “point in the same direction” of a previous article in the newspaper
(p. 31).
Finally, the review of Gassiot’s book was used to support the newspaper’s position in favor of the “total repeal of obnoxious clauses
limiting the bank-note issues”. Marx’s selection of articles under the entry
“Theory of Panic”, therefore, highlights the connection between the
panic of 1866 and one particular financial innovation—limited liability
companies.29 Marx also excerpted an article from 19 October 1867
(B101-B109, p. 276) containing an analysis by the Liverpool Chamber
of Commerce on “Commercial crises, trading upon borrowed capital”.
The piece evaluated common causes of the current crises in France and
England (mostly related to the “American war”), and specific causes
“peculiar to each nation”. The causes specific to England were “premature investments from 1862 to 1866 in railway enterprises”, “excessive
speculation and overtrading”, “reckless investment of capital in jointstock companies of every description”, “the collapse of several banks” and
“two deficient harvests”. This entry indicates that Marx was collecting
evidence of the financial nature of the crisis, showing how an institutional
innovation was crucial in preparing the conditions for both the rise and
subsequent fall in investments.
The third heading (“Securities (Investments) and Panic”) may constitute a systematic inquiry into the stock exchange of Marx’s time. What
did The Money Market Review show his readership? Fig. 4.3 reproduces a
standard section of the newspaper: “The London official stock and share
list”.
TMMR carefully analyzed fluctuations in the value of securities in
general, with a special focus on railway shares (both domestic and foreign,
including the United States and colonial possessions), in the section
“Stock Market of the Week”, which was under Marx’s constant scrutiny
(B101-B109, pp. 190, 193, 218–219; B102-B108, p. 32).30 This may
29 The “city manager” kept contact with the newspaper—see TMMR, 10 August 1867,
pp. 141–142, where one can find recommendations for joint-stock companies and for the
future of the Bank Act of 1844.
30 The reliability of data from The Money Market Review is acknowledged by Chabot
and Kurz (2009, p. 7).
120
J. A. DE PAULA ET AL.
Fig. 4.3 Reproduction of Quotations of the London Stock Exchange (May,
1866) (Source The Money Market Review, 5 May 1866, pp. 618–619)
serve as a guide to understand the state of the stock exchange at the time.
For instance, the 19 May 1866 issue mentioned “government stocks”,
“guaranteed Indian Railways”, “foreign stocks” (Mexico, Italy, Spain,
Brazil and Turkey), “shares in the financial companies”, “railway stock”
and “bank shares”. The section concluded by evaluating that “most securities are at the present absolutely below their value”, so that “purchasers
may at the present moment secure handsome returns on the money laid
out” (p. 664).
Heading D (“Joint-stock banks and other companies”) was the longest
in the index. There were articles covering specific banks (with special
attention to Overend, Gurney & Co., but also including the Leeds
Bank, Royal Bank of Liverpool, European Bank, etc.), companies such
as the Russian Iron Works and the Estate Investment Company, and
the “increase of employment of capital”. There were also articles dealing
with broader subjects, such as one published on 2 February 1867 that
4
INVESTIGATING FINANCIAL INNOVATION AND STOCK …
121
tried to defend the institution of “joint-stock financing” against its abuses
(B101-B109, p. 253). One can also find descriptions of swindles involving
joint-stock financing under investigation by the Justice31 (B101-B109,
pp. 199–200) and of difficulties in the management of new limited
liability companies32 (B101-B109, p. 275).
The fifth heading covered railways, and since this topic seemed deeply
intertwined with the credit system in Marx’s mind, one may interpret
his extensive readings on railways as an attempt to understand how these
could be financed beyond the resources of “individual capitalists”—thus
configuring an extension of Marx’s abovementioned studies on Notebook B102-B108. The topics listed in the index outline a broad study
on railways, dealing with several financial features that surrounded these
high-tech investments. On Notebook B102-B108, Marx had excerpted
articles discussing the “stock market of the week” (p. 32), “railway
dividends” (p. 74), “railway collapse” (pp. 32–34), “railways accounts”
(p. 75) and “railway reform” (p. 76). On Notebook B101-B109, one
can find a systematic investigation on the following topics: ((1) railways and stock exchanges (B101-B109, p. 265)33 ; 2) railway finance
(B101-B109, p. 191)34 ; (3) railway dividends (B102-B108, p. 74)35 ; (4)
railway debentures (B101-B109, pp. 210, 241 and 244)36 ; railway reform
(B102-B109, pp. 251–252).37
Under heading F (“Plethora of Money”), there were two articles.
The first one, “How is money to be employed” (B101-B109, p. 230),
presented a survey of investment opportunities before concluding:
31 “Joint stock promoting and financing—the story of Mr. Bernard Solomon Bernard”
(TMMR, 21 Jul. 1866).
32 A conflict between the Hodges’ Distillery Company and its shareholders (TMMR,
28 Sep. 1867).
33 “The year’s fall in railway property” (TMMR, 15 June 1867, p. 694).
34 TMMR, 16 Nov. 1867, pp. 504–505; 8 Feb. 1867, p. 149; and 15 Feb. 1868,
pp. 185–186.
35 “Railway finance and its mysteries” (TMMR, 16 Nov. 1866, pp. 504–505) and
“Railway dividends and the doubts attaching to them” (TMMR, 23 Nov. 1866, pp. 532–
533).
36 “Railway debentures” (TMMR, 15 Dec. 1866, p. 241) and “The new railway
debenture law now coming into operation” (TMMR, 29 Dec. 1866, pp. 733–734).
37 “Can all railways of Great Britain be consolidated under one management?” (TMMR,
26 Jan. 1867).
122
J. A. DE PAULA ET AL.
Although, therefore, there is not much room, in our view, for the investment of money in bank and financial shares, in British railways stocks, or
telegraphy, there is ample scope at present in North American securities;
and there is a fair prospect that India and our other colonies will be able
to offer us good security for much of our surplus earnings.38
The second article, “Plethora of money”, established a contrast
between the availability of money, which “continues very plentiful”,
and the lack of “means of employment for accumulating capital”39
(B101-B109, p. 255).
Finally, we come to the last heading, which discusses the “Limited
Liability Act of 1862”. On its first edition after the crash (19 May 1866),
TMMR published an article on “The panic and the evils of the secrecy in
the accounts of the financial companies”, associating the spread of limited
liability companies with the crash. The article further argued “there were
many errors and omission in the Companies’ Act which demand immediate attention and action of the Parliament” (p. 665). Marx excerpted
these and other pieces that surfaced during this period of intense parliamentary action on the subject of financial regulation. Regarding the
Limited Liability Act, there was “the appointment of a parliamentary
committee on their operation” (B101-B109, p. 255). This same article
offered a broad overview of the institution to be reformed:
Some of the statistics of joint-stock companies given by Mr. Watkins
are exceedingly interesting. There are now, it appears, 2,200 joint-stock
companies in this country, with a capital of not less than one thousand
millions, and with 750,000 shareholders or persons interested in these
companies. Another class, which had grown up with them, namely, the
director class, amounted to 12,500 in number. In the four years since
the passing of the Limited Liability Act, Mr. Watkins said the companies
formed under it had a capital of one hundred and fifty millions sterling
and a paid up capital of thirty millions, and it is melancholy to reflect that
a large proportion of this capital, nearly one third, appertains to companies
now in liquidation.40
38 TMMR, 27 Oct. 1866, pp. 464–465.
39 TMMR, 2 Mar. 1867, p. 269.
40 TMMR, 9 Mar. 1867, p. 295.
4
INVESTIGATING FINANCIAL INNOVATION AND STOCK …
123
Fig. 4.4 Marx’s transcription of statistics collected by The Money Market
Review (Source B101-B109, p. 255, The Money Market Review, 9 March 1867,
p. 295)
The abovementioned statistics were duly transcribed by Marx, as
shown in Fig. 4.4 below.
Marx’s excerpts captured a time full of initiatives aimed to reform and
correct problems related to the emergence of crises. The discussion of
limited liability may have been the most visible of these, as shown under
heading G, but there were several others: railways, shares, debentures,
the role of the Bank of England as “lender of last resort”, protection
of shareholders, transparency in capital accounts etc. Marx might have
been surveying a strong wave of institutional reform, brought about
by the 1866 crisis, which would soon reshape capitalism—a reformist
agenda that naturally involved strong calls for state intervention through
direct legislative action, and which may have provided the conditions for
the “rehabilitation of railway finance after the 1866 crisis” identified by
Cottrell (2004, p. 267).41
41 Mitchell (1964, pp. 335–336) presents data showing that between 1831 and 1919,
there were five railway investment peaks (capital formation in UK railways greater than 20%
of UK’s gross capital formation): 1845–1849, 1863–1866, 1874–1875, 1883–1884 and
1897–1906. The debates on the problems of railway investments, and the institutional
changes that followed them (all excerpted by Marx) may have been preconditions for
new investment waves. In his notebooks, Marx could have been investigating how post1866 changes might have contributed for subsequent peaks, as indicated in an article
from TMMR (29 Dec. 1866) arguing that changes in the Limited Liability Act “at least
affords this protection to investors in railway debentures”, meaning that they “[r]emoved
the one great impediment to railway progress” (p. 734).
124
J. A. DE PAULA ET AL.
As Takenaga (2014) suggests, the notebooks may have their own inner
unfolding logic. Following this suggestion, the index for Notebook B102109 (pp. 285–287) may help to interpret the contents of Notebook
B105-B113, where Marx excerpted articles from 1868 and reviewed two
books (Paula et al. 2013). One clue indicating that Marx was moving
toward other aspects is the title of one of the headings, dealing with the
post-crisis environment: “2- crises und nachwirkungen”42 (B105-B113,
p. 87).
Conclusion
The notebooks are a labyrinth, since they show how a collection of data
relating to the financial world of the period might open new avenues for
research. They also provide an opportunity to follow Marx’s method of
investigation unfolding, within a logic that Takenaga (2014) has captured
and described. They constitute a broad study of a crisis, an outline for
an investigation of a specific phase of capitalism and an examination of
measures undertaken in response to the crisis. Within them, one can
alternately find:
I. a clear picture of the events surrounding the crisis of 1866,
together with analyses and interpretations;
II. A summary of a long list of available statistics (reserves, bank
notes, clearing houses, joint-stock companies, capital structures,
securities negotiated on stock exchanges, dividends etc.)—a
“storage of knowledge”, to use Michael Heinrich’s suggestion;
III. Hints of transformations underway in capitalism—caused, on one
hand, by certain types of leading companies (railways, joint-stock
companies) that depended on new credit institutions in order to
appear and expand, and on the other, by changes in the financial institutions themselves (debentures, shares, stocks, limited
liability companies);
IV. Investigations of joint-stock companies and limited liability firms
as a powerful counter-tendency to the fall of the rate of profit
(MEGA2, II.4.2, Marx and Engels, 2012, p. 502);
42 “Crises and consequences”.
4
INVESTIGATING FINANCIAL INNOVATION AND STOCK …
125
V. Detailed descriptions of the multifarious aspects of the complex
machinery of financial markets, connecting bank reserves, shares,
securities and foreign exchanges;
VI. An investigation of post-crisis measures, in particular the suspension of the Bank Act of 1844 with the purpose of containing the
panic;
VII. A description of the intense activities undertaken by Parliament in response to the crisis, which set about to reform,
change and improve legislation in order to adapt them to a new
stage. This also indicated that important political and economic
actors would not withstand government inaction: shareholders,
investors, auditors, newspapers, the Bank of England, bankers in
general and the Chambers of Commerce were all taking steps to
secure changes in laws related to the protection of investors and
the financial health of institutions;
VIII. A wealth of material to be used in a future edition of Volume III:
new data, new information and new perspectives on the institutions described in the manuscripts of 1863–65. The lack of
references to limited liability firms in the published version of
Volume III provides additional evidence that Marx still intended
to engage in major editorial work.43 The attention devoted by
Marx to the new forms of financial organization of business in
the Register for his notes of TMMR in B101-B109 is a strong
indication of the nature of such editorial change.
IX. An independent piece of analysis in itself, suited to the study and
understanding of the crisis of 1866.
The notebooks, therefore, represent an investigation of a specific crisis,
but they go much beyond that. In a larger sense, they are also an investigation of structural changes in capitalism, as illustrated by the intense
legislative activity sparked by the crisis of 1866. Marx’s investigations on
stock exchanges and related structural changes seem to have given him a
new perspective for investigating changes in capitalism.
For instance, they may have helped him establish a clearer relationship between credit, joint-stock companies and railways. Pradella (2010,
43 In fact, there is one reference to limited liability firms in Volume III, but it is in
the Addendum 2—The stock exchange—prepared by Engels (1894, p. 1047). The authors
thank Alex Callinicos for this observation in a personal communication.
126
J. A. DE PAULA ET AL.
pp. 90–91) shows how the elaboration on centralization of capital was
introduced by Marx in the French edition (in 1872–1875)—and included
only in the fourth German edition—in a long paragraph that highlights
the relationship between credit, joint-stock companies and railways:
But accumulation, the gradual increase of capital by reproduction as it
passes from the circular to the spiral form, is clearly a very slow procedure
compared with centralization, which has only to change the quantitative
groupings of the constituent parts of social capital. The world would still
be without railways if it had had to wait until accumulation had got a
few individual capitals far enough to be adequate for the construction of a
railway. Centralization, on the contrary, accomplished this in the twinkling
of an eye, by means of joint-stock companies. (MEGA II.7, Marx and
Engels, 1989, p. 549; and II.10, p. 563)
This passage identifies a revolutionary role for stock exchanges in a new
stage of capitalism, probably a consequence of his investigations during
1868 and 1869.
Such changes, on one hand, pointed to processes that would only
reach completeness in the United States—another variety of capitalism
in formation. The transformations in the London Stock Exchange and
the financial structure of British firms did not advance much beyond that
point. With the privilege of hindsight, Hilferding (1985) showed how
Germany (and the United States) took this process further, effectively
going from a “modern enterprise”—railways—to a “modern industrial
enterprise”; financially, this meant the transition from joint-stock to
corporate firms. Chandler (1990) described how the United Kingdom
lagged behind Germany and the United States in this transition, retaining
a form of “personal capitalism” in contrast to the “managerial capitalism”
that emerged in the latter two countries. Marx might have sensed this
process when he mentioned to John Swinton (interview in The Sun, 6
Sep. 1880) his interest in the US credit system. Structural changes in
capitalism may sometimes be related to the emergence of new leading
centers of accumulation.
On the other hand, these investigations may have helped his understanding of the complex nature of the expansion of capitalism to noncapitalist areas such as Russia. The institutions of capitalism investigated in
the 1868–69 notebooks became part of Marx’s framework; it thus became
possible to integrate stock exchanges, capitalism and its expansion toward
4
INVESTIGATING FINANCIAL INNOVATION AND STOCK …
127
Russia within the same analytical effort. In a letter to Vera Zazulich, for
instance, Marx wrote:
In descending from theory to reality, no one can disguise the fact that the
Russian commune now faces a conspiracy by powerful forces and interests.
Not only has the state subjected it to ceaseless exploitation, it has also
fostered, at the peasant’s expense, the domiciliation of a certain part of the
capitalist system—stock exchange, bank, railways, trade... (Marx-Zazulich
Correspondence, February/March 1881)
Selecting Russia and the United States meant not only choosing to
study alternative paths to capitalist development, but also capitalism as a
heteronomous and complex set. It meant understanding the concrete as
“synthesis of multiple determinations, unity of the diverse”—precisely the
level of abstraction planned for Volume III of Das Kapital.
The intended use for the notebooks is very difficult to establish, maybe
simply a matter of speculation. However, Marx’s studies after the drafts of
1857 to 1867 followed a very clear agenda, revolving around the money
market, international trade, credit and crises. The notebooks from this
period compose an important register for economic history on their own
right. When one analyzes the four sections of the complete works of Marx
and Engels, their meaning becomes more than evident, with each section
involved in the making of the other three.
Competing Interests The authors have no conflicts of interest to declare that
are relevant to the content of this chapter.
References
Acheson, G.; Hickson, C.; Turner, J.; Ye, Q. Rule Britannia! British stock market
returns, 1825-1870. The Journal of Economic History, v. 69 (4): 1107-1137,
2009.
Bagehot, W. Lombard Street: A description of the money market. London: Henry
S. King & Co., 1873.
Block, K-D.; Hecker, R. Das “Book of the crisis of 1857” von Karl Marx. Beiträge
zur Marx-Engels-Forschung. Neue Folge 1991, pp. 89-102, 1991.
Chandler JR., A. The visible hand: The managerial revolution in American
business. London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1977.
Chandler JR., A. Scale and scope: the dynamics of industrial capitalism. Harvard:
Belknap, 1990.
128
J. A. DE PAULA ET AL.
Cottrell, P. L. Domestic finance, 1860-1914. In: Floud, R.; Johnson, P. (eds.).
The Cambridge history of modern Britain—Volume 2: Economic maturity,
1860-1939. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 253–279, 2004.
Fowler, W. The crisis of 1866: a financial essay. London: Longman, Green, and
Co., 1866.
Gassiot, J. P. Monetary panics and their remedy, with special reference to the panic
of 11th May, 1866. London: Effingham Wilson, 1867.
Grespan, J. O Negativo do Capital. São Paulo: Hucitec/Fapesp, 1998.
Hecker, R. Marx’ Motivation for the genesis of books of crisis 1857 . Manuscript
prepared for the International Conference “MEGA and Marxian discourses
on economic crisis”. Tokyo, Japan, 27 February—1 March 2015.
Heinrich, M. Engels’ edition of the third volume of capital and Marx’s original
manuscript. Science & Society, v. 60 (4), 1996–1997.
Hilferding, R. O capital financeiro. São Paulo: Nova Cultural, 1985 [1910].
Krätke, M. Kapitalismus und Krisen. Geschichte und Theorie der ziklischen Krisen
in Marx’ ökonomischen Studien 1857/58. In: Beiträge zur Marx-EngelsForschung. Neue Folge, 1998.
Krätke, M. Das Marx-Engels-Problem: Warum Engels das Marxsche “Kapital”
nicht verfälscht hat. In: Marx-Engels-Jahrbuch 2006. Berlin: Akademie Verlag,
2006.
Krätke, M. O Último Marx e O Capital. In: ALIAGA, L. et al. Marxismo: Teoria,
História e Política. São Paulo: Alameda Casa Editorial, 2011.
Marx, K. Œuvres : Économie, vol. II. Paris: Gallimard, 1968.
Marx, K.; Engels, F. Gesamtausgabe, vol. II/3.3. Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1978.
Marx, K.; Engels, F. Gesamtausgabe, vol. II/3.4. Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1979.
Marx, K.; Engels, F. Gesamtausgabe, vol. II/3.5. Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1980.
Marx, K.; Engels, F. Gesamtausgabe, vol. II/5. Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1983.
Marx, K.; Engels, F. Gesamtausgabe, vol. II/7 . Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1989.
Marx, K.; Engels, F. Gesamtausgabe, vol. II/11. Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 2008.
Marx, K.; Engels, F. Gesamtausgabe, vol. I/14. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2001.
Marx, K.; Engels, F. Gesamtausgabe, vol. III/13. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2002.
Marx, K.; Engels, F. Gesamtausgabe, vol. II/14. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2003.
Marx, K.; Engels, F. Gesamtausgabe, vol. II/15. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2004.
Marx, K.; Engels, F. Gesamtausgabe, vol. II/4.2. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2012.
Michie, R. The London stock exchange: A history. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1999.
Mitchell, B. R. The coming of railway and United Kingdom economic growth.
Journal of Economic History, v. 24 (3): 315–336, 1964.
Mori, K.; Tamaoka, A. Marx’s ‘Books of Crisis’ in his study on the economic crisis
of 1857 . Manuscript prepared for the International Conference “MEGA and
Marxian discourses on economic crisis”, 2015.
4
INVESTIGATING FINANCIAL INNOVATION AND STOCK …
129
Paula, J. A.; Cerqueira, H.; Cunha, A. M.; Suprinyak, C. E.; De Deus, L.
G.; Albuquerque, E. M. (2013). Notes on a crisis: the Exzerpthefte and
Marx’s method of research and composition. The Review of Radical Political
Economics, v. 45 (2): 162–182.
Pradella, L. Kolonialfrage und vorkapitalistische Gesellschaften: Zusätze und
Änderungen in der französischen Ausgabe des ersten Bandes des Kapital
(1872-1875). Marx-Engels-Jahrbuch 2010, pp. 82–100, 2010.
Preobrajensky, E. A Nova Econômica. Trad. port., Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra,
1979.
Rosdolsky, R. Gênese e Estrutura de “O Capital” de Karl Marx. Trad. port., Rio
de Janeiro: EDUERJ/Contraponto, 2001.
Shanin, T. El Marx Tardío y la Vía Rusa. Marx y la Periferia del Capitalismo.
Trad. esp., Madrid: Editorial Revolución, 1990.
Takenaga, S. Excerpt notes of Marx in the late 1860s and the economic crisis of
1866. Tokyo: Daito Bunka University (Manuscript), 2014.
Ville, S. Transport. In: Floud, R.; Johnson, P. (eds.). The Cambridge history
of modern Britain—Volume 1: Industrialization, 1700–1860. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, pp. 295-331, 2004.
Vollgraf, C. E.; Jungnickel, J. “Marx in Marx’s Worten?” Zu Engels’ Edition des
Hauptmanuskripts zum dritten Buch des ‘Kapitals’. In: MEGA-Studien 1994/
2. Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1995.
Xiaoping, W.; Heinrich, M. The interpretation of Capital: An interview with
Michael Heinrich. World Review of Political Economy, v. 2 (4): 708–728,
2011.
CHAPTER 5
A Tale of Two Crises: Research and Writing
of Capital Between 1857 and 1868
Leonardo Gomes de Deus
Introduction
“Marx’s work”, “Marx’s theory”, in short, Marxian thought hasn’t always
been finished; it has been built up over more than a century. Hobsbawm
(1979) pointed out exactly this fundamental point a long time ago: at
every moment of communism’s collapse in the last century, Marx’s work
has been rediscovered, its scope has grown and so has the criticism of its
principles. The years 1917, 1956, 1968 and 1989 mark precisely some
of the turning points in the fate of Marx’s work and its reception. At a
time when we are celebrating Marx’s bicentenary, the sesquicentenary of
Capital and the fiftieth anniversary of May 1968, Marx’s work remains
the subject of renewed interest. This article aims to investigate some
important elements regarding Marx’s studies of two economic crises that
he witnessed and studied closely, those of 1857 and 1866. Between the
two crises, Marx also wrote a large part of his economic work, so the
aim here is to assess how conjunctural studies were transformed by the
L. G. de Deus (B)
Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, Brazil
e-mail: leodedeus@cedeplar.ufmg.br
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature
Switzerland AG 2025
J. A. de Paula et al. (eds.), Marx for the 21st Century, Marx, Engels,
and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22011-1_5
131
132
L. G. DE DEUS
writing of economic theory and, on the other hand, how this writing
influenced the conjunctural study itself. In addition to this introduction and a conclusion, this article is divided into four sections, the first
dealing with the Marxian context in 1868, the second and third analyzing,
respectively, Marx’s readings of the two crises and the fourth proposing a
synthesis between one and the other intellectual task carried out by him
in the period.
The ideas developed here were presented in 2018 at the FAJE seminar
on the occasion of the bicentenary. I am grateful for the opportunity,
the comments made on that occasion by a distinguished audience and, in
particular, the suggestions made by my esteemed colleagues Édil Guedes,
Ramon Maia and Guilherme Oliveira. I am also grateful for the invaluable contributions of colleagues from the Contemporary Political Economy
Group at UFMG. I exonerate them, of course, from any responsibility.
Marx in 1868, Between Research and Writing
At the beginning of 1868, Marx was very optimistic. The revolutionary
movement was resuming its expansion phase and the first volume of
Capital had just been published. It was the conclusion of a decade—
from 1857 to 1867—that saw a series of ruptures, establishments and
consolidations. Suffice to say that Marx wrote two drafts for the 1867
book, the Grundrisse and the Manuscript of 1861–1863, which also deal
with various other themes. Between 1864 and 1865, he wrote the main
manuscript for the third volume. In the midst of writing this text, he
drafted the second volume for the first time, “Manuscript I” (MEGA2 ,
II.4.1, Marx and Engels 1988, pp. 138–381), in the midst of all the
activities of the nascent International. Then, in April 1868, in the midst
of illness and debts, he exchanged a few letters with Engels about plans
to finish Capital. In the letter of April 22, for example, there is a brief
discussion about the falling rate of profit and the value of money (Marx,
Briefe über Das Kapital 2010, p. 127). Faced with Engels’ reply on April
30, Marx dwells on a few questions about his work during those days:
However, it is certain that you are familiar with the method of developing
the rate of profit. So I’ll present the path in the most general terms. As
you know, in Book II, the process of circulation of capital will be presented
under the assumptions developed in Book I. Therefore, the new formal
determinations that arise from the circulation process, such as fixed and
5
A TALE OF TWO CRISES: RESEARCH AND WRITING …
133
circulating capital, rotation of capital, etc., will be presented. Finally, in
book I, we were content to assume that if, in the process of valorization, £100 becomes £110, it finds the elements on the market into which
it is converted again. However, we now investigate the conditions under
which these elements are found, and therefore the social intertwining of
the various capitals, parts of capital and income (= m) with each other.
Thus, in Book III, we come to the transformation of surplus value into
its various forms and separate component parts. I. Profit is for us, in the
first place, just another name or another category for surplus value. Just
as the form of the wage appears as payment for all labor, its unpaid part
necessarily appears not as coming from labor, but from capital, not from
its variable part, but from total capital. As a result, surplus value takes the
form of profit, with no quantitative difference between the two. One is
just the illusory manifestation of the other." (ibidem, p. 130)
After explaining the category of cost price, i.e., the fact that the capitalist
can sell his merchandize below value, but never below cost price, Marx
went on to explain to Engels the fundamental and contrasting difference
between the rate of surplus value and the rate of profit. According to him,
this is a marked distinction, unlike the one between profit and surplus
value. Because of this, he explains something that, for the next 150 years,
would remain obscure to a certain extent:
In view of what is developed in Book II, however, it follows that the rate
of profit cannot be computed on the basis of an arbitrary commodityproduct, for example, of a week, but that s/(c+v) means here the surplus
value produced during a year in relation to the capital advanced during
the year (as distinct from the capital that rotates during a year). s/(c+v)
is therefore the annual rate of profit. So, first of all, we investigated how
different rotations of capital (partly dependent on the proportion of the
circulating part in relation to the fixed part of capital, partly on the number
of rotations of circulating capital in a year, etc.) modify the rate of profit in
relation to the constant rate of surplus value. However, assuming rotation
and given s/(c+v) as the annual rate of profit, we investigate how it can
change, independently of changes in the rate of surplus value and even
in its mass. Since s, the mass of surplus value, = the rate of surplus value
multiplied by variable capital, then, if we call the rate of surplus value s’
and the rate of profit r’, r’ = s’v/(c+v). Here we have four variables, r’,
s’, v and c, with 3 of which we can work, always investigating the fourth
as unknown. This results in all cases about the movements of the rate of
profit, in so far as they are distinct from the movement of the rate and,
134
L. G. DE DEUS
to a certain extent, even of the mass of more value. This, of course, has
been unexplained by everyone until now. […] The laws thus discovered,
which are very important, for example, for understanding the influence of
the price of raw materials on the rate of profit, remain correct whatever the
subsequent division of surplus value between producers, etc. This can only
change their form of appearance. Moreover, they remain directly applicable
if m/(c+v) is treated as the relation of socially produced surplus value to
social. (ibidem, p. 132)
Many of the exegetical pitfalls of the last century, especially the fallacious “transformation problem”, would have been avoided if these clues
had been interpreted with some of the manuscripts produced in those
years. Unfortunately, the Manuscripts of 1867–1868 were only published
in 2012 and demonstrate two things: the formal difficulties of promoting
the synthesis between the categories of Volumes I and II, which was to
be carried out in Volume III; the consistency of Marx’s plans for writing
his economic work in the period dealt with here2 . It should only be said
that, in the aforementioned letter, Marx goes on for a few more pages to
spell out his entire plan, including the average rate of profit, the tendential law of falling profit, merchant capital, interest-bearing capital, the
transformation of supplementary profit into land rent and the end of the
work:
Finally, as these three forms of manifestation (wages, land rent, profit
(interest)) appear as the sources of income of the 3 classes, landlords,
capitalists and workers—the class struggle as a conclusion, in which the
movement and dissolution of all this shit is resolved. (ibidem, p. 135)
The broad outlines had been in place for some years and the publication of the first volume indicated a feasible path from a formal point of
view. The problems Marx faced in completing the two volumes stemmed
from the very moment capitalist society was going through. In fact, the
1860s presented notable events in the economic life of peoples, especially financial innovations, the accelerated internationalization of capital,
notably since the American Civil War, as well as various technological
innovations, all of which caught Marx’s attention. In other words, the
research, contrary to what our author believed at the beginning of the
decade, was not finished, the object itself was open to change. Vollgraf
put it this way:
5
A TALE OF TWO CRISES: RESEARCH AND WRITING …
135
How would Marx carry out a similar empirical exposition [to book I—
LGD] in books II and III? In book II, he could vividly present the
intense battles of opposing interests of buyers and sellers on the market,
or illustrate the turnover of capital with reference to railroads (in which
immense capital investments were involved and which could only be recovered slowly). Marx could have considered the advantages of the three forms
of depreciation, about which he questioned Engels for years, and could
have vividly described the struggle of the railroad companies over transportation rates and market share. Such discussions are found in two drafts
for Book II only in outline, although they are covered in Marx’s readings
and in his notebooks. (Vollgraf 2018, p. 72)
The research itself was far from complete. The correct balance between
empiricism and theory, achieved in the first volume, had not yet been
achieved for the following parts, and in fact, never would be. In addition,
Vollgraf also points out another crucial problem of those years: Marx’s
intended method of exposition would suffer several repairs due to his
forays into the field of mathematics (ibid., p. 74). The level of abstraction he intended to give his work implied the development of a method
of exposition compatible with the “general laws of motion”, exactly as
described in the letter of 1868 and as outlined in the manuscripts of that
year. Precisely because of the problems arising from the reciprocal action
of various variables in the tendencies of movement, a quantitative apparatus would be needed that was not available to any economist at the
end of the nineteenth century. This clearly appears in the aforementioned
Manuscripts of 1867–1868 (MEGA2 II.4.3, Marx and Engels 2012b), as
well as in the mathematical manuscripts of Marx’s last decade (MEGA2
II.14, Marx and Engels 2003).
Be that as it may, once the first edition of Volume I had been published,
Marx’s priority task in 1868 was to write the various manuscripts for
Volumes II and III. At the same time as writing the various manuscripts
for Volumes II and III, he set about studying the crisis of 1866, which
he had not been able to study properly because of his work in the International and, above all, thanks to his immersion in the final draft of the
1867 book. Taken by great surprise, in 1868 he received an invitation
from Nikolai Danielson to translate his book into Russian. Danielson
had even offered to send him the manuscripts he was working on, so
that the remaining books could be released simultaneously in the original
language and in Russian. Marx replied on 7 October 1868: “You must
not wait for the second volume, the publication of which may be delayed
136
L. G. DE DEUS
for another six months. I cannot finish it until certain official surveys,
begun last year (and in 1866), are completed or published. Volume I,
by the way, is a finished whole” (MEW , v. 32, p. 563). The first task,
therefore, was to investigate yet another economic crisis, in other words,
Marx continued to treat crises as a revolutionary opportunity, but also
as a special moment in the functioning of the capitalist economy. This
material has been studied, although it has never been published. On the
other hand, it was only in 2017 that Marx’s notes on the crisis of 1857
were made public (MEGA2 IV.14, Marx and Engels 2017). As mentioned
above, between one crisis and another, the general plan and a large part
of the manuscripts for Volumes I and III were drafted. Two things should
be investigated here: whether the Marxian perspective on crises changed
between 1857 and 1868 and whether this perspective can be read in the
light of Volume III.
The “Double Crisis” Hypothesis (1857)
Marx’s conjunctural studies underwent a major evolution after his move
to London. He began to rely on empirical data of the most varied nature.
His notes in The Economist gradually improved his perspective on crisis
and the cycle. At the same time, he never stopped studying all the theoretical literature available on the period. When the crisis of 1857 broke
out, therefore, he was better prepared to study it than in its continental
phase. He had always done so from the perspective that an economic crisis
would accelerate the revolutionary movement and bring about the overthrow of capitalism. This view would appear, in a translucent way, in the
Grundrisse, written in the same period, that is, the contradiction between
forms of exchange and productive forces would lead capitalism to its end.
The crisis of 1857 seemed to be a definitive sign of this trajectory.
This crisis, in fact, was considered to be the most severe crisis faced by
England or any other country until then. This is the opinion, for example,
of David Morier Evans, in his 1859 book on the crisis (p. 46). For this
author, the difference between the crisis of 1857– 58 and other panics of
the first half of the century was due to its scope and accelerated expansion.
The new crisis would have been deeper because it would have erupted at
the heart of more acute speculation, namely speculation in railroad paper,
a new element at the time. The causes of the crisis, although complex,
are linked to elements of economic expansion toward the American West:
immigration, with the expectation of railroad expansion, speculation in
5
A TALE OF TWO CRISES: RESEARCH AND WRITING …
137
land and, finally, speculation in securities. The immediate cause was the
bankruptcy of several institutions that borrowed money to speculate in
railroad bonds and mortgages. Railroad stock prices and the price of land
in the American Midwest fell dramatically from the second half of 1857,
leading to the successive bankruptcies of several banks, until it reached
England itself (cf. Calomiris; Schweikar 1991, p. 811). According to
Evans, three factors made the crisis even more serious: the unprecedented
expansion of foreign trade, the expansion of the supply of precious metals
and the “monstrous” development of the banking system (ibid., p. 32).
Just as it was dramatic and acute, the recovery also began quickly and
unexpectedly, as early as January 1858.
With 192 pages, Marx’s notes comprise three notebooks, written
between November 1857 and February 1858, with most of the references coming from the Economist . The first notebook, “1857—France”,
has forty pages and deals with that country, possibly because of Marx’s
journalistic activities. It covers the attempts by the imperial government
and the Bank of France to save railroad companies with various links to
American railroads. The main solution found by the French government
to solve the liquidity problem, in the face of high interest rates (to stem
the drain of gold abroad), was to guarantee the circulation of bank paper
instead of gold itself (MEGA2 IV.14, p. 14). From November onwards,
the crisis hit a number of businesses in France, but contrary to expectations, the crisis did not lead to widespread bankruptcies, only to the
contraction of commerce and industry. The big problem was the postponement of several payments, but this didn’t cause the expected panic
in the French financial market. During the crisis, the Bank of France operated like a modern central bank, guaranteeing liquidity and preserving the
balance of payments, even at the cost of increasing the indebtedness of
companies and the government itself. Thus, unlike London, Hamburg,
Vienna, Berlin, etc., in France, only the petty traders ended up bankrupt
(MEGA2 IV.14, Marx and Engels 2017, p. 14, 27). All these facts are
explicit in the Bank of France’s November balance sheet, with a decrease
in gold-backed securities, an increase in bank notes, advances on the
collection of loans, funds, and deferred liquidation of railroad securities. The circulation of paper money increased dramatically, while the
discounting of banknotes fell dramatically (MEGA2 IV.14, p. 31 ff.). The
final part of the first notebook ends with notes on imports (falling in
1857), government revenue (increasing throughout the year, although
the public accounts also took into account taxes “receivable”) and, finally,
138
L. G. DE DEUS
the resumption of railroad activity. From January 1858 onwards, companies’ indebtedness returned to normal and the Bank of France was able
to resume cutting interest rates, after the worst increase it had ever
experienced.
With 74 pages, the second booklet started on 12 December 1857 and
was entitled “Book of the Crisis of 1857”, covering primarily the English
economy. Unlike France, the number of bankruptcies in England was
staggering and the measures taken came later. In the end, the French
measures involved draining gold from the Bank of England to France.
The Bank Charter Act of 1844 was in force, which meant that the Bank
of England had to seek a fixed proportion of gold on its balance sheet, i.e.,
there was a monetary restriction intrinsic to the Bank’s practices which, in
times of crisis, meant not only raising interest rates but also withdrawing
paper money from circulation. It was therefore a pro-cyclical monetary
policy, which made panics and crises even more serious. Both in 1857
and nine years later, the law was suspended so that market players could
be rescued. In view of this, the second booklet lists the various bankruptcies in England, as well as looking at the balance sheet of the Bank of
England.
The law of 1844 represented a very strong monetary contraction and,
at the same time, with the measures on the other side of the English
Channel, an accelerated drain of gold, to such an extent that the law was
suspended in November. Marx quotes the Economist of November 14th;
The currency crisis reached its climax this week. Throughout the beginning
of the week, the feeling of mistrust continued to grow. The demand for
money from the Bank of England was unprecedented; yet, despite all the
immense sums of money obtained from that establishment, the difficulty
of obtaining accommodation on the open market became more decisive
than ever. On Thursday morning, there was a danger that commercial
business would come to a standstill. At around half past three, the Bank
of England officially notified the suspension of the Bank Act of 1844. The
large discount houses and other firms were allowed to obtain a large supply
of money from the Bank of England, and immediately began a great liberal
accommodation. On Friday, though still high, they were well below those
of the previous day. (MEGA2 IV.14, p. 84)
Faced with this situation, in the days that followed, there was a huge
expansion of private notes, from the Bank of England and other banks,
and a decrease in the gold reserve. In five weeks, there was about a 5%
5
A TALE OF TWO CRISES: RESEARCH AND WRITING …
139
increase in paper money in circulation, a decrease of more than 40% in
gold reserves, about a 50% increase in deposits and an expansion of almost
50% in private bonds. The interest rate went from 6% on October 10th
to 10% in November. The monetary pressure would continue over the
following weeks, although gradually the Bank of England’s balance sheet
began to improve. By January 1858, the crisis seemed to be surmountable. One of the explanations for the panic and the level of the fall in the
previous months was already apparent. Marx quotes from the Economist
on January 23rd:
The explanation of the recent crisis comes down to this in particular—that
in this country, and in most of the commercial communities to which it
is attached, during the last five or six years, a large circle of firms had
gradually grown up which carried on an enormous trade in exportables
and importables, not by means of their own capital, but by means of capital
raised by the systematic issue and discounting of bills of exchange; that, after
several narrow escapes from collapse since the summer of 1855, the crash
finally came in its most devastating form, with the simultaneous collapse
(and where did this simultaneity come from?) of several major centers on
which the coherence of the system depended; and that, in fact, when all
the mysteries of issue and new issue, discount and rediscount disappeared,
it became perfectly clear that the masses of real capital actually handled
by those adventurers were obtained by them in the form of discounts and
advances, and the high interest reserves, were obtained from reservoirs of
deposits held by firms like the Western Bank of Scotland, and from reservoirs
of capital at the command of industrialists, brokers and distributors, from
whom the adventurers obtained credit and for whom, of course, there was
only as much satisfaction as was covered by an infinitesimal dividend. It
will be a great misfortune if any part of the public is led to believe that it
is possible to devise and conduct any system of mere paper credit, which will
be equal for years to creating and conducting an immense trade, especially
foreign trade. Credit cannot make something out of nothing. For a large
part of trade, there has to be a money supply from somewhere. (MEGA2
IV.14, p. 105, Marx’s emphasis, as well as the brackets)
A very common diagnosis in those days was the moral view of crises.
England was undergoing changes to its banking system and the view of
usury and speculation dated back to the crisis of 1720. This moral view
of the crisis remained alive and would resurface from then on with every
panic until this century. Even though the construction of his economic
work was still in its infancy, this perspective was, of course, absolutely
140
L. G. DE DEUS
foreign to the Marxian perspective. The nature of the process, Marx
believed as early as 1857, was more complex than the moral intentions
of the agents. In fact, the plan outlined in the second notebook of 1857
seems to have a clear intention, the claim to capture all the economic
phenomena, made clear at the moment of the crisis breaking. Thus, Marx
starts with the most apparent phenomena, the money market (MEGA2
IV.14, pp. 90 ff.), which comprises an “overview”, the “foreign exchange
market”, the “securities market”, to finally analyze the “product market”
(raw materials) and the “industrial market”. For Marx, the drastic falls in
imports and exports seen in 1857 could not have been the result of speculation and immoral actions by agents. They were, moreover, the point
of connection between the various markets of the capitalist world of the
time, which is why, in the following pages of the manuscript, Marx investigates the effects of the crisis in Hamburg and Vienna, affected after
the English panic, with similar fluctuations in interest rates and monetary
expansions (MEGA2 IV.14, pp. 111 and ss.). In this global network, trade
between the United States and England merited Marx’s detailed attention. Between November 1856 and November 1857, English exports fell
by 72%. Analysts at the time continued to blame moral issues and, above
all, to denounce a kind of competition between various parts of the globe
(MEGA2 IV.14, p. 155). In any case, with the crisis, it became clear to
the British that their trade deficit could not be sustained, a view that was
rather limited given the huge export of capital by England itself.
The second part of the second section continues with a new round of
notes with the same plan. As of December, the recovery seemed feasible
to the market itself (MEGA2 IV.14, p. 207). The overthrow of capitalism
didn’t go according to plan, it didn’t even manage to make the proletariat’s actions more vivid in the period, since sporadic work had become
scarcer and the prospects looked disastrous. On the other hand, by the
end of 1857, confidence was complete, to the point where the Bank of
England reduced the interest rate (MEGA2 IV.14, p. 208). On the other
hand, the market for products (raw materials) seemed to be recovering
rapidly, with price rises all over the world. Marx’s analysis in this regard is
detailed, following the evolution of various products: cotton, silk, wool,
hemp, flax, metals, coal, hides, leather, sugar, coffee, cocoa, indigo, drugs,
corn and dyes. Marx quotes almost verbatim the following note from the
Economist of 26 December 1857:
5
A TALE OF TWO CRISES: RESEARCH AND WRITING …
141
Remarkable mildness of the season: 2 or 3 nights of frost, on each occasion
extremely reduced. (...) Prices of all kinds of grain have fallen; so have
prices of wool; cattle and sheep are also considerably cheaper than of late.
The biggest drop has been in pigs, which in some districts are not worth half
of what they were last June. (MEGA2 IV.14, p. 250)
The second section concludes with a look at the “industrial market”.
The constant decline in prices led to layoffs, bankruptcies and cancellations of orders for raw materials. On 12 December 1857, Marx quotes
The Times on the Manchester textile industry: “Few sales were made this
morning, and all the business done this week has fallen below the sales
of any previous week during the present crisis. Manufacturers say they
cannot remember a more complete stagnation of trade, for, although
the average output of the district does not exceed half the quantity
produced, stocks are rapidly accumulating” (MEGA2 IV.14, p. 254). In
the following pages of the notebook, Marx takes several similar notes,
i.e., the industrial market was the last to fall and the one that fell most
drastically, when the recovery of the capital market was already being
announced. On December 14, The Times again describes the situation
in Manchester:
While the monetary pressure is diminishing in London, it is increasing
in this district. (...) They [businessmen—LGD] are accumulating stocks,
although their production is enormously reduced; and therefore, as well as
by reason of the loss from the fall in prices, they in turn feel the need of
money more than ever. (MEGA2 IV.14, p. 256; similar news is noted on
page 263, recovery in the capital market and stagnation in industry and
commerce)
The effects on employment were naturally felt. Meetings of unemployed workers took place with evidence of rapid impoverishment and
joblessness. The Sheffield Independent of December 26 showed that wages
were said to have fallen by around a third compared to 1856. Some firms
even paid half the wage, while others paid only a quarter (MEGA2 IV.14,
p. 258). Only at the end of the year, on the other hand, did confidence
seem to return and the general impression at the turn of the year was
that the worst was over (MEGA2 IV.14, p. 273). The second section,
however, ends with news of persistent unemployment.
With 81 pages, the third booklet was entitled “The Book of the
Commercial Crisis”. It’s interesting to note how often Marx still used the
142
L. G. DE DEUS
term “commercial crisis” to refer to any economic crisis. The manuscript
was started in January 1858 and follows the same plan as the second
one, i.e., it starts with the capital market and goes on to the various
product markets. The last notes include the Brazilian coffee market, which
boomed between 1854 and 1856 and then fell by more than 10% during
the crisis (MEGA2 IV.14, p. 500). This notebook, unlike the two previous
ones, describes exactly the recovery of the various markets, especially the
money market. In January 1858, private securities held by the Bank of
England began to fall, as did interest rates (MEGA2 IV.14, pp. 296 to
310). The real sector of the economy, raw materials and industry itself
was the slowest to recover, with prices very low in January 1858 and the
sector’s debts still very high. As a result, the notes held by banks, which
had been responsible for their tightening a few months earlier, continued
to weigh on their liabilities at the start of the year. The view was still that
they came from speculation, from “adventurers” (MEGA2 IV.14, p. 311).
Be that as it may, the credit market began to show signs of recovery
in the period. The first week of January, in fact, with the publication
of a balance sheet by the Bank of England, showed “a remarkable year
of unprecedented prosperity ahead” (MEGA2 IV.14, p. 313). With the
monetary pressure gone, banks were eager to lend at lower interest rates.
By January 15, optimism was already very high, to the point where the
Economist complained that the speculators were already back (MEGA2
IV.14, p. 319). On the other hand, in the following weeks, bankruptcies
continued, especially among industries (MEGA2 IV.14, p. 321). Just as
the crisis erupted in the financial market, the recovery also began there,
infecting the real economy only with some time difference. Once again,
in the third notebook, Marx follows all the commodity markets, each of
which, at some point in January or February, manifested the recovery of
the economy. The third notebook, on the trade crisis, therefore ended
up detailing the entire process of crisis and recovery in countless markets.
Around ten percent of its content is made up of price evolution tables for
various primary products. What was supposed to be a crash turned out to
be an accelerated cycle of decline and recovery. Almost the entire booklet
covers just a few weeks, an analysis of the conjuncture that is profound in
its detail and scope. Most of the markets analyzed by Marx have their fluctuations described from December to the end of January. Naturally, when
the primary goods markets begin to recover, they are a symptom of the
industrial recovery. The low prices eventually attracted more buyers, both
at home and abroad (MEGA2 IV.14, p. 412). At one point, Marx makes
5
A TALE OF TWO CRISES: RESEARCH AND WRITING …
143
the following note, from an unknown source, probably the Manchester
Guardian:
Many think that because there is an abundance of unemployed capital,
the purchase of manufactured goods and other commodities is certainly
stimulated immediately and considerably. They forget that it is the desire
for confidence which causes money to increase in innumerable stagnant
industries; that many are making deposits with their bankers, in order
to be prepared for losses or demands which they know to be certain or
possible; and that there are many parties to the bonds whose names would
not be accepted in contracts, although they have not been dishonored.
In such cases, recovery from stagnation is made possible inevitably slowly
and contained, and subject to pauses and setbacks. To hasten the natural
progress of recovery is effectively to hinder it, as any attempt manifestly
reveals. It will probably be discovered that abandoning the ’short term’
now taking place is premature. (MEGA2 IV.14, p. 419)
The first step in industrial recovery, therefore, is “speculation” itself,
i.e., various acquisitions and purchases are made thanks precisely to the
state of price contraction. “Idle capital”, therefore, is the great business
opportunity that paves the way for recovery, although it cannot yet be
confused with prosperity itself. The money that expanded in the form of
unbacked bank notes, thanks to the suspension of the banking law, meant
that idle capital changed hands, to the detriment of entire productive
sectors. Low prices meant losses for practically all businesses, industry and
primary goods, with no benefit for consumers in the short term. These
consumers were ultimately the largely unemployed proletarians. Those
who kept their jobs had their wages greatly reduced (MEGA2 IV.14,
p. 448). Industrial unemployment rates were enormous in some sectors.
Unemployment in the Manchester textile industry reached 25% (MEGA2
IV.14, p. 449). Marx takes several notes on involuntary unemployment,
impoverishment, hunger and misery; strikes and rebellions were widely
described in the press in the first weeks of January 1858. After taking
these notes, Marx’s third notebook takes on a more irregular form, with
notes on various countries. Just as the crisis was gradually overcome, Marx
ended his work. He abandoned the Grundrisse to restart writing and put
aside his conjunctural study, an immense record even by the standards
of the contemporary financial market. In 1858, he resumed his efforts
to produce his critique of political economy, always promising more than
was humanly possible, as Vollgraf (2018) has shown. The following years
144
L. G. DE DEUS
would see great achievements and, at the same time, constant postponements. In any case, the economic analysis of 1857 left its mark on his
subsequent career.
In this respect, it is worth assessing how Marx was theoretically
prepared for the task and the next steps in his studies on crises. According
to Mori (2018), in 1857, Marx intended to develop a theory of crises that
distanced himself from a purely financial view of the phenomenon, the
dominant perspective at the time of the panic of 1847 (Mori 2018, p. 2).
The financial market would only be the starting point, but there would be
a crisis of overproduction in the industry and, on the other hand, underproduction in the raw materials department. For Mori, Marx’s research
into the crisis of 1857 would have followed in the footsteps of the book A
History of Prices, by Thomas Tooke and William Newmarch, published in
February 1857. The Marxian excerpts from this book have not yet been
published in the MEGA collection2 . Mori states:
[...] there are many parallels between Marx’s analysis of the crisis in the
1850s and the last two volumes of Tooke and Newmarch, in fact both
sharing the same view of the economic developments that led to the crisis
of 1857, as formulated by Marx as a ’double crisis’. The History of Prices
described—based on the reports of the chief inspector of factories and
workshops, Leonard Horner—details of over-investment in the boom years
of 1852 and 1853, which subsequently resulted in rising raw material costs
and falling prices for cotton manufacturers’ products. (p. 4)
The editor of the volume under discussion clarifies, therefore, that
Marx, in 1857, did not abandon his conception of the “commercial
crisis”, but considered it an essential part of the outbreak of the crisis
in the strict sense: the sequence of monetary pressures manifesting themselves in the financial market. Faced with this situation, two questions
arise: whether the Marxian perspective would be transformed ten years
later, when analyzing the crisis of 1866, having already produced enough
elements of his own theory; secondly, whether a consistent perspective
was produced for this analysis.
5
A TALE OF TWO CRISES: RESEARCH AND WRITING …
145
The Theory Between the Crises (1865)
and the New Round of Research (1868)
As has been said, between 1864 and 1865, Marx wrote the main
manuscript for the third book, as well as the first manuscript for the
second book, not to mention the essential Manuscript of 1861–1863 and,
from 1864 onwards, the intense work in the International. When the first
book of Capital was published, just as he had done in 1857–58, Marx
wrote three notebooks on the crisis of 1866, as well as taking notes in
other notebooks on related topics during those years of intense research.
In order to analyze the two issues, let’s take the opposite route, that
is, let’s look first at the notes from 1868. The exposition here follows
research work on material not yet published in MEGA2 , the results of
which we have published elsewhere (Paula et al. 2013; De Deus et al.
2016).
Notebooks B108, B109 and B113 total just over five hundred handwritten pages and will be published in Volume IV.19 of MEGA2 . Notebook B108 has the following structure: (1) Bank of England and money
market; (2) investments in the stock market and shares; (3) companies;
(4) commerce and (5) railroads. This notebook was based, in particular,
on The Money Market Review, a very influential weekly newspaper in the
1860s.
Notebook B109, on the other hand, presents more notes taken from
the Economist , and has the following structure: (1) Bank of England and
the Banking Act of 1844; (2) panic theory; (3) securities and panic; (4)
banking companies and other joint-stock companies; (5) railroads; (6)
plethora of money; (7) Limited Liability Act of 1862. Finally, notebook
B113 presents notes on the year 1868 itself, again. In 2013, we published
a transcription of the index made by Marx himself for this notebook
(Paula et al., p. 172). The index that Marx made for his notes is divided
primarily into countries and the United Kingdom is, of course, the center
of his concerns. It is important to emphasize that Marx’s studies, on
this occasion, take on an unprecedented complexity. The hasty conclusion
would be that having already worked theoretically on a number of financial market issues, he would have different conditions to those of 1857 to
address the subject. However, another fundamental element was the series
of mutations that the object of research itself underwent. In the midst of
the American Civil War, England experienced significant changes to its
146
L. G. DE DEUS
legal system from 1860 onwards, in order to keep up with the accelerated expansion of international capital. Unlike the crisis of 1857, in 1866
the epicenter of the panic was the English financial market itself. In May
1866, the bank Overend, Gurney & Co. went bankrupt. Although it had
been a giant in the bill discounting sector in the first half of the nineteenth century, from 1850 onwards it found itself immersed in a series
of dubious ventures. To avoid bankruptcy, in 1865, the bank became a
limited liability company, an innovation brought about by the 1862 law,
namely the liability of partners only up to the amount of the subscribed
capital. Based on its reputation, the bank obtained a large subscription a
year before it went bankrupt. In 1866, with a series of breakdowns in the
railroad sector, the bank was itself driven into bankruptcy. The following
months saw a series of bankruptcies, and again the Banking Act of 1844
was suspended. The crisis of 1866 was therefore a symptom of the separation between ownership of capital and its management, with limited
liability companies acquiring greater leverage.
This picture therefore demonstrates a twofold change in the Marxian
perspective: on the one hand, the object underwent some important
changes and, on the other hand, the author was better prepared from a
scientific point of view, having written the series of manuscripts mentioned
above. The articulation between the various instances only became minimally clear with the writing of the various drafts of Capital. The
hypothesis developed by Mori (2018) is therefore worth considering:
when we look at the Marxian thematization of crises in the Grundrisse
and the 1857/58 notebooks, we can see the link between the expansion
of fixed capital (and the growing investments in science), in contradiction with the production of value and surplus value in society. In
fact, in 1857, the prospect of the overthrow of capitalism can be seen.
After 1863, the plan for the critique of political economy underwent
considerable transformations, and, from then on, the approach to crises
acquired not a double and rather Ricardian character, but a perspective
with several concentric elements, a multidimensional approach. Callinicos
(2014) shows precisely how, from the Manuscript of 1861–1863 onwards,
crises acquire this multidimensional character in Marx, which cuts across
the phenomena of accumulation (linked to the organic composition of
capital), reproduction and finally the tendency of the system itself, i.e.,
the Marxian approach is present at various levels of abstraction in his
economic work, all of them combined. He says:
5
A TALE OF TWO CRISES: RESEARCH AND WRITING …
147
Nothing in the above suggests that Capital contains anything like a
complete theory of crises. The unfinished nature of the book is particularly
evident in book III, above all in part 5. However, it seems undeniable that,
at successive levels of determination, the conception of capitalist crises is
unfolded throughout the book. This involves: (i) the formal possibility of
crises emerging from the separation between buying and selling, inherent
in the circulation of commodities, and from the function of money as a
means of payment; (ii) the interaction between the economic cycle and
fluctuations in the industrial reserve army and the rate of wages; (iii)
the role of the rotation of fixed capital in regulating the duration of the
economic cycle; (iv) the possibility of disruption inherent in the conditions
of exchange between the two main departments of production required
for reproduction; (v) the interaction between the tendency for the rate
of profit to fall and its opposing factors; and (vi) the role of the bubble
cycle and panics in the financial markets, in both cases, during booms, to
accelerate the process of accumulation and, during crises, to carry out the
destruction of capital required to restore the rate of profit to a level that
allows for subsequent expansion. (2014, p. 282)
In 1868, although Marx was far from producing the densest
manuscripts for the second volume, as mentioned above, he already had a
clear articulation between the various levels of analysis of the capitalist
economy and, consequently, of the various instances of the economic
crisis. The role of the third volume, in this case the Manuscript of 1864–
1865, in this trajectory is essential. In fact, its planned title would be
“forms of the complete process”, i.e., the manifestation of the economic
crisis would be based precisely on the action of the downward trend in
profitability and its contradictory interaction with opposing factors and,
above all, on the most apparent form of the phenomenon, namely the
financial market (from a theoretical point of view, of course, the approach
to the crisis presupposes the prior thematization of price and average
profit). The retroactive effects of the crisis, however, would clearly manifest themselves in the form of unemployment and the physical destruction
of capital and commodities. It is worth pointing out, then, how Marx
thought about the crisis and its consequences at the most complex level
of capitalist society, a meditation that underpinned his readings of the
crisis of 1866 and, on the other hand, was absent ten years earlier.
The fifth chapter of the Manuscript of 1864–1865 (which would
become the fifth section of the third volume) deals with “interest-bearing
148
L. G. DE DEUS
capital”, the supreme capitalist fetish, making money out of money: DD’. After the whole trajectory that began with the commodity, we arrive
at credit capital in its various forms, the conclusion of the process of
social reification, which reaches capital itself, in the financial market, transformed into a commodity subject to demand and supply, that is, with
a price, interest. This entire section of the manuscript aims to address
two points that are not always distinct in political economy and even in
the political life of the time: the relationship between money and credit
and, secondly, between credit and capitalist accumulation. Part of the
fifth chapter is rightly subtitled “The confusion”, especially when Marx
analyzes the discussions in the English parliament about the crisis of
1857 (MEGA2 II.4.2, p. 597 ff.). The Marxian approach to crisis and
economic dynamics in this part of the manuscript deserves to be read
in conjunction with the section on the law of the tendency of the rate
of profit to fall, something that is not always considered. Authors such
as Heinrich (1999, p. 330 ff.) have criticized the place of the law in
the architecture of Capital, indicating that the thematization of crises
would only be feasible precisely in the fifth section of the third volume
(third chapter of the manuscript). Heinrich seeks to demonstrate how
Marx’s deduction for the law is insufficient, the variables involved in the
rate of profit—surplus value, total capital or, in the transformed form,
rate of surplus value and organic composition—do not actually produce a
tendency, but rather ambiguous and indeterminate effects, whatever the
time frame considered. Says Heinrich:
No matter with which argumentative variant we approach a determination
of the movement of the rate of profit, we are always faced with the same
problem. We have two variable quantities (rate of surplus value and organic
composition, mass of surplus value and size of capital, increase and decrease
of the elements of constant capital), of which one is known as the direction
of the long-term movement.3 However, for the direction of movement of
the rate of profit, the proportion of the movement of these two quantities
emerges, which changes faster in relation to the first and thus dominates
events. However, such a comparison, which only refers to the direction of
movement of the quantities to be compared, cannot be made with qualitative information at all. Therefore, the general demonstration sought by
Marx that the rate of profit has an inevitable tendency to fall due to the
capitalist development of the productive forces is not absolutely possible.
(1999, p. 337)
5
A TALE OF TWO CRISES: RESEARCH AND WRITING …
149
In the years that followed, Heinrich’s proposition became one of the
central objects of the polemics surrounding Marx’s work. The Marxian
method of exposition, as well as the mathematical methods available at the
time, were insufficient and the very nature of the law remained unclear.
In 2012, for example, Kliman tried to present a new methodology to
answer the questions posed here, and many others have been carried out.
What interests us here, however, is Marx’s articulation of the contradictory effects of the law with the economic crisis, that is, the perspective
that financial crises in general are linked to the very functioning of capitalism, a dynamic and open system that overcomes the contradictions it
sets itself. The analysis of the Marxian text is made difficult in this respect
by Engels’ editing of the section on the tendential law: “In his important
introduction to the English translation of the 1864–1865 Manuscript,
Fred Moseley noted two important points. Firstly, the Engelsian edition
made Marx’s text seem more organized than it actually was […]” (p. 19).
Secondly, in some passages of the edition, Engels modified words to
further the theories. In his important introduction to the English translation of the 1864–1865 manuscript, Fred Moseley (2015) noted two
important points. Firstly, the Engelsian edition made Marx’s text seem
more organized than it actually overthrew in the Second International
(p. 20). Most important for the point here, however, is the observation that what would become Chapter 15 of the third volume would,
according to Moseley, present a consistent perspective on the tendency
for the rate of profit to fall and its link to economic crises. He says:
Section 1 [of the text converted by Engels into chapter 15—LGD] highlights three main points: the relative proportions of industrial profit,
interest and rent may have been different from the general rate of profit;
a decrease in the rate of profit may be accompanied by an increase in the
rate of profit; and the decline in the rate of profit is not due to reduced
exploitation, but to the decline in the number of workers employed. The
main point of section 2 is that the development of labor productivity in
capitalism has two main effects—an increase in overwork per worker and
a decrease in the number of workers employed—and these two effects,
in turn, have opposite effects on the rate of profit. Section 3 presents
an outline of a pioneering theory of the capitalist cycle of expansioncontraction, which follows directly from Marx’s theory of the fall in the
rate of profit. If capitalist crises are caused by the falling rate of profit,
then recovery from crises requires, first and foremost, a restoration of the
rate of profit to its previous higher levels. Furthermore, if the underlying
150
L. G. DE DEUS
cause of a falling rate of profit is an increase in the organic composition
of capital (the ratio of constant capital to variable capital), then restoring
the rate of profit requires a reduction in the value of the organic composition of capital, which is typically accomplished during capitalist depressions
by the devaluation of capital that results from the widespread collapse
of capitalist enterprises. Therefore, Marx’s theory not only predicts recurrent capitalist crises, but also predicts that the precondition for recovery
from crises is the devaluation of capital and widespread bankruptcies. The
outline of a theory of capitalist cycles in this section is certainly far from
a complete theory, but it is far ahead of other theories at any time (which
barely acknowledge capitalism’s tendency to crises), and I think it remains
today a uniquely useful framework for analyzing the expansion-contraction
cycles of capitalism. (p. 21, emphasis added)
We couldn’t agree more. The interaction between the trend and
its counter-arresting circumstances generates an overabundance of
commodities and capital (“capital glut”) and, therefore, an economic
crisis. As early as 1865, Marx’s work managed to capture capitalism’s
ability to overcome its barriers, something reproduced in his approach to
capitalist accumulation in the first book. Moseley (2015, p. 22) also draws
attention to a sentence by Marx in the manuscript at this point: “a detailed
investigation of this belongs to the investigation of the apparent movement of capital, where interest-bearing capital etc. credit etc. are examined
in more detail” (MEGA2 II.4.2, Marx and Engels 2012a, p. 325). The
editors of MEGA believe that this warning stems from the fact that, with
the change of plans in 1863–1864, Marx abandoned the study of the
“apparent movement”, in other words, he postponed empirical research
to another occasion, while the three theoretical books of Capital were
confined, in the case of credit and interest, to what they related to industrial capital itself (MEGA2 II.4.2, Marx and Engels 2012a, p. 1255).
However, the writing of the Manuscript of 1864–1865, in its fifth chapter,
took on proportions that escaped this design and which ended up reinforcing Moseley’s thesis that there is a link, however tenuous, between the
law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall and its apparent movement,
namely the cycle of contraction–expansion, which could only manifest
itself in the financial market, an apparent form of capital that already has
an average rate of profit, with a tendency to fall and with a tendency to
overcome, via crisis, its own contradictions. Let’s see how this perspective
is developed by Marx in the fifth chapter of his manuscript.5
5
A TALE OF TWO CRISES: RESEARCH AND WRITING …
151
The Expansion–Contraction Cycle
The perspective outlined above starts from the realization that the various
phenomenal forms of capital (mercantile, commercial, monetary) do not
prevent the elaboration of a theory of the economic cycle. The necessary
analytical steps are the theoretical construction of an average rate of profit
and the determination of its downward trend. The manifestation of both
phenomena combined takes place in what is now known as the financial
market, something that is in line with the empirical manifestation of the
crises of yesterday and today. This is the thrust of the Marxian approach in
the Manuscript of 1864–1865, the fruit of the interpretation of the crisis
of 1857 and the apparatus for the analysis of the crisis that would occur
in the following years.
Interest-bearing capital, the subject of the fifth chapter of the
Manuscript of 1865–1865, is capital that acts as if it were a commodity,
in other words, it has supply and demand and a price, the interest itself.
For Marx, the credit market expands endogenously, it is elastic in relation
to times of material prosperity and the expansion of production. In times
of economic acceleration, money has increased its speed of circulation in
order to remunerate a greater profitability (surplus value) of the various
capitals, in other words, of society’s global capital, “a period of most elastic
and easy credit ” (MEGA2 II/ 4.2, p. 509). It is easy to see here the
opposite pole that Marx places himself at in relation to exogenous theories of credit and money. The process of accelerated reproduction implies
an acceleration in the circulation of money for the settlement of transactions and payments between capitalists, as well as for the remuneration of
the expanding variable capital, i.e., the demand for capital increases and
money has to be able to satisfy both these payments and the very circulation of commodities (means of exchange), with the result that the supply
of credit expands and interest falls.
The period of economic contraction, on the other hand, implies a
reduction in the amount of money as a means of circulation and payment,
due to the fall in prices, wages and the number of transactions. At this
time, credit decreases and interest rates behave in a peculiar way. Marx
says:
If we consider the cycles in which modern industry moves—a state of tranquility, growing excitement, prosperity, overproduction, crisis, stagnation,
tranquility, etc.—(...) we find that, generally, low interest rates correspond
152
L. G. DE DEUS
to periods of prosperity or extraordinary profits, rising interest is the border
between prosperity and its reverse, but maximum interest to the point of
extreme usury corresponds to crisis." (MEGA2 II.4.2, Marx and Engels
2012a, p. 433)
The crisis requires “monetary accommodation”: the supply of capital as
such decreases, but not the demand for credit. As a result, the demand for
capital in its particular forms, namely merchandise, money and productive
capital, decreases. However, the demand for financial capital6 , banking
capital, increases in the form of credit, causing interest rates to rise. This
happens, according to Marx, so that capitalists in difficulty have access to
part of the value saved by society as a whole, thus putting pressure on
bank capital, whether in the form of shares, government bonds (ownership of capital), so that it is converted into money capital. There is thus
pressure not on capital, but specifically on bank capital. This process ultimately results in the transformation of money capital into world money
(exchange rate and balance of payments crisis). So, here, capital makes a
U-turn: it stops being capital and becomes money and, as we shall see, a
commodity. It becomes money again in order to satisfy the demand for
means of circulation and payment from the people of capital themselves.
The crisis thus promotes a redistribution of the stock of value available in
society, which is only possible in the form of money.
According to Marx, the main symptom of this mechanism is the
“plethora of capital” which, after periods of expansion, does not shrink
during the crisis, but simply changes hands, or form. The contraction in
production means less productive capital and fewer investment opportunities. As a result, the stock of banking and financial capital has to be
converted back into money. Its stock increases in inverse proportion to
productive capital. Herein lies the manifestation of the crisis, as discussed
in the section on the law of the downward trend of the rate of profit , the
surplus capital that necessarily has to shape productive life in order to
return to profit. On the other hand, in Marxian terms, the great novelty
of the crises of the last century and this century was precisely the state’s
ability to carry out this monetary expansion in a controlled manner.
From 1865 onwards, Marx doesn’t work with two crises, but several
concentric crises. It therefore seems reasonable to point to a change from
1857. The crisis begins in production, with an abundant supply and
falling prices, an excess of use values, innovation and a decrease in the
value of things. The contagion mechanism, on the other hand, occurs in
5
A TALE OF TWO CRISES: RESEARCH AND WRITING …
153
the balance of payments (world money), with a fall in the supply of capital
(credit), a loss of world money and a rise in interest rates, a change in the
balance of banks. Financial capital and its transformation into money for
circulation and payment will finally measure the transfer of values between
capitalists, between the various branches of production and, finally, the
ratio between constant and variable capital. Marx says: “(…) after each
period of crisis, the highest level of financial capital of the preceding
industrial cycle becomes the basis of the lowest level of the following
period” (MEGA2 II.4.2, Marx and Engels 2012a, p. 553). He goes on
to say:
For example, in the adverse phase of the industrial cycle, the interest rate
rises to a high level so as to devour profits for a while. At the same time,
the prices of government and other bonds fall. This is the moment when
the mass of capitalists invests in these depreciated securities so that, in
the next phases, they will rise beyond their normal level. Then they will
be sold at any price and a part of the publicum’s financial capital will be
appropriated. The part that is kept because it is bought at a lower price will
have its return increased. All the profits made, however, which they will
reconvert into capital, are first converted into loanable, financial capital. It
is the accumulation of the latter, which is different from real accumulation,
although it is its fruit, that therefore occurs, even when we only consider
financial capitalists (bankers, etc.) on their own, as the accumulation of
this particular class of capitalists. And they have to prosper with every
credit expansion, since it goes hand in hand with the real expansion of the
production process.” (MEGA2 II.4.2, Marx and Engels, 2012a, p. 557)
Financial capital is itself a part of the entire capital stock, albeit in
the form of securities over productive capital. The crisis thus promotes a
redistribution between these two types of capitalists, possibly on an international level. The role of credit at this point is precisely to unify the
various circuits of the system, so that the crisis affects all the individuals
involved in economic life at the same time. Eventually, entire parts of a
country’s productive life are sacrificed in the process. A contraction in
credit means that, in order to guarantee the convertibility of money (the
autonomous existence of value) into commodities, many of them will have
to be sacrificed in order to guarantee this autonomy, i.e., the functioning
of the accumulation of social labor. And Marx concludes, somewhat
surprisingly: “This is inevitable in bourgeois production and constitutes
one of its beauties” (MEGA2 II.4.2, Marx and Engels 2012a, p. 594).
154
L. G. DE DEUS
The process of production and reproduction of capital implies the expansion of use values, of value, of the stock of commodities and money in
social life. At a given moment, however, we have the production of superfluous capital, i.e., capital is always able to profit from less stock, which
is to say that as long as this stock doesn’t decrease, the rate of profit
falls. The manifestation of this phenomenon is the economic crisis, which
breaks out where capital is bought and sold. The path of adjustment is the
opposite path, which will result in the destruction of commodity capital,
in unemployment, in other words, in the reduction of the material stock,
while the stock of wealth in the hands of capitalists only undergoes transformations. The adjustment, however, continues to take place at the level
of people’s social and material life. This was the perspective assumed by
Marx before the outbreak of the 1866 crisis and, to a large extent, present
in the various and successive elaborations of his drafts for his economic
work. The importance that Marx himself attached to this itinerary is well
known, but it is also necessary to recognize its limits. The overthrow of
capitalism would not happen by the grace of economic decadence but
through practical and emancipatory action. These themes, in turn, will
run through not only Marx’s last years but all the years of his reception,
in the last century and this one.
Conclusion
Although they have witnessed the disappearance of Marxism as a practical possibility, the last fifty years have allowed for freer approaches to
Marxian work. Because of its character and its ineliminable practical vocation, in the last century, it has been immersed in futile debates, while it
has always been far removed from effective action in essential debates. It
was very late, for example, that Marxian philosophy was restored to its
fruitful dialog with tradition by the pen of the last Lukács. One of the
central elements of the rediscovery of Marx in this century necessarily
involves the realization of his ontological character. In the words of José
Chasin:
Without the spirit or ontological dimension, in other words, without the
status of a first philosophy, it is impossible to even understand what the real
scientific problems are at any given moment—what should be studied, what
their hierarchy is and their positions within the hierarchical framework of
social urgencies—or to position oneself in the face of the different strands,
5
A TALE OF TWO CRISES: RESEARCH AND WRITING …
155
without falling into the fallacy of their equivalence and/or complementarity, or succumbing, in an even more deleterious way, to the invocation of
pluralism, which from being an anti-dogmatic invocation becomes simply
a camouflage for ignorance and a subterfuge for opportunism in theory.
(2000, p. 14, emphasis added)
The correct philosophical position does not guarantee, but is a requirement for emancipatory practice, an integral part of it. Without this, the
emphasis necessarily falls on politics and politicism, on voluntarism, which
inevitably results in the reinforcement of the very system it is intended to
overcome, i.e., a mere predicate of the material and cultural decadence of
the times.
Another debate into which Marxism entered late and precariously was
the dynamic approach to economic crises. When Marxism tackled the
problem, the field of economic rhetoric had already been completely taken
over. This article was part of an effort by several authors so that the trajectory can be corrected, having won several secondary debates within the
terms of capitalist economic science, whether orthodox or not.
One of the elements that emerges from Marx’s research, as well as
from his political work, is precisely his observation, from the 1870s
onwards, of the violent nature of overcoming crises. Accelerated accumulation and the unprecedented development of the productive forces
of social labor implied, in the second half of the nineteenth century,
an exponential expansion in the size of the state and its role in social
life. The bloody repression of various revolutionary movements, notably
the Paris Commune, and international wars with superlative casualties
made Marx realize that state violence was part of the solution to the
crises he had studied. This element would only become fully explicit
within Marxism from Bolshevism onwards. The expansion of capitalism
would not only have victorious countries and entrepreneurs but would
also produce inequalities on a global scale, a fact already stated in the
first edition of Capital. If the crisis is not the inevitable harbinger of the
overthrow of capitalism, this overthrow would not happen without the
use of an opposing force of certainly greater dimensions, the action of
the workers on a planetary scale, no less. In the current century, this
action doesn’t seem possible, the subsumption of labor to capital has
crossed its final frontier, which is the total annulment of any emancipatory perspective, the complete immersion in the mental life and practice
of capitalism itself, which implies the freezing of the class struggle. These
156
L. G. DE DEUS
are the impasses that, a hundred and fifty years ago, seemed absolutely
unthinkable. At both times, it is more than necessary to reflect correctly
on the limits and possibilities of this way of life, which has systematically
managed to extend its historical usefulness by various and renewed means.
Competing Interests The authors have no conflicts of interest to declare that
are relevant to the content of this chapter.
References
Callinicos, Alex. Deciphering Marx. London: Bookmarks, 2014.
Calomiris, Charles W.; Schweikart, Larry. The panic of 1857: origins, transmission, and containment. The Journal of Economic History, v. 51 (4),
1991.
Chasin, José. Ad Hominem: rota e prospectiva de um projeto marxista. Ensaios
Ad Hominem, v. 1 (3), 2000.
De Deus, Leonardo Gomes, et al. A theory in the making: Marx’s drafts of
Capital and the notebooks on the crisis of 1866. Science & Society, v. 80 (4),
2016.
Evans, David Morier. The history of the commercial crisis, 1857–1858, and the stock
exchange panic of 1859. London: Groombridge & Sons, 1859.
Heinrich, Michael. Die Wissenschaft vom Wert. Münster: Westfälisches Dumpfboot, 1999 (4th edition, 2006).
Hobsbawm, Eric. A fortuna da edições de Marx e Engels. In: Hobsbawm, Eric.
História do Marxismo, v. 1, O marxismo no tempo de Marx. São Paulo: Paz
e Terra, 1979.
Kliman, Andrew. The failure of capitalist production. London: Pluto Press, 2012.
Moseley, Fred. Introduction. In: Marx, Karl. Economic Manuscript of 1864–1865.
Leiden: Brill, 2015.
Paula, João Antonio de, et al. Notes on a crisis: The Exzerpthefte and Marx’s
method of research and composition. Review of Radical Political Economics,
v. 45 (2), 2013.
Marx, Karl. Briefe über das Kapital. Berlin: Dietz, 2010.
Marx, Karl; Engels, Friedrich. Gesamtausgabe, II.4.1. Berlin: Dietz, 1988.
Marx, Karl; Engels, Friedrich. Gesamtausgabe, II.14. Berlin: Akademie, 2003.
Marx, Karl; Engels, Friedrich. Gesamtausgabe, II.4.2. Berlin: Akademie, 2012a.
Marx, Karl; Engels, Friedrich. Gesamtausgabe, II.4.3. Berlin: Akademie, 2012b.
Marx, Karl; Engels, Friedrich. Gesamtausgabe, IV.14. Berlin: De Gruyter
Akademie, 2017.
5
A TALE OF TWO CRISES: RESEARCH AND WRITING …
157
Mori, Kenji. The books of crisis and Tooke-Newmarch excerpts: a new aspect
of Marx’s crisis theory in MEGA. The European Journal of the History of
Economic Thought, v. 25 (5), 2018.
Vollgraf, Carl-Erich. Marx’s further work on Capital after publishing volume I:
on the completion of part II of the MEGA2. In: Linden, Marcel van der;
Hubmann, Gerald (eds.), Marx’s Capital: An unfinishable project? Leiden:
Brill, 2018.
CHAPTER 6
New Starting Point(s): Marx, Technological
Revolutions and Changes
in the Center-Periphery Divide
João Antonio de Paula, Hugo da Gama Cerqueira,
Leonardo Gomes de Deus,
and Eduardo da Motta e Albuquerque
Introduction
Before and after the publishing of Volume I of Capital, 150 years ago,
Marx had planned investigations, readings and studies for a broader
understanding of global capitalism.1 This is one of the reasons for the
1 See the letters to Engels, April 22 1868 (Briefe über das Kapital, Marx, 2010, p. 127)
and to Danielson, 7 October 1868 (MEW , v. 32, Marx and Engels, 1974, p. 563). To
Danielson, Marx says that the Capital’s second volume should not be finished “until
certain official Enquêtes about last year (and 1866) in France, United States and England
are carried out, completed and published”.
This text was originally published by the Revista de Economia Política (Paula
et al. 2020). A version of this paper was presented at the Conference Capital.150:
Marx’s Capital today (King’s College, London, 19–20 September 2017).
J. A. de Paula · H. da Gama Cerqueira · L. G. de Deus ·
E. da Motta e Albuquerque (B)
Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, Brazil
e-mail: albuquer@cedeplar.ufmg.br
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature
Switzerland AG 2025
J. A. de Paula et al. (eds.), Marx for the 21st Century, Marx, Engels,
and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22011-1_6
159
160
J. A. DE PAULA ET AL.
constant delays in his writing process of Volumes II and III. Among many
other subjects, he thought to investigate a connection between technological innovations and the changes in the relationship between center
and the periphery in the global system. It might not be casual that one
of his last notebooks—the Notebook B162, which he composed between
1881 and 1882—contains excerpts on topics related to those two issues:
his studies of Java and India, and his readings of a book on electricity, as
shown in Fig. 6.1.
The apparent disconnection between those subjects might be illusory.
As we will show, those notes might all be connected to more general
research on a broader dynamic of capitalism, which was becoming increasingly global. In fact, the materials that Marx organized in Notebook B162
might also bring new arguments for Teodor Shanin’s interpretation of his
“late Marx”: “to admit the specificity of late Marx is (also) to see Marx
We would like to thank Alex Callinicos, Lucia Pradella and Michel Roberts
for the kind invitation to participate in that International Conference. This
research is supported by CNPq (Processes 486,828/2013–1, 472,009/2014–
1, 401,054/2016–0 and 307,787/2018–4). The authors acknowledge the
research assistance from Tiago Guedes de Camargo. We thank the International Institute of Social History (IISG), in Amsterdam, curator of the Karl
Marx/Friederich Engels Papers (http://www.iisg.nl/archives/en/files/m/107
60604.php), for kindly providing access to copies of Notebooks B51, B108,
B109, B113, B156 and B162 and for its authorization to use images from
those Notebooks. We would like to thank comments and suggestions to previous
drafts from Michael Heinrich and Sofia Lalopoulou-Apostolidou in a meeting at
Cedeplar-UFMG (29 May 2017), and also from Rolf Hecker, Carl-Erich Vollgraf
and Kevin Anderson in a meeting at Cedeplar-UFMG (5 September 2017). We
would like to thank the comments and suggestions from two anonimous referees
from Revista de Economia Política. The usual disclaimer holds.
João Antonio de Paula
e-mail: jpaula@cedeplar.ufmg.br
Hugo da Gama Cerqueira
e-mail: hugo@cedeplar.ufmg.br
Leonardo Gomes de Deus
e-mail: leodedeus@cedeplar.ufmg.br
6
NEW STARTING POINT(S): MARX, TECHNOLOGICAL …
161
[Heft CXLVI], XII.1880-III.1881, Englisch, Deutsch, Franz. 204 S
S.1:Inhaltnvon Engels;
S.2-3: Bibliogr. Notizen;
S.4-101: L.H. Morgan , Ancient Society , 1877;
S. 102-130: J.W.B. Money , Java, or how to manage a colony , 1861;
S. 131-157: J. Phear , The Aryan Village in India and Ceylon , 1880;
S. 157-161: R. Sohn , Fränkisches Recht und Römisches Recht , 1880;
S. 162-199: H.J.S. Maine , Lectures on the Early History of Institution , 1875;
S. 199: Notiz;
S. 200-203: E. Hospitalier , Les Principales Applications de l`Electricité. ;
S.204: Inhalt.
NB. digitalisiert IISG-Original B 146.
Fig. 6.1 Contents of notebook B162 (1881–1882) (Source IISG, https://sea
rch.socialhistory.org/Record/ARCH00860#A072e534c62)
in his creativity” (1983, p. 31). Those excerpts add new elements to the
understanding of the late Marx and his creativity. This paper suggests that
we may find in Marx’s works—published and unpublished—hints, clues
and insights of those connections between technological changes and the
center-periphery divide. Those insights might even provide elements for a
better understanding of capitalism today. Marx’s great interest in science
is well known. Engels, for instance, in his speech at Marx’s grave said:
Such was the man of science. But this was not even half the man. Science
was for Marx a historically dynamic, revolutionary force. However great the
joy with which he welcomed a new discovery in some theoretical science
whose practical application perhaps it was yet quite impossible to envisage,
he experienced quite another kind of joy when the discovery involved
immediate revolutionary changes in industry, and in historical development
in general. For example, he followed closely the development of the discoveries made in the field of electricity and recently those of Marcel Deprez.
(CW , v. 24, Marx and Engels, 1989, p. 468; MEGA2 I/25, Marx and
Engels, 1885, p. 403ff)
This interest was so great that Wilhelm Liebknecht, writing about his
first conversation with Marx in the beginning of July 1850, remembered
Marx’s enthusiasm and excitement about the progress of science and
mechanics. He expressed his belief that “Natural Science was preparing
a new revolution” (Liebknecht 1908, p. 57).
162
J. A. DE PAULA ET AL.
This paper explores Marx’s interest in the development of science
and technology. We use new evidence provided by the Marx-EngelsGesamtausgabe edition, especially Marx’s excerpts on science—chemistry
and electricity—that were published, mostly for the first time, in Volume
IV.31. Those notes were taken between 1877 and 1883 from some of
the last books he read. The material offers new possibilities to interpret
Marx’s agenda at the end of his life and his plans for further research.
They also add new elements to the comprehension of aspects yet to be
fully explored about the “late Marx” and his creative process. We try to
integrate those readings from 1882 and its respective excerpts in a broader
framework, investigating two specific issues that might be deeply interrelated in Marx’s developments—the technological revolutions and the
center-periphery divide—along with his trajectory of changing conceptions, learning new subjects and recognizing, as Shanin suggests, the
existence of a plurality of roads in the development of global capitalism.
In a previous paper (Paula et al. 2016) we have discussed how Marx
might have begun to see crises and institutional reactions/responses to
them as moments of a structural transformation of capitalism. That paper
showed how Marx learned with new events and took advantage of his
researches on them, updating and improving his theoretical views accordingly. Even after publishing the first volume of Capital in 1867, he was
still developing long investigations on the dynamics of capital accumulation. Now we study two of those important issues related to changes in
the world—and in the economy—and correspondent improvements and
renewal of Marx’s elaboration: the technological revolutions after 1867
and the spread of industrial capitalism from England to the rest of the
world.
Marx in 1850–1851: A Model of an Electric
Engine and Notes on Machinery
Wilhelm Liebknecht remembrances of his first meeting with Marx go
beyond his excitement about the development of science. According to
him, “the conversation slowly assumed a wider scope”, reaching Marx’s
expectations about a new revolution in technology, which impressed
Liebknecht’s memories:
6
NEW STARTING POINT(S): MARX, TECHNOLOGICAL …
163
[s]oon we were in the field of Natural Science, and Marx ridiculed the
vigorous reaction in Europe that fancied it had smothered the revolution
and did not suspect that Natural Science was preparing a new revolution.
That King Steam who had revolutionized the world in the last century
had ceased to rule, and that into his place a far greater revolutionist would
step, the electric spark. And now Marx, all flushed and excited, told me
that during the last days the model of an electric engine drawing a railroad
train was on exhibition in Regent Street. (Liebknecht 1908, p. 57)
Is this an early indication of Marx’s insights on a very specific feature
of the nature of capitalist system: that the industrial revolution—and King
Steam—was only the first among others that might come? In 1850 and
1851, Marx had more interest in technology than the model of an electric
engine suggests. In 1851, he read extensively about technology, certainly
preparing himself to understand the scientific and mechanic background
of the Industrial Revolution. Hans-Peter Müller (1982, 1992) prepared
two books with a detailed attention to the 1851 Notebooks. Figure 6.2
shows the content of Notebook B51.
The notes deal with A. Ure’s book on technology and Poppe’s book on
the history of technology and sciences. Readings from Ure and Babbage
preceded this Notebook. In 1845, for instance, Notebook B33 contained
excerpts from both authors. Babbage is excerpted also later, in Notebook
B91a (1858–1862). It is interesting to point out one specific topic of
Marx’s concerns: the railways. Figure 6.3 shows that, after excerpts on
Steam engines from Ure’s book, Marx took notes on railways and more
specifically from one historic event in technology—the first travel of a
[Heft LVI], ca. X.1851, Deutsch. 44 S
S. 1-3: J.H.M. Poppe , Lehrbuch der allgemeinen Technologie ;
S. 3-10: ders., Die Physik vorzüglich in Anwendung auf Künste... , 1830;
S. 10-11: ders., Geschichte der Mathematik... , 1828;
S. 11-37: ders., Geschichte der Technologie... , 1807-1811;
S. 37-44: Andrew Ure , Technisches Wörterbuch , 1843-1844;
S. 44: Beckmann , Beiträge zur Geschichte der Erfindungen , 1780-1805.
NB. digitalisiert IISG-Original B 56.
Fig. 6.2 Contents of notebook B56 (1851) (Source IISG, https://search.soc
ialhistory.org/Record/ARCH00860#A072e534c62)
164
J. A. DE PAULA ET AL.
Fig. 6.3 Reference to “The Rocket”, 1829, excerpts from A. Ure, in notebook
B51 (1851) (Source B51, IISG)
steam locomotive, the Rocket, between Liverpool and Manchester.2 It
is also important to highlight this because, for Perez (2010, p. 190),
this new technology—the steam locomotive—represents the big bang
of a second technological revolution. In this sense, Marx was following
in 1851 the emergence of a new technology developed in 1829—with
broader implications in the coming years.
Marx in 1867: Industrial Revolution and a New
International Division of Labor in Capital
In the first volume of Capital, Marx explained the technology and its
impact in shaping a world divided by what is now called center-periphery.
It is possible to identify a clear linkage between the two topics of this
paper—after the Industrial Revolution, Marx suggests a “new and international division of labour” emerged. To understand this connection, he first
needed to explain the Industrial Revolution. The chapter on “machinery
and large-scale industry” (Chapter 13, Part IV, Volume 1) explains the
emergence of machinery, factories and machine systems. Here, Marx’s
readings of Ure and Babbage are very important, since they are references for the explanations on how machines, factories and their mechanics
work—for Babbage, see page 337; for Ure, see page 333ff, both in the
section on “development of machinery” (MEGA2 II/10).
In this chapter, Marx also discussed the relationship between science
and capital, a subject that he had explored previously in his Grundrisse.
There is a new relationship, opened by the mechanization of production,
2 Müller (1982) deciphered and transcribed this passage. The reference to this steam
locomotive, shown in Fig. 3, is as follows: “Man entschied sich f. d. letztre Prämie
ausgeschrieben, d. October 1829 die /:Maschine:/ ‘Rocket’ von Stephenson gewan”
(1982, p. 162).
6
NEW STARTING POINT(S): MARX, TECHNOLOGICAL …
165
since large-scale industry “…makes science a potentiality for production
which is distinct from labour and presses it into the service of capital”
(Marx 1867, p. 482; MEGA2 II/10, Marx and Engels, 1991, p. 326).3
This approach of the science’s role in capitalism may be a good reference
to understand why Marx kept reading about science until the end of his
life. It is possible to advance a conjecture: for Marx, investigations about
science might be investigations about a social force that capital would
always use in its favor.
Marx’s elaboration on how a revolutionary change in one specific
position in the production may have broader impacts might be an early
illustration of a model for technological revolutions. His perspective illustrates how changes in one point of production can have forward and
backward impacts. As Marx writes: “the transformation of the mode of
production in one sphere of industry necessitates a similar transformation
in other spheres” (p. 505). Those effects spread throughout the economy:
“machine spinning made machine weaving necessary, and both together
made a mechanical and chemical revolution compulsory in bleaching,
printing and dyeing” (p. 505). Backwards, “the revolution of cottonspinning called forth the invention of the gin, for separating the seeds
from the cotton fibre”. Changes in industry and agriculture made necessary changes in “means of communication and transport” (p. 506), and
later to “produce machines by means of machines” (p. 506) (MEGA2 II/
10, Marx and Engels, 1991, p. 344ff).
The impact of those machines on workers was tragic. It is interesting
for our argument that Marx presents those effects articulating the effects
on England and India in the same paragraph, in a comparison between
different speeds of the spread of machinery “when machinery seizes on
an industry by degrees, it produces chronic misery among the workers
who compete with it. Where the transition is rapid, the effect is acute
and is felt by great masses of people” (p. 557). “World history offers no
spectacle more frightful than the gradual extinction of the English handloom weavers; this tragedy dragged in for decades” (p. 557). “In India, on
the other hand, the English cotton machinery produced an acute effect”
(p. 558) (MEGA2 II/10, Marx and Engels, 1991, p. 388).
3 Quoted by Rosenberg (1974, p. 134). The relationship between science and capital
is also discussed in the Grundrisse (see pp. 580–582), for example: “capital … calls to
life all the powers of science” (MEGA2 II/1.2. Marx and Engels, 1981, Marx, p. 582,
Marx, 1857–1858).
166
J. A. DE PAULA ET AL.
It is important to highlight how the changes brought by machinery
were revolutionary for the relationship between India and England.
Earlier, in the eighteenth century, “India’s textile exports met the basic
requirements of cloth in several parts of south-east Asia and the Middle
East. The competitive power of this line of trade—based on very low
costs of production—is evident in the need felt by the British textile
industry for protective tariffs despite the high cost of inter-continental
trade” (Raychaudhury 2008, p. 32). Darwin (2007, p. 193) stresses that
“[p]erhaps 60 percent of global manufactured exports in the eighteenth
century were produced in India, the textile workshop of the world”.
After the industrial revolution, the English textile production was able
to decimate the Indian textile manufacture.
Those changes affected the whole world, giving room for a revolutionary change in the global economy. Marx articulates those two
dimensions, explaining how two very different global regions emerged.
The Industrial Revolution at the center “converts one part of the globe
into a chiefly agricultural field of production for supplying the other
part, which remains a pre-eminently industrial field” (p. 580). This is
the first center-periphery divide: an industrial center and an agricultural
periphery.4 This is, Marx writes, a “new and international division of
labour” (p. 579) (MEGA2 II/10, Marx and Engels, 1991, p. 406).5
What is new in this transformation? On one hand, world market is a
precondition for capitalist development in Capital (p. 247; MEGA2 II/
10, Marx and Engels, 1991, p. 131ff). On the other hand, the initial
capitalist development changed this world market, reshaping the divide
center-periphery. Internationally, there are multiple effects of the Industrial Revolution. First, there is the “cheapness of products” … and
“conquest of foreign markets” (p. 579). Second, there is the ruin of
handcraft production. This ruin compels India “to produce cotton, wool,
hemp, jute and indigo for Great Britain” (p. 579)—in other words, the
4 Celso Furtado (1978) also makes this connection between the industrial revolution
and a new international division of labor.
5 Furthermore, as Darwin writes, “India’s contribution to British world power was not
left to chance or self-interest. It was deliberately shaped by British rule. After 1870, the
Indian economy was developed rapidly as a major producer of export commodities: wheat,
raw cotton, jute and tea, among others. It also became an ever more important market
for British exports, especially cotton textiles and iron and steel” (Darwin, 2009, p. 182).
6
NEW STARTING POINT(S): MARX, TECHNOLOGICAL …
167
destruction of manufactures in India pushes it to concentrate on agricultural products. Third, a new world market grows, transforming, for
instance, Australia into “a colony for growing wool” (p. 579) (MEGA2
II/10, Marx and Engels, 1991, p. 406ff).
In Capital, therefore, Marx systematically presents two general features
of capitalist system: on one hand, technology and expansionary effects
of accumulation—that globally reorganizes the production; on the other
hand, the strong push toward foreign countries—foreign trade is listed
among the main countertendencies to the fall of the rate of profit in
Volume 3, a dynamic international expansion of capital that, at that stage,
divides the world into an industrial center and an agricultural periphery.
Marx in 1879: Railways as a “New Starting Point”
After publishing the first volume of Capital, 150 years ago, Marx
continued his researches and returned to the British Museum to read
about the crisis of 1866 and monetary and financial aspects of that crisis
(Krätke 2001). Notebooks B108, B109 and B133 show the focus of his
investigations (Takenaga 2016; Paula et al. 2013, 2016). Beyond these
investigations on the crisis—monetary and financial dimensions, actions
of the Bank of England—railways are a very important topic of Marx’s
inquiries. Indeed, as a financial innovation, railway shares and railway
debentures were very important to the evolution of the crisis. Marx
excerpted news from The Economist and from The Money Market Review
on railways, foreign investment and foreign railways—see, for instance,
The Money Market Review, May 5th, 1866, pp. 618–619 (excerpted by
Marx).
Darwin explores the role of a “railway mania” in the transformation
of Britain into an “investing economy” between 1830 and 1875: “the
mobilization of savings that ‘railway mania’ had encouraged, as well as
domestic prosperity, created a fund for investment abroad, at first in
government bonds and then, increasingly, in the building of railways
and other infrastructure in India, the Americas and Australasia” (Darwin
2009, p. 59). Describing the global impact of that “railway mania”, on
how railways spread globally, Darwin continues: “a marked tendency
to invest abroad was visible before 1880s. … The major impetus came
from the construction of railway overseas, which, unlike most commercial or industrial ventures, required a large immediate return before any
return was forthcoming. British confidence in railway technology, the
168
J. A. DE PAULA ET AL.
early development in British market in railway shares and the prominent role of British railway contractors overseas combined to make this
an especially attractive outlet for British surplus funds. As the international railway boom developed in the 1870s, a huge stream of British
capital flowed abroad” (Darwin 2009, p. 116). This “international railway
boom” was a subject of Marx’s attention. A letter written in 1879 shows
how close he kept following those changes. Writing to Nicolai Danielson
(April 10), Marx presented a very detailed and organized analysis of the
implications of that “international railway boom”.
First, railways were a “couronnement de l’oeuvre”, in a different sense
from what he had written in Capital (p. 506). For Marx “[t]he railways
sprang up first as the couronnement de l’oeuvre in those countries where
modern industry was most developed, England, United States, Belgium,
France, etc.6 I call them the ‘couronnement de l’oeuvre’ not only in
the sense that they were at last (together with steamships for oceanic
intercourse and the telegraphs) the means of communication adequate
to the modern means of production, but also in so far as they were the
basis of immense joint stock companies, forming at the same time a new
starting point for all other sorts of joint stock companies, to commence
by banking companies” (CW , v. 45, Marx and Engels, 1991, p. 356;
MEW ¸v. 34, Marx and Engels, 1966, p. 372).
This approach of railways as a “new starting point” is very important—
since it is new vis-à-vis what had been written in Capital. Something new
in a new phase of capitalism? Probably. Why? Marx continues his elaboration: railways “gave in one word, an impetus never before suspected to
the concentration of capital, and also to the accelerated and immensely
enlarged cosmopolitan activity of loanable capital, thus embracing the
whole world in a network of financial swindling and mutual indebtedness,
the capitalist form of ‘international’ brotherhood’” (CW , v. 45, Marx and
Engels, 1991, p. 356; MEW , v. 34, Marx and Engels, 1966, p. 373).7
6 According to Carlota Perez (2010, p. 190), the Akwright’s mill in Cromford (1771)
was the big bang of the Industrial Revolution, while the test of the Rocket steam engine
for the Liverpool-Machester railway (1829) was the big bang for the “Age of Steam and
Railways”—the second technological revolution in her view.
7 Chandler (1977), with the advantage point of writing in the second half of the
twentieth century, illustrates this relationship. He organizes his book on the large firms
in the United States starting from the maturation of the railways in the post-Civil War
period, since the spread of railways through the United States enabled the emergence of
the largest domestic market of the world and provided basis for economies of scale and
6
NEW STARTING POINT(S): MARX, TECHNOLOGICAL …
169
Marx discusses how a technological innovation—railways—can impact
the international division of labor, how the “railway mania” affects the
whole world. He explains that “the appearance of the railway system
in the leading countries of capitalism allowed, and even forced, states
where capitalism was confined to a few summits of society, to suddenly
create and enlarge their capitalistic superstructure in dimensions altogether disproportionate to the bulk of the social body, carrying on the
great work of production in the traditional modes” (CW , v. 45, Marx
and Engels, 1991, p. 356; MEW , v. 34, Marx and Engels, 1966, p. 373).
In sum: the “railway system” forces the enlargement of a “capitalistic
superstructure” everywhere, even in countries with limited capitalistic
development.
The diffusion of railways around the world was based on different
institutional and financial arrangements from the English case, it took
different paths of capitalist development—national states had a different
role vis-à-vis the UK case. According to Marx, “[t]here is, therefore, not
the least doubt that in those states the railway creation has accelerated
the social and political disintegration, as in the more advanced states it
hastened the final development and therefore the final change of capitalistic production. In all states except England, the governments enriched
and fostered the railway companies at the expense of the Public Exchequer. In the United States, to their profit, great part of the public land
they received as a present, not only the land necessary for the construction
of the lines but many miles of land along both sides of the lines, covered
with forests, etc. They become so the greatest landlords, the small immigrating farmers preferring of course land so situated as to ensure their
produce ready means of transport” (CW , v. 45, p. 356; MEW , v. 34,
p. 373).
Finally, this letter deals with another important topic for our argument:
implications for global capitalism, in an articulation between the spread of
railways and its effect on a general adaptation to a new international division of labor. Marx evaluates that “[g]enerally the railways gave of course
an immense impulse to the development of foreign commerce, but the
scope to be explored by first movers that would reshape the US economy. Chandler’s
book explains how the railways prepared the basis for the second industrial revolution
in the United States, a industrial revolution based on electricity, chemistry and steel.
Chandler’s book, therefore, illustrates how railways could be a “new starting point” for
global capitalism—part of the hegemonic transition described by Arrighi (1994).
170
J. A. DE PAULA ET AL.
commerce in countries which export principally raw produce increased
the misery of the masses” (CW , v. 45, p. 357; MEW , v. 34, p. 374). We
would like to stress a new movement in the international division of labor
hinted by Marx, a consequence of this “immense impulse to the development of foreign commerce”. According to him, “[n]ot only that the
new indebtedness, contracted by the government on account of the railways, increased the bulk of imposts weighing upon them, but from the
moment every local production could be converted into cosmopolitan
gold, many articles formerly cheap, because unvendible to a great degree,
such as fruit, wine, fish, deer, etc., became dear and were withdrawn from
the consumption of the people, while on the other hand, the production
itself, I mean the special sort of produce, was changed according to its
greater or minor suitableness for exportation, while formerly it was principally adapted to its consumption in loco” (CW , v. 45, Marx and Engels,
1991, p. 357; MEW, v. 34, Marx and Engels, 1966, p. 374).
This letter suggests a very important and new rearrangement of what
Marx had described 12 years earlier as a “new and international division of
labour”. This division of labor, after the “international railway boom” is
further developed, pushing changes everywhere “according to its greater
or minor suitableness for exportation”. In sum, after 1867, Marx highlights two points: (1) a new technology—railways—forcing regions where
capitalism was not so developed to “enlarge their capitalistic infrastructure”; (2) reorganization of production and changes in other countries,
derived from “greater or minor suitableness for exportation”. A new
starting point at the center but with huge implications for the rest of
the world—railways at the periphery and a new international division of
labor in 1879.8
Marx in 1879–1882: The Peripheries, Russia and India
After the publishing of Capital, there is also a broadening of Marx’s interests. Probably the experience within the International pushed him to a
broader view of global capitalism, to new issues. According to Scaron.
“[i]f from this point of view it is certain that Marx is one of the principal founders of the International, it is no less certain that it contributed
8 Marx also noted in the same letter: “The United States have at present overtaken
England in the rapidity of economical progress, though they lag still behind in the extent
of acquired wealth”. Hegemonic transition in sight?
6
NEW STARTING POINT(S): MARX, TECHNOLOGICAL …
171
… to develop Marx’s internationalism, freeing him from certain elements
contradictory by this same internationalism” (Scaron 1972, pp. 9–10).
On the other hand, the defeat of the Paris Commune in 1871 had
tremendous impacts in the history of the International. Kevin Anderson
mentions that, after 1871, “Marx focused again on resistance to capital
outside Western Europe and North America” (2016, p. 196). Anderson
then lists strands of Marx’s evolution: changes in the French edition of
Capital, “1879–1882 excerpt notebooks on non-Western and precapitalist societies” and texts on Russia (2016, p. 196). Pradella (2015,
p. 173) highlights how Marx’s notebooks "of the late 1870s and early
1880s… shed light on a relatively unknown phase of his life, revealing
his growing interest in precapitalist societies and the emerging science of
antropology".
This interest in non-Western regions is probably connected with the
same perception shared with Danielson in 1879. It becomes even clearer
in the drafts of Marx’s letter to Vera Zasulich (Shanin, pp. 97–126).
He wrote in the various drafts that “Russia does not live in isolation
from the modern world” (p. 106; MEGA2 I/25, Marx and Engels,
1985, p. 220). For instance, since the late 1860s, the railways in Russia
were calling Marx’s attention. In Notebook B113, pages 75 and 76,
he excerpted news on Russian railways, from The Economist , 18th July
1868, p. 816–817 (Paula et al. 2013, p. 172). In the drafts for the
letter to Zasulich, Marx mentions how railways and other capitalist institutions could be “acclimatised” to Russian conditions (Marx in Shanin,
p. 115; MEGA2 I/25, Marx and Engels, 1985, p. 226). It is striking how
Marx explored other possibilities of capitalist development, and how the
institutional conditions of that development would be different from the
classic English case. Furthermore, these drafts show how capitalist development in non-capitalist regions would require a stronger presence of the
state. Marx writes: “[At the peasant’s expense, it grew as in a hothouse
those excrescences of the capitalist system that can be most easily acclimatised (the stock exchange, speculation, banks, share companies, railways),
writing off their deficits, advancing profits to their entrepreneurs, etc.
etc.]. At the peasant’s expense, the state [lent a hand to] grew in hothouse
conditions certain branches of the Western capitalist system which, in no
way developing the productive premises of agriculture, are best suited to
facilitate and precipitate the theft of its fruits by unproductive middlemen” (Marx, in Shanin, p. 115; MEGA2 I/25, Marx and Engels, 1985,
p. 226).
172
J. A. DE PAULA ET AL.
Which exactly are those “hothouse conditions”? Davies (1998, p. 7)
describes the development of iron and steel industry in Russia during
the 1870s: “The state guaranteed foreign loans for railway construction
and provided substantial sums for railway construction from the budget.
From the end of the 1870s it also actively encouraged the production of rails and rolling stock by Russian industry… Foreign companies
were encouraged by the state to invest in the iron and steel industry”
(p. 7). Those might be the “certain branches of Western capitalism”
that Marx mentions; however, it is clear that Marx understood how the
periphery was not homogeneous. He distinguished the Russian case from
the Indian: Russia has not “fallen prey, like East Indies, to a conquering
foreign power” (Marx, in Shanin, p. 106; MEGA2 I/25 Marx and Engels,
1985, p. 226). Even a certain development of industries at the periphery
should be evaluated, as the Russian case indicated.
Those drafts, therefore, show a growing awareness by Marx on the
differentiation in the periphery—not a simple division between an industrial and an agricultural world anymore (as in Capital, 1867, p. 580;
MEGA2 II/10, Marx and Engels, 1991, p. 406); not only a broader
and finer adaptation of all regions of the agricultural world to “its greater
or minor suitableness for exportation” (as in the letter of 1879). In the
drafts to Vera Zasulich, there are broader differences, different paths, that
might be related to different roles of states, colonial powers and historical roots. Shanin (1983, p. 29) describes this acceptance by Marx of
“the multiplicity of roads within a world in which capitalism existed and
became a dominant force”. Shanin stresses different new meanings of this
“multiplicity of roads”, and we would like to highlight the following: “an
anticipation of future societal histories as necessarily uneven, interdependent and multilinear in the ‘structural’ sense” and “first steps toward the
consideration of the specificity of societies which we call today ‘developing societies’” (p. 29). Later, Shanin discusses the relationship between
this multidirectionality and interdependence: “the acceptance of multidirectionality also within a capitalist-dominated (and socialism-impregnated
world of mutual dependence, indeed, of heterogeneity resulting from that
very interdependence” (p. 31). It is important to notice that the title of
Shanin’s important book mentions peripheries, in the plural.
For his part, Kevin Anderson (2016, p. 167) writes about the differentiation of movements toward the periphery, making distinctions between
India, China and Russia, regarding the speed of the process and the
presence of “direct political forces”. According to him, “[i]n China and
6
NEW STARTING POINT(S): MARX, TECHNOLOGICAL …
173
Russia, where global capital lacked the ‘assistance’ of ‘direct political
force’ as in colonized India, the change came even more slowly” (p. 167).
K. Anderson helps the investigation of this broadening interests of Marx
informing the scope of his 1879–1882 notebooks, that comprised “a wide
range of societies and historical periods, including Indian history and
village culture, Dutch colonialism and the village economy in Indonesia;
gender and kinship patterns among Native Americans and in Ancient
Greece, Rome and Ireland; and communal and private property in Algeria
and Latin America” (p. 196). Those investigations may be seen in Fig. 1
(see Introduction), where the readings of Marx in the early 1880s are
shown: Java, India, primitive societies.
Therefore, over time the periphery became more complex, heterogeneous and diversified—“peripheries”, as Shanin highlights. The new
and international division of labor became more complex and heterogeneous, even with indications of initial industrialization at the periphery, in
very special conditions (“hothouse conditions”)—the peripheries are not
anymore only raw material producers.
Marx in 1882: An Emerging
Technological Revolution
In 1882 Marx, together with other studies (according to Fig. 6.1,
readings about Java, India etc.), excerpts a book on electricity and its
applications (Hospitalier 1882). The contents of this book can be seen in
Fig. 6.4—a very up to date book, a fresh second edition published after
an exhibition in Paris in 1881 (Exposition d’életricité au Palais de l’industrie), which hosted a meeting of scientists to define units of measurement
of that emerging technology—standardization in the process (Hospitalier
1882, p. 6).9 At this stage, the interest of Marx on experiments with
electricity was very important, as we can read in his letter to Engels on
8 November 1882: “Dear Fred, What do you think of Deprez’s experiment at the Munich Electricity Exhibition? It was almost a year ago
that Longuet promised to procure Deprez’s works for me (notably his
demonstration that electricity makes it possible to convey energy over
9 Accoding to Hospitalier (1882, p. 6), “[a]près huit années de travaux et d’experiences,
le comité publia un rapport très détaillé et détermina les unités électriques… Le Congrès
international des électriciens, réuni à Paris le 15 Septembre 1881 a sanctionné l’émploi
de ces unités…”.
174
J. A. DE PAULA ET AL.
considerable distances by means of a simple telegraph wire)” (MEW , v.
35, Marx and Engels, 1967, p. 104).
Deprez is mentioned by Hospitalier (1882, p. 320), and the editors
of Volume IV.31 of MEGA2 suggest that Marx might have read first the
whole Hospitalier’s book, and only then he began to excerpt it (MEGA2
IV.31, Marx and Engels, 1999, p. 876 and p. 879). Hospitalier’s book,
as shown in Fig. 6.4, discusses a wide range of aspects of emerging technologies. References to Siemens, Edison, Bell, Deprez and others are
present in this book. An electric locomotive is shown in Hospitalier’s
book—Figure 126, page 310, which shows a “locomotive du premier
chemin de fer électrique ayant fonctionné à Berlin in 1879”, an experiment prepared by Werner Siemens. Therefore, in 1882, Marx had new
evidence about scientific advances in a technology that would challenge
King Steam. Not only a model, but preliminary experiments of electric
traction and concrete measures about standardization were necessary for
a full development of this new technology. Why would Marx read with
such interest a book on electricity? Why would he read on other scientific developments as chemistry,10 according to the excerpts published in
MEGA2 , Volume IV.31?
First, was there a general interest in the development of sciences,
something beyond very concrete applications in industry? Rosenberg
(1974, p. 136) suggests that Marx’s views include a relative autonomy of
science, that “factors internal to the realm of science must be conceded
to play a role independent of economic needs”. Moreover, science studies
would have many motivations. One should not disregard some dose of
Hegelianism, that means, Marx was indeed interested in the movements
of the human spirit. Another reason is Marxian great curiosity about the
sciences in general; hence, he studied chemistry, physiology, agronomy,
geology, physics etc. But Marx had a well-formed view of the role of
science in the capitalist economy. Rosenberg (1974) wrote about it in
a very positive way. One of the things that Rosenberg emphasizes is
Marx’s perception of certain properties of the advance of science—from
simple to complex, first to physics (Newtonian), then chemistry, etc. Here
too, there would be an element of caution: Marx’s gigantic curiosity
would arm him to understand several future developments, such as a leap
forward toward more science-based technologies than before (electricity
10 For the role of organic chemistry for industrial innovation in leading German firms
by 1870s, see Murmann (2003, pp. 120–121).
6
NEW STARTING POINT(S): MARX, TECHNOLOGICAL …
175
Fig. 6.4 (A) Reference to “La Physique Moderne”, 1882, excerpts in notebook B156 (1882) (B) Contents of E. Hospitallier’s La Physisque Moderne 1882
(Source 4A [B156, IISG], 4B [Hospitallier])
176
J. A. DE PAULA ET AL.
and chemistry will have a direct impact on industry … from the 1870s).
Murmann (2003) investigates the history of the chemical industry and
writes about the stages of the industry formation contemporary to Marx:
“science unbound” is the title of the period between 1866 and 1885, and
MEGA IV.31 suggests that Marx was trying to follow that evolution.
Second, was there a relation between investigations on science and
new opportunities of technological development? The editors of MEGA2
IV.31 write about Marx’s earlier studies of sciences, since 1833. His
interest on Liebig and Johnston, for instance: “Marx based himself on the
insights of Liebig and Johnson to corroborate his argument against the
‘law of diminishing productivity of land’, respectively, with the clarification of the question whether agricultural economy, given its technical and
scientific principles, could be able to supply food for a growing population
and to continually provide the industry with raw materials” (p. 641).
Third, understanding science is a precondition to understand later
applications by the economy and industry, applications demanded by
them. This leads us to a very specific question: would those readings published in MEGA2 IV.31 (Chemistry and Electricity) (Marx and
Engels, 1999) have the same role as the reading of Babbage and Ure
in the understanding of machinery—and the industrial revolution? Our
guess is a positive answer to this question. Did Marx have hints and
clues of a new industrial revolution? Was he exploring another “new
starting point”? Certainly, Marx did explore some emerging technologies of his time. However, the key event—other elements about the big
bang that would trigger the third technological revolution had not yet
taken place—according to Freeman & Louçã (2001, p. 141), this key
event was Thomas Edison’s New York Electric Power Station, inaugurated
in September 1882, therefore not covered by Hospitalier’s book—the
second edition was published in 1882, but the book was prepared in
1881—see his “préface de la deuxième édition”, dated from “Décembre
1881” (p. VIII). Those data show how difficult it is to forecast emerging
technological revolutions. W. Liebknecht stresses this point: “Forty-five
years and a half have passed, and no railroad train is yet driven by an
electric engine. The few street cars and whatever else are operated by electricity do not signify much on the whole, however much it may appear.
And in spite of all revolutionising inventions, it will take some time yet
before lightning, completely tamed, will allow itself to be hitched to
the yoke of human labour and will drive King Steam from his throne.
Revolutions are not accomplished in a sleight-of-hand fashion. Only the
6
NEW STARTING POINT(S): MARX, TECHNOLOGICAL …
177
sensational shows in politics are called revolutions by the wonder-working
rustic faith. And whoever prophesises revolutions is always mistaken in the
date” (W. Liebknecht 1896, p. 58).11
Conclusion: Remarks on Technological
Revolutions and the Peripheries
Was Marx trying to investigate the future of capitalism in the late years
of his life? Probably yes. This leads us once again to our introduction: is
it an accident that Marx reviewed Hospitalier and Morgan in Notebook
B51, as shown in Fig. 6.1? Our answer is no. Throughout his life, Marx
faced a sequence of “new starting points”, for him and for capitalism.
As suggested in the sections related to the selected years of 1850, 1867,
1879–1882 and 1882, there is a rich history of changes, new issues and
a sequence of “new starting points”. In a certain sense, this could be a
way to look ahead for the future of capitalism: this system might have
“new starting points”. However, those “new starting points” could be
articulated in the history of capitalism with its new implications for the
rest of the world—a divide center-periphery seems to be always changing,
following the structural changes brought forward by each technological
revolution.
Marx followed two of those technological revolutions—according to
Perez’s chronology. Therefore, it is possible to connect Marx’s analysis of
changes at the center with their implications for the periphery. It is also
possible to compare the implications of the first technological revolution
or the first big bang—machines in England, destruction in India; industries at the center, agriculture at the periphery (Capital 1867, Volume
1, p. 579; MEGA2 II/10, Marx and Engels, 1991, p. 406)—with the
impacts of the second technological revolution or the second big bang—
railways spreading globally, reorganization of local economies to export
for leading economies (letter to Danielson 1879). New developments
were explored in his drafts for Vera Zasulich (1881), as a peripheral
economy like Russia may suggest special (“hothouse”) conditions for
11 Although a subject that might be beyond the specific objectives of this paper, it is
important to stress that late Marx did not share a “naive prometheanism” of his times
(Saito, 2016, p. 302). As Saito (2016, p. 303) puts forward, reading his notebooks and
following his process of elaboration “it is actually difficult to believe that he has shared
the naive progress optimism of infinite growth”.
178
J. A. DE PAULA ET AL.
the development of “certain branches of Western capitalism” (domestic
production of steel and iron for railway construction), an indication of
non-agricultural production at the periphery, that means, there was a
change in course from the initial center-periphery divide between an
industrial center and an agricultural periphery suggested in 1867, the
early signs of a new international division of labor. In sum: insights on
how each technological revolution reshapes the international division of
labor.
The third technological revolution or the third big bang could not
be described or discussed by Marx. Nevertheless, he was following
its scientific preconditions and first experiments with technologies that
would challenge King Steam. Could Marx be regarded as an investigator of emerging technologies? We could guess—and W. Liebknecht’s
memory suggests this: Marx had a clear vision that new revolutionary
changes in science and technology would happen. In less than 40 years
after his reading of Hospitalier, the United Kingdom would be overtaken by the United States and Germany, new industries, new products
and a new international division of labor would emerge, the division
between an industrial center and an agricultural periphery would not be
enough anymore, since industries began to develop in the periphery. Two
observations and cautionary notes are necessary as concluding remarks.
First, Marx cannot be seen as a Kondratiev avant-la-lettre. On one
hand, Marx was not a systematic scholar of technological revolutions.
On the other hand, in his time there was not enough empirical evidence
for further reflection, as they existed for Kondratiev and van Gelderen in
the 1920s. But Marx went through everything that was later seen as the
technological revolution or the different industrial revolutions. What he
studied and wrote about was very interesting to a researcher here in the
twenty-first century, like that letter on the railroads to Danielson and the
insight of “new starting points”.
Second, did Marx elaborate a theory of structural change? Beyond
Capital , Marx had insights about this: Notebooks B108, B109 and B112,
the 1879 letter. Although he did not develop this systematically, he left
enough evidences and perceptions in this direction. Our question is how
to deal with this sequence of insights, non-systematized perceptions, notes
for later development etc. What we can do is once more indicate possible
avenues for further development. That’s why MEGA2 is so important.
6
NEW STARTING POINT(S): MARX, TECHNOLOGICAL …
179
Finally, the investigation of connections between technological revolutions and changes in the center-periphery divide is a broad and open
agenda for further research. This investigation is basic for an understanding of today’s capitalism and for an elaboration of a program for
alternatives to it.
Competing Interests The authors have no conflicts of interest to declare that
are relevant to the content of this chapter.
References
Anderson, K. Marx at margins: on nationalism, ethnicity and non-Western
societies. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2016.
Arrighi, G. O longo século XX: dinheiro, poder e as origens do nosso tempo. Rio de
Janeiro/São Paulo: Contraponto/Unesp (1996), 1994.
Chandler JR., A. The visible hand—The managerial revolution in America
business. London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1977.
Darwin, J. After Tamerlane: the rise and fall of Global Empires. London: Penguin
Books, 2007.
Darwin, J. The empire project: The rise and fall of the British World-System, 18301970. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Davies, R. W. Soviet economy development from Lenin to Khruschev. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Freeman, C.; Louçã, F. As time goes by: From the industrial revolutions and to the
information revolution. Oxford: Oxford University, 2001.
Furtado, C. Criatividade e dependência na civilização industrial. Rio de Janeiro:
Paz & Terra, 1978.
Krätke, Michael. Le dernier Marx et le Capital. Actuel Marx (37): 145-160,
2001.
Hospitalier, E. La physique moderne: les principales applications de l’électricité.
Paris: G. Masson, Éditeur (Deuxième édition), 1882.
Liebknecht, W. Karl Marx biographical memoirs. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr &
Company, 1908 [1896].
Marx, K. Briefe über das Kapital. Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 2010.
Marx, K. Grundrisse. London: Penguin Books, 1857–58 [1973].
Marx, K. Capital, Volume I . London: Penguin Books, 1867 [1976].
Marx, K.; Engels, F. Gesamtausgabe, v. I.25. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1985.
180
J. A. DE PAULA ET AL.
Marx, K.; Engels, F. Gesamtausgabe, v. II.1.2. Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1981.
Marx, K.; Engels, F. Gesamtausgabe, v. II.10. Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1991.
Marx, K.; Engels, F. Werke, v. 32. Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1974.
Marx, K.; Engels, F. Werke, v. 34. Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1966.
Marx, K.; Engels, F. Werke, v. 35. Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1967.
Marx, K.; Engels, F. Collected Works, v. 24. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1989.
Marx, K.; Engels, F. Collected Works, v. 45. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1991.
Marx, K.; Engels, F. Gesamtausgabe, v. IV.31. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1999.
Müller, H-P. Die technologischeb-historichen Exzerpte. Frankfurt: Verlag Ullstein
GmbH, 1982.
Müller, H-P. Karl Marx über Maschinerie, Kapital und industrielle Revolution. Exzerpte und Manuskriptentwürfe 1851–1861. Springen Fachmedien
Wiesbanden GmbH, 1992.
Murmann, J. P. Knowledge and competitive advantage. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2003.
Paula, J. A.; Cerqueira, H.; Cunha, A. M.; Suprinyak, C. E.; De Deus, L. G.;
Albuquerque, E. M. Notes on a crisis: the Exzerpthefte and Marx’s method
of research and composition. The Review of Radical Political Economics, v. 45
(2): 162-182, 2013.
Paula, J. A.; De Deus, L. G.; Cerqueira, H.; Suprinyak, C. E.; Albuquerque,
E. M. Investigating Financial Innovation and Stock Exchanges. Marx‘s Notebooks on the crisis of 1866 and structural changes in capitalism. Beiträge zur
Marx-Engels-Forschung, v. 2014/5: 194–217, 2016.
Perez, C. Technological revolutions and techno-economic paradigms. Cambridge
Journal of Economics, v. 34 (1): 185-202, 2010.
Pradella, L. Globalisation and the critique of political economy: new insights from
Marx’s writings. Oxon/New York: Routledge, 2015.
Raychaudhury, T. The mid-eighteenth century background. In: Kumar, D.;
Raychaudhury, T. (eds.), The Cambridge Economic History of India, Volume 2
(c. 1757–2003). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 3–35, 2008.
Rosenberg, N. Karl Marx on the economic role of science. In: Rosenberg, N.
(1976) Perspectives of technology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
pp. 126–138, 1974.
Saito, K. Natur gegen Kapital: Marx’ Ökologie in seiner unvollendeten Kritik des
Kapitalismus. Frankfurt/New York: Campus Verlag, 2016.
Scaron, P. A modo de Introducción. In: Marx, Karl y Engels, Friedrich.
Materiales para la Historia de America Latina. Córdoba: Cuadernos PyP,
1972.
6
NEW STARTING POINT(S): MARX, TECHNOLOGICAL …
181
Shanin, T. Late Marx and the Russian road: Marx and the "peripheries of
capitalism". New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983.
Takenaga, S. Excerpt notes of Marx of the later 1860s and the economic crisis of
1866. Marx-Engels Jahrbuch, 2015/2016, pp. 71-102, 2016.
CHAPTER 7
Surplus Profit: A Key Concept
for an Investigation of Modern Industrial
Capitalism
Eduardo da Motta e Albuquerque
Introduction
Surplus profit is a key concept for understanding contemporary capitalism. Leading firms—the set of firms that shape and reshape capitalist
dynamics—seek not average or normal profits, but above-average profits.
In a chapter that incorporates modern interpretation of theories of the
firm, David Teece (2010, p. 722) stresses how the innovating firm
must reinvent itself again and again to obtain and preserve those extra
Financial support from CNPq (Grants #307.787–2018-4 and 307.516/
2022–9) is acknowledged. I would like to thank Leonardo Gomes de Deus, for
discussions on previous versions of this chapter. I would like to thank Elton
Rosa for his research help regarding the first references of surplus-profit from
Marx. The usual disclaimer holds.
E. da Motta e Albuquerque (B)
Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, Brazil
e-mail: albuquer@cedeplar.ufmg.br
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature
Switzerland AG 2025
J. A. de Paula et al. (eds.), Marx for the 21st Century, Marx, Engels,
and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22011-1_7
183
184
E. DA MOTTA E ALBUQUERQUE
profits. According to Teece, what does the firm pursue in deploying these
dynamic capabilities? “The goal is to generate abnormal returns” (p. 692).
Nathan Rosenberg is one of the leading researchers of evolutionary
economics, with influential studies on the dynamics of technological
progress. One of his most important contributions to economic theory,
through the economics of innovation, is his elaboration on the “orientation of technological progress”, “inducement mechanisms” and “focusing
devices” (see Rosenberg 1976, especially Chapter 6, pp. 108–125).
Rosenberg’s definition is didactic: “the inducement mechanism is the
prospect of making extra-high profits, or the prospect of losing a
marvelous and tangible opportunity to do so…” (1976, p. 124).
Since 1848 the young Marx, together with Engels, has described one
key feature of the capitalist mode of production: “The bourgeoisie cannot
exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production,
and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole
relations of society” (Marx and Engels 1848).
During his investigations between 1848 and 1867, Marx was able to
understand the driving force behind this permanent revolution of production: there is a key link that connects the pursuit of extra profits and the
permanent revolution of the technological foundations of the economy.
This link was presented in Capital, Volume 1, in the chapter on “the
concept of relative surplus-value”.
After 1867, Marx continued to work with the concept of extra profits
and followed new scientific and technological developments that support
them. The publication of Marx’s archives, with his Excerpt-Notebooks
(section B of IISG Archives) and his collections of selected newspaper
articles (section P of IISG Archives), allows researchers to track Marx’s
interests, readings, and notes, yielding a rich source of clues, indications
and suggestions of his plans after the publication of Capital in 1867.
This chapter is organized around the concept of surplus profit, beginning in Section 2 by the presentations of its origin and development
in Marx’s published works, and how after 1867 he continued to elaborate on connections between that concept and technological change in
general. This relationship is explored by Marx in his post-1867 investigations through his readings on two revolutionary changes—railway and
electricity—summarized, respectively, in Sections 3 and 4, that present
material uncovered by MEGA. Sections 5 and 6 show how that concept
is important for the understanding of contemporary capitalism, describing
how Schumpeter provided one route for fruitful applications of that
7
SURPLUS PROFIT: A KEY CONCEPT FOR AN INVESTIGATION …
185
concept in later phases of capitalism—Section 5—and how the history of
capitalism in the twentieth century places surplus profit as a key variable
for the renewed dynamism of this mode of production. The concluding
section summarizes this chapter and suggests topics for further research.
In Capital and After It: Surplus
Profit and Technological Change
David Ricardo’s chapter On Machinery was very well known by Marx,
as Müller (1992) shows in his investigations on Marx’s excerpts—from
1851 (pp. 336–338) and 1861 (p. 329).
In the Theories of Surplus Value (Part II, Topic c—pp. 555–564),
Marx discusses Ricardo’s chapter On Machinery. There Marx transcribes
five paragraphs of that chapter, including the sentence related to the
advantages of capitalists that introduce new machines. In that sentence,
Ricardo writes: “He, indeed, who made the discovery of the machine,
or who first usefully applied it, would enjoy an additional advantage, by
making great profits for a time; but, in proportion as the machine came
into general use, the price of the commodity produced, would, from the
effects of competition, sink to its cost of production, when the capitalist
would get the same money profits as before…” (p. 555).1
Marx’s comments regarding this part of Ricardo’s chapter present one
criticism: that Ricardo limited his interpretation of the introduction of
new machines to only “spheres of production in which the capitalist mode
of production already exists” (p. 556). Marx evaluates one consequence of
the introduction of new machines: “revenue is set free” as a consequence
of the “lowering in the price of the commodity”. Part of this revenue
“may be used in the formation of a new industry producing a different
commodity” (p. 558). Later Marx reiterates those two possibilities for the
“revenue set free”: expansion of “old spheres of production” or “opening
up new ones” (p. 559). This chain of events triggered by the introduction of new machines that may lead to new branches of production is a
comment that is important for the argument delineated in this section.
Ricardo’s chapter On Machinery might have helped Marx in his elaboration on the dynamic of technological progress. His more comprehensive
views on this subject were first presented in his Manuscripts prepared
1 This passage is in Ricardo (1821, p. 246).
186
E. DA MOTTA E ALBUQUERQUE
in 1861–1863. The basic dynamic that the capitalist who introduced
improved technologies would earn extra profits are presented in those
notes (see, for example, MEW, v. 43, pp. 315–316, and p. 332).
The first full analysis of this dynamic is in Capital , Volume 1,
Chapter 10—“the concept of relative surplus-value”. After an explanation
of the difference between the absolute and relative surplus, he stresses the
role of technology for the increasing labor productivity. This increased
labor productivity, on the one hand, enabled the capitalists to reach
earlier the point where the value of the labor force is achieved therefore expanding the time devoted to extraction of surplus value, and on
the other hand, determined a reduction of abstract labor crystalized in
the commodities produced. In this chapter, Marx reiterates something
that was presented in Chapter 1, an inverse relationship between the
productivity of labor and the cost of commodities (Marx 1867, p. 131
and p. 436).
This basic relationship is important for the next step in Marx’s scheme,
an anticipation of the level of abstraction planned for Volume 3—the
concurrence among different capitals. Marx now makes room for different
capitals, with different levels of technology, to investigate what would
happen when one capitalist introduced an improved method of production (p. 433): “let one capitalist contrive to double the productivity
of labour”, a process that leads to “individual value of these articles…
below their social value”, which in turn leads to “an extra surplus-value”
(p. 434). This “extra surplus-value” explains a key feature of capitalism:
“there is a motive for each capitalist to cheapen his commodities by
increasing the productivity of labor” (p. 435).
Rubin stresses the importance of this process, as he summarizes: “This
difference between market value and individual value, which creates
various advantages of production for enterprises with different levels of
productivity of labor, is the prime mover of technological progress in
capitalist society” (1926, p. 174—Rubin’s highlights).
However, this is only the first part of this process. There is competition among different capitals—concurrence is a feature of capitalism.
Marx describes the two sides of the same process: on the one hand, “the
capitalist who applies the improved method of production appropriates
and devotes to surplus labour a greater portion of the working day than
other capitalists in the same business”. But, on the other hand, “this
extra surplus value vanishes as soon as the new method of production
7
SURPLUS PROFIT: A KEY CONCEPT FOR AN INVESTIGATION …
187
is generalized, for then the difference between the individual value of the
cheapened commodity and its social value vanishes” (p. 436).
Those paragraphs inform a truly microeconomic explanation for the
role of innovation in the capitalist dynamic.
This scheme was discussed again, in Volume 3, as the “process of
capitalist production as a whole” was presented: this volume deals with
the capitalist reality with the concurrence among different capitals. Chapters 8, 9 and 10 deal with different compositions of capital, variation in
rates of profit, average rate of profit, the transformation of values into
production prices, market prices and market values. In the conclusion of
Chapter 10, Marx highlights: “we saw in the course of our argument how
market value (and everything that was said about this applies with the
necessary limitations also to the price of production) involves a surplus
profit for those producing under the best conditions in any particular
sphere of production” (Marx 1894, p. 300).
Here, Marx makes comments that may be related to later advances
in economic theory in the second half of the twentieth century. Surplus
profit may arise, Marx speculates, “from monopolies in the customary
sense of the term, whether artificial or natural” (Marx 1894, p. 301). Or,
according to those comments, “a surplus profit can also arise if certain
spheres of production are in a position to opt out of the transformation
of their commodity values into prices of production…” (p. 301). Both
comments may be related to the contribution of Bain (1956): barriers to
entry. And, as the literature on this subject shows, firms need to keep
investing in innovation to build those barriers to entry.
In his notes for potential editorial work for Volume 3 (see Paula
et al. 2016), Marx returned to exercises related to the rate of profit
(see MEGA II.14, pp. 3–164). The editors of that volume gave high
importance to those exercises, organizing a section on that topic: “KARL
MARX: MANUSKRIPTE ZUM DRITTEN BUCH DES ‘KAPITALS’ —
1871 BIS 1882”. Those notes include a discussion on “Mehrwertrate und
Profitrate mathematisch behandelt ”. Why those exercises? One hypothesis may be put forward: Marx was working with a key and synthetic
variable: profit. Profit, according to his elaboration, had multiple determinations, being affected by changes coming from multifarious different
sources. Therefore, he tried to address all these movements together. As
we know, because we learn this from Marx, each change in one point of
the system transmits its effects to other points that also affect others—a
chain of events triggered by one specific change. With profit that would
188
E. DA MOTTA E ALBUQUERQUE
not be different. Probably Marx was uncomfortable with his elaboration
so far and kept trying to understand all movements. Without the tools of
modern complex systems, he did try to comprehend this with the tools
then available to him. Those notes are an expression of those attempts.2
Among those notes, in a section “Über Profitrate, Kapitalumschlag,
Zins und Rabatt ”, Marx returns specifically to the topic of surplus profit.
That section discusses monopolies and their emergence, and explicitly
presents the temporary nature of those monopolies—opportunities for
surplus profits, that could be transformed into rent: railways are the
example of this type of monopoly (Marx, MEGA II.14, pp. 158–161).
The editors of MEGA II.14 articulate this topic (Kapitalunschlag )
with Engels’ new chapter (4: Wirkung des Unschlags auf die Profitrate).
The importance of the issue of Umschlag on profit rate—so important
that Engels, in the conclusion of the paragraph on railways, steamers,
telegraphs, Suez Canal etc., stresses the reduction of the “turnover time
of the world trade”, and the concept that “this cannot but have had its
effect on the profit rate” (p. 164). Those comments from Marx, from
the editors of MEGA II.14 and Engels open an important avenue for this
chapter, as they link profit, surplus profit and technological changes in
a broader sense: railways are a revolutionary sector, with a deep impact
upon the rate of profit, channeled by changes in circulation time.
Those connections were further explored in Capital ’s Volume 1: investigating the relationship among extraordinary profits, new branches of
production and new technological revolutions. They begin with the extra
profits that are a consequence of the introduction of new machines—
part of the overall process of the industrial revolution: “[t]his first period,
during which machinery conquers its field of operations is of decisive importance, owing to the extraordinary profits (‘außerordentlichen
Profite’ ) it helps to produce. These profits not only form a source of
accelerated accumulation, that also attract into the favored sphere of
production a large part of the additional social capital that is constantly
being created, and is always seeking out new areas of investment” (1867,
p. 578).
Here, there is a key relationship between profit, formation of additional capitals and investments in new branches of production: “Entirely
2 Louçã (2010) suggests that Schumpeter and Keynes dealt with complexity without
the tools now available—this is also the case of Marx, an author who had insights related
to capitalism as a complex system (Albuquerque 2024).
7
SURPLUS PROFIT: A KEY CONCEPT FOR AN INVESTIGATION …
189
new branches of production, creating new fields of labor, are also formed
as a direct result either of machinery or of the general industrial changes
brought about it” (1867, p. 573). Those additional capitals may have a
clear relationship with innovations in a broader and even contemporary
meaning: “[t]he additional capitals formed in the normal course of accumulation serve above all as vehicles for the exploitation of new inventions
and discoveries, and industrial improvements in general” (Marx 1867,
p. 780). More specifically, “[t]he mass of social wealth … thrusts itself
frantically into newly formed branches, such as railways, etc.…” (Marx
1867, p. 785).
Supported by the extra profits produced earlier, those new sectors also
present high profitability: since there is “preponderance of the element
of living labour, and only gradually pass through the same trajectory as
other branches”, therefore “both the rate and mass of surplus-value in
these branches are unusually high” (p. 344).
What are the new branches of production that are created with the
extra profits of the first movements of the industrial revolution? For Marx,
“[t]he chief industries of this kind are, at present, gas-work, telegraphy,
photography, steam navigation and railways” (Marx 1867, p. 573). This
reference to railways as a new branch helps the understanding of the
reference that Engels included in his edition of Chapter 4: the revolution in communications in the “last fifty years” “is comparable only with
the industrial revolution of the second half of last century” (Marx 1894.
p. 164).3
3 This comment leads to a dialogue with Carlota Perez’ (2010) systematization of
technological revolutions, that differentiates the first industrial revolution from the second
technological revolution, that had its big bang in 1829 with the first commercial railway.
190
E. DA MOTTA E ALBUQUERQUE
Investigating Railways
and Discovering Standard Oil
This reference to railways—as a change “comparable to the industrial
revolution”—might explain why Marx persisted in investigating them.4
Railways are a subject that is very present in Marx’s post-1867 investigations, as shown by at least five different Notebooks (B108, B109, B112,
B113 and B161).5 Furthermore, among the documents organized by the
IISG, there is a section (P) with newspaper cuttings that may help this
section to bring more indications of Marx’s focus of attention.6
Notebook B108 contains excerpts of various articles from The Money
Market Review 7 (issues from 19 May 1866 to 28 December 1867)
dealing with railways and Marx organizes the main notes in his Register
at page 86 (Notebook B108, p. 86)—a whole page of references. The
subjects excerpted include articles on specific lines (Calledonian, Brighton
etc.), on specific issues (Railway reform), on statistics (Railway accounts)
and detailed calculations on “Railway capital in UK in the last 15 years”—
that presents a jump in “revenues”, from £ 15,710,554 in 1852 to £
35,751, 655 in 1867 (see B108, p. 46). This Notebook also has an article
from New York’s Standard (4 December 1868) on “the great Eire railway
war”, with references to Belmont, Fisk and Gould—important investors
in railways, two of them are discussed in Chandler (1977).
Notebook B109 contains excerpts from The Economist (pages 23–182)
and from The Money Market Review (pages 187–280). Marx organized
two Registers (pages 183–186 for The Economist and pages 281–283 for
4 As presented earlier (Albuquerque 2021), Marx’s elaboration on the industrial revolution may be read as a first scheme of a technological revolution, since he presents how
a change brought by a new machine triggered a chain of events that affected the whole
economy (Marx 1867, pp. 505-506).
5 Previous work has investigated those notebooks and two publications dealt with B108,
B109 and B113 (Paula et al. 2013 and 2016).
6 The section P of the IISG’s Marx and Engels Archives seems to be little used so far.
It deals with Zeitungsausschnitte, with 25 different boxes. A discussion of its meaning and
its usefulness as a research tool could be a topic for further elaboration. There are other
articles that might illustrate Marx (and also Engels) interest in this topic (see archive P14, for example). Furthermore, other little explored sections like J (Excerpts from Engels)
would also enrich investigations like ours.
7 It is well known that The Money Market Review presented itself as “a weekly record
of trade and finance: railway, insurance, mining, steam & other public companies”. This
presentation highlights how important were railways for “trade and finance” at that time.
7
SURPLUS PROFIT: A KEY CONCEPT FOR AN INVESTIGATION …
191
The Money Market Review), and again railways are highlighted among
the main topics of his curiosity: topic 5 in page 184 and topic 2-E in
page 286 (part of this scheme on the “crisis of 1866”, topic 2)—within
the topic on the United States, there is a reference to “American railways”
(p. 287). Chosen topics involve the “railway act of 1867” (p. 173) and
“Consolidation” (pp. 251–252).
Notebook B121 contains a long excerpt from the parliamentary report
of the “Royal Commission on Railways” (pages 105–129).
Notebook B133, with notes from both The Economist and The Money
Market Review—for 1868, and again in the Register there are topics on
railways (topic 4, pages 87–88).
In the 1870s, Marx apparently was exploring how investments in railways—remember, a new sector in his comments in Capital (see 1867,
p. 573)—could be related to a new phase in capitalism. Our research
group explored this possibility in a previous paper (Paula et al. 2020,
p. 107), mentioning that Marx had written to Danielson that “railways
were a ’couronnement de l’oeuvre’” and a “new starting point”. For Marx
“[t]he railways sprang up first as the couronnement de l’oeuvre in those
countries where modern industry was most developed, England, United
States, Belgium, France, etc. I call them the ‘couronnement de l’oeuvre’
not only in the sense that they were at last (together with steamships
for oceanic intercourse and the telegraphs) the means of communication
adequate to the modern means of production, but also in so far as they
were the basis of immense joint-stock companies, forming at the same
time a new starting point for all other sorts of joint-stock companies,
to commence by banking companies” (CW , v. 45, p. 356; MEW ¸v. 34,
p. 372).
This letter is important because, written in 1874, it is between the
publication of Volume 1 (1867) and Engels edition of Volume 3 (between
1885 and 1894) and his Chapter 4, with the reference of railways as
part of a revolution in transport and communication so important as the
industrial revolution.
Also in the 1870s, Marx read an article published by the Times (13
August 1875) intitled “Railway progress” (this article is available in the
ARCHIVE P 12—”Ausschnitte über Eisenbahnfragen”—p. 13). This
article is interesting, in addition to being another evidence of Marx’s
interest in the railways, because it summarizes the history of a new
product—railroad since the beginning, as it celebrates the 50th anniversary of the “Stockton and Darlington railway, said to be the first line
192
E. DA MOTTA E ALBUQUERQUE
used for the conveyance of the general traffic” (Times, 13 August 1875).
The article goes on to present statistics on railways and concludes with
a reference to 1874, when the “net receipts exceeded half a million a
week”—another indication of profits made in that business.
Notebook B161—prepared in 1881 and 1882—brings new material
for our understanding of Marx investigations. In that Notebook Marx
took long notes on two articles that deal with railways in the United
States. But, although those articles are on railways, they present indications of deeper changes in the United States—the rise of a new sector,
with an emerging firm that was then establishing a near monopoly
situation: the oil industry under the leadership of Standard Oil.
One article is intitled “The story of a great monopoly” (Lloyd 1880).
The article begins mentioning Vanderbilt—”Vanderbilt was the richest
man in Europe or America, and the largest owner of railroads in the
world” (Lloyd 1880)—a familiar name for Marx, as his excerpts on the
US railways show. As this article unfolds, there is a reference that might
have captured Marx’s attention: ”Commodore Vanderbilt is reported to
have said that there was but one man—Rockefeller—who could dictate
to him. Whether or not Vanderbilt said it, Rockefeller did it” (Lloyd
1880). Lloyd describes this emerging economic power—Standard Oil—
producing a new product—kerosene from petroleum—that was important
for illumination.8 This article brings a detailed account of the origins of
Standard Oil, also presenting how an innovation was at the origin of that
future conglomerate: “This company began in a partnership, in the early
years of the civil war, between Samuel Andrews and John Rockefeller in
Cleveland. Rockefeller had been a bookkeeper in some interior town in
Ohio, and had afterwards made a few thousand dollars by keeping a flour
store in Cleveland. Andrews had been a day laborer in refineries, and so
poor that his wife took in sewing. He found a way of refining by which
more kerosene could be got out of a barrel of petroleum than by any
other method, and set up for himself a ten-barrel still in Cleveland, by
8 Kerosene may be an example of an advance in chemistry that Marx had speculated in
Capital: “[e]very advance in chemistry not only multiplies the number of useful materials,
and the useful applications of those already known, thus extending capital’s sphere of
investment along with its growth” (1867, p. 754).
7
SURPLUS PROFIT: A KEY CONCEPT FOR AN INVESTIGATION …
193
which he cleared $500 in six months. Andrews’ still and Rockefeller’s
savings have grown into the Standard Oil Company” (Lloyd 1882).9
Lloyd’s article describes the consolidation process of Standard Oil
under Rockefeller, in that time almost a monopolist—information that
was latter organized by Chandler (1977, p. 321), that informs that
in 1881 Standard Oil “controlled 90 percent of the country’s refining
capacity”. A look at Marx’s excepts (Notebook B161, p. 31 and p. 32)
on Lloyd’s article shows that he highlighted two words: kerosene and
Rockefeller.10 Kerosene from petroleum may be seen as a new product—
invented and improved between 1846 and 1851—later produced by
Standard Oil, a firm established in 1870. Kerosene was produced and
traded by Standard Oil—according to Chandler (1977, p. 418), in 1882
Standard Oil detained two-thirds of the global production of kerosene.
Standard Oil is part of this article given the prices and conditions that the
emerging oil conglomerate was able to impose on the other monopoly,
the American railway system.
The other article excerpted by Marx, “Railroads and the people”
(Thurber 1880), an article that mentions Vanderbilt, Gould, Fisk—and
the Eire Railroad—also discusses how Standard Oil’s had privileges in the
use of the railroad networks.11 Again, Marx highlights Standard Oil as a
topic of this article (see Notebook B161, p. 28).
Standard Oil, in itself, is an excellent example of the vicissitudes and
unexpected changes that an economy pushed by innovations can face: in
1881, the date of Lloyd’s article excerpted by Marx, it was a conglomerate
based on the strong market power with one commodity—kerosene—then
important for illumination. In the twentieth century, Standard Oil would
continue to be an important corporation, but with one important change:
9 Schumpeter (1939, p. 384) writes that “[p]etroleum for lighting purposes was one
of the great innovations—a New Commodity in our sense—of the second Kondratiev”.
After this comment, Schumpeter describes the number of refineries in 1865—195 mostly
in Ohio—and the biggest enterprise—”that of Rockefeller, Andrews and Flagler”. Standard
Oil is described by Schumpeter as an “outstanding example” of “the completion of an
organizational innovation” (p. 385).
10 A search for the words “kerosin”, “petroleum” and “öl” in the Mega Digital returned
no results. The same search for the work “kohle” returned 111 results (http://telota.
bbaw.de/mega/).
11 Those discounts and rebates were very important for the overall performance of
Standard Oil, as Lamoreaux (2019, p. 96) comments: “Standard’s rapid rise to dominance
owed more to railroad rebates than to any initial advantage in efficiency”.
194
E. DA MOTTA E ALBUQUERQUE
gasoline would become its most important product. Two innovations
displaced and replaced Standard Oil’s main product: first, electricity, with
its electric lamp, displaced kerosene as a product for illumination; second,
the combustion engine created a demand for a secondary by-product of
petroleum refining process—gasoline. As Chandler (1977, p. 350) puts
forward, in the first two decades of the twentieth century “[t]he new
demand for gasoline appeared just as the rapid spread of electricity for
light was reducing the demand for kerosene”.
Lloyd (1880) and Thurber (1880) are two articles that are indications
that Marx was taking notes of a new transformation in capitalism, a period
when the effects of the America network of railroads were having a huge
effect on the reorganization of American capitalism, with the rise of giant
firms and new market structures—monopolies and oligopolies—described
by Chandler (1977).
In sum: following the movements of extraordinary profits, additional
capitals were applied to new branches and new inventions—railways in
particular, Marx got references and indications of other new sectors and
other transformations led by new products. Furthermore, those transformations also presented an indication of a new leading center of global
capitalism, the United States.12 Schumpeter, with the privilege of hindsight, wrote: “[i]n the same sense it is possible to associate the second
Kondratiev with railroads, and with the same qualifications, the third can
be associated with electricity” (1939, p. 397). What could Marx have seen
of this change in the early 1880s?
12 Notebook B161 is a good illustration of Marx’s interest on the United States, as
there are at least eight articles—28 pages—on diverse aspects of American economy and
society excerpted there, including an article on “Political Economy in the US” (B161,
p. 51). Among materials from other Notebooks, there is in B143 (pp. 25-42) an extensive review of an Annual Report from the Ohio Bureau of Labour Statistics (OBLS
1878), with detailed investigations on the economic structure of that state—see statistics of employment in agriculture, manufacturing and other sectors (OBLS, p. 40; B143,
p. 5). In page 222, there is a reference to the Standard Oil—a company created in 1871,
according to that report—as is described in Chandler, the Ohio Standard Oil was the first
firm of the later conglomerate (Chandler 1977, p. 321).
7
SURPLUS PROFIT: A KEY CONCEPT FOR AN INVESTIGATION …
195
Investigations on Electricity: Witnessing
the Beginning of a New Technological Revolution
After MEGA2, we know that Marx was following the emergence of electricity (Notebook B162). The role of science in the capitalist dynamics is
another important contribution of Marx, as Rosenberg (1976) explains.
The relationship between the technological application of science and
profits—and surplus profits—may be traced throughout Marx’s works.
Basically, for Marx “science and technology give capital a power of expansion which is independent of the given magnitude of the capital actually
functioning” (1867, p. 754). The role of science as a determinant of the
productivity of labor is presented in the first section of the first chapter
of Volume 1: one of the five determinants listed there is “the level of
development of science and its application to technology” (1867, p. 130).
And, as reviewed in Section 2, Marx elaborated extensively on how the
productivity of labor is a key component of relative surplus.
Mentioning one specific science—chemistry—Marx suggests how
scientific progress may open new spheres of application for capital (1867,
p. 754). Therefore, it is not surprising that Marx would be highly curious
about new fields of science and the possibilities of their application to
technology.
Electricity is a scientific field that Marx followed with interest, at least
since 1851 (see Paula et al. 2020, p. 102). This curiosity led Marx to read
and take notes from a book with information about inventions related to
electricity: La Physique Moderne: les principales applications de l’électricité
(Hospitalier 1882). Those notes are in Notebook B162 (pp. 200–203).
Those excerpts were deciphered in MEGA IV.31 (pp. 467–473) and
commented in MEGA IV.31-Apparat (pp. 875–886).
Hospitalier (1882) describes applications of electricity to industry and
its second edition—the edition that Marx read—is updated enough to
reveal how a Congress held within the Paris Exhibition in 1881 had
defined and agreed upon the basic standards and measures of electricity
(1882, p. 6). The stage of those innovations was so close to science at
that time that it was the theme of articles in the journal Nature. Nature
(1881a) describes “The International Exhibition and Congress of Electricity in Paris” and Nature (1881b, p. 118) presents an address of the
president of the British Royal Society that summarizes the resolutions of
“the meeting of a most important scientific congress—the International
Congress of Electricians, held at Paris”.
196
E. DA MOTTA E ALBUQUERQUE
Those resolutions represent an important part of those excepts by
Marx. He excerpted a comment on the process—a Commission of the
British Association was created in 1863 “pour établir un système coordené
de mesures publiques ”. The conclusion of its work was approved in the
International Congress in Paris, 15 September 1881 (Hospitalier 1882,
pp. 5–6; MEGA IV.31, p. 471).
According to the Editors of MEGA IV.31, Marx’s copy of Hospitalier’s
book had annotations throughout the whole book, evidence that he had
read the book before writing his notes (p. 879).
Hospitalier (1882) can be read as a list of new inventions, with each
chapter presenting one new product—new commodities: (1) “les piles
électriques”; (2) “les piles thermo- électriques”; (3) “les machines électrodynamiques”; (4) “les transformateurs et accumulaters électriques”; (5)
“les régulateurs”; (6) “les bougies électriques”; (7) “éclairage par incandescense”; (8) “télephones”; (9) “moteurs électriques”; (10) “le transport
de la force électrique à distance”. Each chapter described inventions and
inventors—names later associated with firms that grew and transformed
markets.
Sometimes there are references to patents, very recent patents, to stress
the novelties that this book described. For instance, there is a reference to Graham Bell’s patent of his model of telephone—a patent filed
on 14 February 1876 (Hospitalier, p. 217). Hospitalier (1882, p. 219)
mentions an article in Nature (1878) that mentions an experiment that
Bell presented in London in 1877—again, this highlights the importance of this invention to the scientific community of that time. Reading
Hospitalier, Marx was learning of innovations that would be a base for
leading firms in the United States. For Schumpeter (1939). “[t]elephones
began their carrier in 1877, when A. G. Bell floated a company for the
exploitation of his patent…” (p. 395).
A genealogy of an important firm can be traced from that patent:
“Bell’s patents became the legal cornerstone of the American Bell Telephone company, the progenitor of American Telephone & Telegraph
which American Bell established in 1885 as a subsidiary to develop
long-distance market” (John 2000, p. 87).13
13 Hospitalier (1882) might be a book useful for contemporary researchers as a guide
about which of those innovations survived the later process of selection. Hospitalier lists
other options available in 1881, such as a telephone from Siemens (p. 230) and from
Edison (pp. 235–236).
7
SURPLUS PROFIT: A KEY CONCEPT FOR AN INVESTIGATION …
197
In the case of one invention by Edison, the incandescent lamp (Hospitalier 1882, p. 177, p. 179), its patent was filed on 1 November 1879
(US patent # 223,898). Other inventions from Edison were explained by
Hospitalier: “rhéostat” (p. 204) and telephones (p. 235). Again, these
inventions by Edison led to patents and to new firms, that initiate a
genealogy that reaches an important modern corporation: Edison’s firms
led in 1889 to a merger that originated the Edison General Electric, later
involved in another round of mergers that led to The General Electric
Company, in 1892 (Chandler 1977, p. 427).
Siemens appears in Hospitalier in various topics: machine (p. 79),
bobbins Siemens (p. 304) and locomotives (p. 310). Siemens was then
a firm, described by Chandler as “the oldest of the global industry “big
four”, a company that “pioneered in the development of the telegraph
and cable equipment”. (Chandler 1990, p. 464). Chandler refers to the
leading role of Siemens “during the 1880s”, with “the firm’s innovative
work in the development of equipment for generation, transmission and
use of electric power and light” (p. 464).14
Deprez is an important inventor in Hospitalier’s book, mentioned in
relation to a motor (p. 301) and to transmission of electricity (p. 307).
Hospitalier (1882, p. 306–36) reports a series of experiments, among
them one from Deprez, to demonstrate how electricity can be transmitted
over long distances. It was mentioned by The New York Times: “the
great point in the system of M. Deprez is that he has solved the problem
of divisibility of electrical force and its transmission, I may say, over an
indefinite distance” (The New York Times, 22 October 1882).
The Editors of MEGA II.14 write about how Marx kept abreast of that
subject in the 1880s: “[s]ince 1881, Marx had been carefully following
all the news about the work and experiments of the French physicist
Marcel Deprez on the transmission of electrical power over long distances
using ordinary telephone wire. (See Marx to Engels, 8 November 1882)”
(Einfuhrung. II.14, p. 444)]. In that letter, it is easy to perceive the
interest in “Deprez’s experiment” (Archive L, p. 58).15
14 Telegraph and cable systems are inventions related to the second long cycle,
according to Kondratiev (1926, p. 39), that would have important positive feedbacks
with railways (Chandler 1977, Part II).
15 Schumpeter (1939, pp. 360–361) notices Deprez’s experiments, including one in
Frankfurt.
198
E. DA MOTTA E ALBUQUERQUE
Those references from the MEGA Project and from Marx’s Notebooks
show that in the early 1880s Marx could see the beginning of a new
technological revolution, following the first steps of a new phase, concentrating his attention on learning the new basic knowledge of this emerging
new era. It is not an accident that he did excerpt the units of measurement
related to those new technologies (Notebook B162, p. 199).16
A Schumpeterian Connection
Marx’s elaboration on extra profits and technological progress transits
between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries through Schumpeter’s
elaboration.
Schumpeter’s scheme is clearly shown in the second chapter of The
Theory of Economic Development (Schumpeter 1911), where there is
an entrepreneur, with an idea of an innovation and without money,
that borrows from a bank and invests to implement the innovation. If
successful, the entrepreneur captures a profit, that is as temporary as his
monopoly of the innovation. As the imitation process takes place, the
profit vanishes. All issues in this scheme are present in Marx (1867)
and there is ample literature on the connections between Marx and
Schumpeter.17
Schumpeter himself wrote the first part of Capitalism socialism and
democracy (Schumpeter 1942) as an evaluation of Marx’s contribution:
“The Marxian doctrine”, divided in four chapters: “the prophet”, “the
sociologist”, “the economist” and “the teacher”. Schumpeter inaugurated a type of analysis by “cutting Marx into pieces and discussing them
one by one” (p. 9). In the end, his project was an “interpretation in
16 According to MEGA IV.31 (p. 611), Engels also did this, taking notes from an
article from Nature (1882).
17 As a recent and illustrative example of this line of discussion, there is a short debate
in the Industrial and Corporate Change about a paper from Nathan Rosenberg (2011):
Was Schumpeter Marxist? There are two answers: a yes, in the Rosenberg’s sense, from
Lazonick (2011) and a no, from Galombos (2011). Of course, the exact position of
Schumpeter in relation to schools of economic thought is deeply controversial, as other
two papers suggest: “Was Schumpeter Walrasian?” (Knell 2012); “Schumpeter and Mises
as ‘Austrian economists’” (Vanberg 2015). These issues are important for the history of
economic thought but not important for this paper. What matters here is Schumpeter’s
role as a connection between Marx’s elaboration and contemporary thought, independent
of his classification within economic currents.
7
SURPLUS PROFIT: A KEY CONCEPT FOR AN INVESTIGATION …
199
a conservative sense”, a way of “saying that he can be taken seriously”
(p. 58).
How positive was Schumpeter’s opinion on Marx, we can read in his
chapter on “the process of creative destruction”: “The essential point to
grasp is that dealing with capitalism we are dealing with an evolutionary
process. It may seem strange that anyone fail to see so obvious a fact
which moreover was long ago emphasized by Karl Marx” (p. 82).
Although Schumpeter’s scheme in The Theory of Economic Development
made no reference to Marx or to Chapter 10 of Capital , his History of
Economic Analysis, posthumously published in 1954, shows the roots of
his profit-innovation connection. In a chapter reviewing the period “from
1790 to 1870”, Schumpeter presents different concepts of profit, and
after outlining three “types of return”, he introduces a very special form:
“it should be observed that, occasionally, both Ricardo and Marx recognized a fourth type of return, of an essentially temporary nature, that
accrues to the businessman, namely, the return he derives for a time from
the first introduction into the economic process of a novel improvement
such as a new machine. They thus discovered a special case of what is
really the most typical of all entrepreneurial gains” (Schumpeter 1954,
p. 646).
This “most typical of all entrepreneurial gains” can be read as exactly
the type of gains that he, Schumpeter, presented in Chapter 2 of The
Theory of Economic Development. What is also relevant for the argument
presented in this section, is an observation that Schumpeter makes in a
footnote linked to that “fourth type of return”, as he stresses the importance of this type for both Ricardo and Marx: they “not only recognized
the existence of this gain but made it an essential part of their analytic
structure. With Marx it is particularly clear that it was indispensable for
him because it motivated the process of mechanization which, as he saw,
does not benefit the ’capitalist’ class permanently” (footnote #6, p. 646).
This comment of how ”indispensable” for Marx was this type of profit
makes a link with a dynamic nature of capitalism, through a suggestion
that “mechanization” would be only a first process, given the temporary
gains that it would give to capitalists. Those two references from Schumpeter may be read as indications of how he learned with Marx about extra
profits and their relationship with new technological changes.
Although only in the History of Economic Analysis does Schumpeter explain the genealogy of his interpretation of “most typical of all
entrepreneurial gains”, his elaboration on the relationship between profit
200
E. DA MOTTA E ALBUQUERQUE
and innovation and the search for profits as a driving force of dynamic in
capitalism was popularized and brought to the twentieth century one key
piece of Marx’s elaboration.
This connection can be later more thoroughly researched for one very
special case: the elaboration of Kondratiev on long cycles of capitalism.
In this case, Schumpeter has a dual role. First, Schumpeter’s The Theory
of Economic Development is part of the references used by Kondratiev in
his initial works (see Kondratiev 1922, 1926 and 1928). Schumpeter may
have influenced him in the assessment that among the major causes of
long waves there were changes in technology—”far-reaching changes in
the conditions of manufacturing techniques and capacity (which in turn as
preceded by significant technical inventions and discoveries)” (Kondratiev
1926, p. 38). Second, Schumpeter learned with Kondratiev’s elaboration and developed his views on cycles, presented in his Business cycles
(Schumpeter 1939), where he included the 50-year cycle and named it
the “Kondratiev cycle”.
In Business Cycles Schumpeter links those two points: he mentions high
profits in then new sectors like oil (p. 26, p. 418) and cars (p. 263),
as part of the dynamics that he identifies in Marx’s analysis of mechanization: those new industries also do “not benefit the ’capitalist’ class
permanently”.
This Schumpeterian connection enables us to follow how the new
inventions listed by Hospitalier and read by Marx would develop. Almost
half a century later, Kondratiev (1926, p. 40) could list “major changes”
in technology: “the most important technological inventions include
Gramme’s DC dynamo (1875), DC power transmission (1877), the electric telephone (1877), …., Siemens’s electric locomotive (1878), …, the
electric railway (1880), electrical welding and smelting (1881–9), electric trams (1881), transformers (1882), …, the electric lift (1887), AC
power transmission (1891), electro smelting (1892), wireless telegraphy
(1892)…” (p. 40). Kondratiev’s list for his third long wave suggests that
Hospitalier (1882) was able to present just the first batch of technological
innovations that would characterize a new phase of capitalism. Still later,
for Schumpeter (1939, p. 395), “[e]lectric current for light and power
dates really from 1882, when Edison’s hydroelectric station in Appleton,
7
SURPLUS PROFIT: A KEY CONCEPT FOR AN INVESTIGATION …
201
Wis., his thermoelectric station in New York, and the one in Chicago
went into operation” (p. 395).18
Those observations from Kondratiev and Schumpeter are important
to contextualize what Marx was able to see—just part of a larger set of
then-emerging technologies, with a real beginning after the publication
of Hospitalier’s book.
The Role of Surplus Profit in the Economic
History of Twentieth Century Capitalism
Schumpeter in his Business Cycles (1939) mentions firms that had been
created using the new technologies that Marx was reading about and
excerpting—Bell, General Electric and Siemens, in his book are no longer
names of inventors or owners of new firms, but big firms (General Electric
in page 413, Siemens in page 439) that shaped new market structures—
monopolies and oligopolies. Those new market structures are one of
the major subjects of his Capitalism, socialism and democracy (1942).
From a post-Kondratiev point of observation, Schumpeter could think
about the dynamic underlying those big firms and reshape the elaboration on the sources of the large market shares owned by those firms:
those firms needed to keep their innovative drive. Broadening the conception of capitalist competition, to include other dimensions put forward
by innovation, Schumpeter highlighted the role of actual and potential
competition, from existing and potential rivals. What really matters is
“the competition from the new commodity, the new technology, the new
source of supply, the new type of organization” (1942, p. 84). This is not
only today’s competition, but also “an ever-present threat” (1942, p. 85).
Schumpeter (1939, p. 417), explaining how Standard Oil migrated
from kerosene to gasoline, wrote about an excellent example of those
possible but unpredictable changes. Standard Oil, as Marx had read from
Lloyd’s article, was a powerful firm with a strong market power from
its kerosene production. Kerosene, as Lloyd (1880) explained, was an
illuminant. Hospitalier (1882) shows the emergence of new forms of illumination through the electric light—and Marx read that piece. Electric
18 David (1989, p. 35) shows statistics of the diffusion of electricity throughout the
United States. His Table 3 shows that in 1889 the rate of “electrification of mechanical
drive in manufacturing establishments” was only 3%, in 1904, 11.5% and in 1939, 86.1%.
A classical paper on difusion of radical innovations.
202
E. DA MOTTA E ALBUQUERQUE
lights would mean “decay” for kerosene producers. However, the emergence of a new commodity—the automobile—19 created a new demand
for gasoline, and this demand transformed the oil industry that, according
to Schumpeter, “became a subsidiary to the gasoline engine” (1939,
p. 417).
Chandler summarizes this whole process: first, there was “the coming
of a huge new market after 1900—that created by the automobile”;
second, “the new demand for gasoline appeared just as the rapid spread of
electricity for light was sharply reducing the demand for kerosene” (1977,
p. 350). The transition from kerosene to gasoline had big technological
and engineering challenges, that a company such as Standard Oil was able
to respond to. Therefore, its survival depended upon its technological
capabilities.20
Joe Bain extended that Schumpeterian insight on potential competition
and developed a new line of research on the effects of potential entry—
with a special attention to profits: research on barriers of entry. Since his
initial works, there was an investigation on the relationship between the
rate of profit and industrial structure. Bain’s investigations led to his book:
Barriers to new competition (Bain 1956), which highlighted the importance of inter-industry differences in profitability. Data on rates of profit
of individual firms were collected and evaluated at the level of specific
industries. Bain’s work, with a dialogue with other contemporary authors
such as Labini and Steindl, built a theoretical foundation for the understanding of oligopolies as a dominant form of market structure of the
1950s and 1960s.
Bain’s barriers to entry opened a new field in economics—industrial
economics or industrial organization. Schmalensee (1989) and Scherer
and Ross (1990) organize broad reviews of this literature, where the
behavior of the rate of profit is key to understanding the performance
of modern economies such as the post-war US. Schmalensee (1989)
19 The beginning of the automobile industry in the United States, for Klepper (1997,
p. 154), is in 1895—see his Fig. 2, for the “entry, exit and numbers of automobile producers” (p. 153). Kondratiev’s list of “significant inventions” related to the “rising wave of
the third long cycle” includes “petrol engine (1885)” and “the Diesel engine (1893)”
(Kondratiev 1926, p. 40). Schumpeter (1939, p. 415) mentions German production of
automobiles in the 1880s.
20 Information on the technological side of Standard Oil is presented by Scherer (2011).
Rosenberg (1998, p. 180) shows how “[a]fter 1920 the history of chemical engineering
simply became inseparable from the history of petroleum refining”.
7
SURPLUS PROFIT: A KEY CONCEPT FOR AN INVESTIGATION …
203
organizes a long list of empirical regularities selected after a survey of
the literature on industrial organization, basically inspired by interpretations of Bain’s hypotheses, especially that “high concentration and high
barriers to entry were necessary to produce excess profits in the longrun equilibrium” (p. 969). In this list, two stylized facts deserve to
be mentioned, both related to important indicators of innovative activities. First, advertising intensity is “positively related to industry-average
account profitability” (SF 4.8) and second, R&D intensity is “positively
related to profitability” (SF 4.9). Beyond those correlations, Schmalensee
(1989, pp. 969–987) points out the existence of variability in profits,
inter-industry differences that may be related to, as Bain had already
found, differences in concentration and in market shares. Profit rates
also present important variability (Section 4.6). Scherer and Ross (1990)
may be read as a broad literature review of research done after Bain’s
hypotheses. Profit rates are important throughout the whole book, which
can be read as a collection of empirical evidence on rates of profit, their
changing determinants, their variability and their ups and downs through
time, industrial sectors and even specific firms.
The literature on entry barriers opened a dialogue with the elaboration
on industry life cycles. In this dialogue, the role of differences in rates of
profit is central. For Caves and Porter “[t[he entry barriers surrounding
an industry can be viewed as a collective capital good, generating joint
profits for the going firms” (1977, p. 247). This line of research led to
another, that focuses on the persistence of inter- and intra-industry differences in rates of profit. Caves and Porter suggest that “without intergroup
immobility it would be hard to explain persistent differences in profit rates
among groups within an industry” (1977, p. 254). For them, “[p]rofit
rates may differ systematically among the groups making up an industry,
the differences stemming from competitive advantages that a group may
possess against others” (Caves and Porter 1977, p. 251).
In another strand of this literature, Klepper (1997) describes the
changes in profitability during an “industry life cycle”, an introduction
of movements in the rate of profit over time. For instance, in the initial
phases “[t]he absence of size advantages coupled with large prospective
returns to successful innovation attracts many entrants” (p. 149). Caves
(1998) articulates both strands of the literature in a survey, mentioning
Baldwin’s works that ”suggested industry life cycles as an explanation:
at early stages both entry/exit turnover and profitability are high; in
maturity both decline”. (p. 1965).
204
E. DA MOTTA E ALBUQUERQUE
Chandler (1990) writes an excellent history of leading firms in the
twentieth century. Those inventors and inventions read by Marx in
the Hospitalier book are already transformed in big and leading firms
in the United States and Germany—AT&T (p. 212), General Electric
(p. 217) and Siemens (p. 547). Chandler presents a systematization of the
“dynamics of industrial capitalism”, built on his research on the history
of firms, and attributes a key role for the “first-movers”: leading firms
with investments in production, management and marketing—innovations on all fronts—that enable those pioneers to grow, transform markets
from competitive to oligopolist, based on their “powerful competitive
advantages or first-mover advantages” (p. 34). Those capabilities provided
profits (p. 36), or “high profits” (p. 37) that “in large part financed the
continuing growth of the enterprise” (p. 36).
This growth, during the twentieth century took four different forms:
(1) mergers, (2) vertical integration, (3) “expand geographically to distant
areas” and 4) “to make new products that were related to existing
technologies or markets” (p. 37).
The expansion to new geographical areas is related to an important
phenomenon of the 1950s: the emergence of the multinational firm as a
leading institution of global capitalism (Hymer 1970). As the researchers
on this subject put forward, the internationality is a source of “strength
and ability” (Hymer 1970, p. 441) and multinationality is a new source
of advantages for the firm (Dunning and Lundan 2008, p. 101).
Finally, bringing the literature on the theory of the firm, Teece (2010)
presents a broad and updated survey on the innovative firm—the firm that
aims at extra profits. In his review, as already pointed, Teece comments
on the resources available and used by leading firms in the first decade of
the twenty-first century. Teece uses different terms to express those extra
profits: “Sustained ‘abnormal’ or ‘supernormal’ profitability”; “take full
advantage and earn superior profits”; “foundations for sustained aboveaverage profitability” (2010. p. 722), “abnormal returns” (p. 702). In the
abstract of his chapter, Teece (2010, p. 680) highlights the importance
of this concept: “Complementarities and cospecialization are advanced as
two emerging concepts of particular relevance to a theory of the innovating enterprise earning above-normal returns”. In his presentation of
one important approach to the theory of the firm, Teece summarizes it
as follows: “Dynamic Capabilities are the firm’s ability to integrate, build,
and reconfigure internal and external resources/competences to address
7
SURPLUS PROFIT: A KEY CONCEPT FOR AN INVESTIGATION …
205
and shape rapidly changing business environments”. Those dynamic capabilities, therefore, are ground to achieve the firm’s basic goal: “abnormal
returns”.
Concluding Remarks
Marx with his elaboration on the connection between extra profits and
technological change defines a key driving force of the capitalist system.
This driving force can be seen as an organizer of a complex system that is
modern industrial capitalism.
Marx interprets capitalism as a system that connects through the
market all parts of the system, with long chains of events interconnected
and with mutual influences and feedbacks. Rubin (1926) describes very
well those interconnections through the market. Rubin points out that a
capitalist market system makes the producers internalize markets demands
during the planning stage and before the production phase (p. 80). The
market connects producers and buyers, as well as different producers
of branches of production, different places and different countries. For
Rubin, “[t]hrough exchange and the value of commodities, the working
activity of some commodity producers affects the working activity of
others, and causes determined modifications. On the other hand, these
modifications influence the working activity itself. Individual parts of the
social economy adjust to each other” (1926, pp. 80–81).
Any and all changes introduced at any place of the whole market—
consumer demand, new products, new production techniques—affect the
whole system, even already produced commodities (retroactive effects):
“this reacts back on all old commodities of the same type” (Marx 1867,
p. 318).
Those interconnections are part of the dynamic of the system, organized by capital, more precisely, by the search for profits as a driving force.
The system can be interpreted as self-organized, as Marx stresses, after
pointing the basic process of self-valorization (p. 255), as an “automatic
subject” (p. 255), “a constant renewed movement”, “limitless” (p. 253),
“unceasing movement of profit making” (p. 254).
Those two very basic structural features of modern capitalism—(1)
interconnections within the market and (2) a driving force from the profit
motive—seem to provide the foundation for a self-organized system.
The driving force of this system—search for extra profits—shapes
another structural feature, as it behaves as ”an expansionary force” (Marx
206
E. DA MOTTA E ALBUQUERQUE
1867, p. 826). This basic force determines that this self-organized system
is a constantly expanding system. Therefore, a system that originated in
one very peculiar region of our Earth—England—after 200 years involves
all of our planet—in the making of global capitalism, as Panitch and
Gindin (2012) discuss.
The profit motive, with its dynamics that show fractal properties
(Ribeiro et al. 2017a), is at the center of this self-organized system, a
system with an expansionary dynamic (Ribeiro et al. 2017b).
If the connection between the search for extra profits and innovation is
a key organizing principle of modern capitalism as a self-organized system,
the elaboration on its overcoming must deal with a substitution of this
powerful driving force, by another that is more innovation-inducing and
has a technological orientation that is led by mechanisms that challenge
inequality, war and environmental destruction.
Competing Interests The authors have no conflicts of interest to declare that
are relevant to the content of this chapter.
References
Albuquerque, E. M. Revoluções tecnológicas e general purpose technologies:
mudança técnica, dinâmica e transformações do capitalismo. In: Rapini, M.
S.; Ruffoni, J.; Silva, L. A.; Albuquerque, E. M. (Org.) Economia da ciência,
tecnologia e inovação. Fundamentos teóricos e a economia global. 2ed. Belo
Horizonte: Cedeplar-UFMG, v. 1, p. 53–83, 2021.
Albuquerque, E. M. Complex systems: Introductory notes on a dialogue among
political economy, evolutionary economics and physics. PSL Quarterly Review,
v. 77 (310): 247–261, 2024.
Bain, Joe. Barriers to new competition. Harvard: Harvard University, 1956.
Barret, W. F. The telephone, its history and its recent improvements. Nature, v.
18 (470): 698–700, 31 October 1878.
Caves, R. Industrial organization and new findings on the turnover and mobility
of firms. Journal of Economic Literature, v. 36: 1947-1982, 1998.
Caves, R.; Porter, M. From entry barriers to mobility barriers: conjectural decisions and contrived deterrence to new competition. Quaterly Journal of
Economics, v. 91:. 241-261, 1977.
Chandler JR., A. The visible hand—The managerial revolution in America
business. London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1977.
Chandler JR., A. Scale and scope: The dynamics of industrial capitalism. Harvard:
Belknap, 1990.
7
SURPLUS PROFIT: A KEY CONCEPT FOR AN INVESTIGATION …
207
David, P. Computer and dynamo: The modern productivity paradox in a not-too
distant mirror. Stanford: Stanford University (Discussion Paper No. 339),
1989.
Dunning, J.; Lundan, S. M. Multinational enterprise and the global economy.
Alderhot: Edward Elgar, 2008.
Galambos, L. A comment on Nathan Rosenberg’s question: “Was Schumpeter a
marxist”? Industrial and Corporate Change, v. 20 (4): 1223-1227, 2011.
Hospitalier, E. La physique moderne: les principales applications de l’électricité.
Paris: G. Masson, Éditeur (Deuxième édition), 1882.
Hymer, S. The efficiency (contradictions) of multinational corporations. American Economic Review, v. 60 (2): 441-448, 1970.
John, R. R. Recasting the information infrastructure for the industrial age. In:
Chandler JR. A.; Cortada, J. W. (ed.), A nation transformed by information:
How information has shaped the United States from colonial times to the present.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 55-106, 2000.
Klepper, S. Industry life cycles. Industrial and Corporate Change, v. 6 (1): 145202, 1997.
Knell, M. Was Schumpeter walrasian? Oslo: NIFU Nordic Institute for Studies
in Innovation, Research and Education, 2012
Kondratiev, N. D. Long Cycles of Economic Conjuncture.” In Natalia Makasheva, Warren J. Samuels and Vincent Barnett (eds.), The Works of Nikolai D.
Kondratiev (vol. 1). London: Pickering and Chato, pp. 25–60, [1926] 1998.
Lamoreaux, N. The problem of bigness: from Standard Oil to Google. Journal
of Economic Perspectives, v. 33 (3): 94-117, 2019.
Lloyd, X. The story of a great monopoly. (https://www.theatlantic.com/mag
azine/archive/1881/03/the-story-of-a-great-monopoly/306019/), 1880
Lazonik, W. Comment on Nathan Rosenberg, “Was Schumpeter a marxist”?
Industrial and Corporate Change, v. 20 (4): 1229-1233, 2011.
Louçã, Francisco. Bounded heresies, early intuitions of complexity in economics.
History of Economic Ideas, v. XVIII (2): 77–113, 2010.
Marx, K. Capital, Volume I . London: Penguin Books, 1976/1867.
Marx, K. Capital, Volume III. London: Penguin Books, 1981/1894.
Marx, K.; Engels, F. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/
communist-manifesto/ch01.htm,1848
Müller, H-P. Karl Marx über Maschinerie, Kapital und industrielle Revolution. Exzerpte und Manuskriptentwürfe 1851–1861. Springen Fachmedien
Wiesbanden GmbH, 1992.
Nature. The International Exhibition and Congress of Electricity at Paris, v. 24
(622): 511–512, 29 September 1881a.
Nature. The Royal Society—Address of the President, v 25, v. 631: 115–119, 1
December 1881b.
208
E. DA MOTTA E ALBUQUERQUE
Nature. Electric lighting, the transmission of force by electricity 2. Nature, v. 27:
67–71 (1882). https://doi.org/10.1038/027067b0
Ohio Bureau of Labor Statistics. First annual report. Columbus: Nevin &
Myers State Printers. (https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=nnc1.cu0858
6837&view=1up&seq=5), 1878
Panitch, l.; Gindin, S. The making of global capitalism: the political economy of
American Empire. London: Verso. 2012.
Paula, J. A.; Cerqueira, H.; Cunha, A. M.; Suprinyak, C. E.; De Deus, L. G.;
Albuquerque, E. M. Notes on a crisis: the Exzerpthefte and Marx’s method
of research and composition. The Review of Radical Political Economics, v. 45
(2): 162-182, 2013.
Paula, J. A.; De Deus, L. G.; Cerqueira, H.; Suprinyak, C. E.; Albuquerque,
E. M. Investigating Financial Innovation and Stock Exchanges. Marx‘s Notebooks on the crisis of 1866 and structural changes in capitalism. Beiträge zur
Marx-Engels-Forschung, v. 2014/5: 194–217, 2016.
Paula, J. A.; Deus, L. G.; Cerqueira, H. E. A. G. ; Albuquerque, E. M. New
starting point(s): Marx, technological revolutions and changes in the centreperiphery divide. Brazilian Journal of Political Economy, v. 40 (1): 100-116,
2020.
Perez, C. Technological revolutions and techno-economic paradigms. Cambridge
Journal of Economics, v. 34, n. 1, pp. 185–202, 2010.
Ribeiro, L. C.; Deus, L. G.; Loureiro, P. M., Albuquerque, E. M. Profits and
fractal properties: notes on Marx, countertendencies and simulation models.
Review of Political Economy, v. 29 (2): 282–306 (disponível em https://doi.
org/10.1080/09538259.2016.1265823), 2017a
Ribeiro, L. C.; Deus, L. G.; Loureiro, P. M., Albuquerque, E. M. A network
model for the complex behavior of the rate of profit: exploring a simulation model with overlapping technological revolutions. Structural Change and
Economic Dynamics, v. 43: 51–61 (disponível em https://doi.org/10.1016/
j.strueco.2017.07.001), 2017b
Ricardo, D. The works and correspondence of David Ricardo, ed. Piero Sraffa
with the Collaboration of M.H. Dobb. Vol. 1 Principles of political economy
and taxation. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund (2005), 1821
Rosenberg, N. Perspectives on technology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1976.
Rosenberg, N. Chemical engineering as a General Purpose Technology. In:
Helpman, E. (ed.), General Purpose Technologies and economic growth.
Cambridge, Mass./London: The MIT Press, pp. 167–192, (1998).
Rosenberg, N. Was Schumpeter a marxist? Industrial and Corporate Change, v.
20 (4): 1215-1222, 2011.
Rubin, I. Essays on Marx’s theory of value. Delhi: Aakar Books (2008), 1926.
7
SURPLUS PROFIT: A KEY CONCEPT FOR AN INVESTIGATION …
209
Scherer, F.; David R. Industrial market structure and economic performance.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990.
Scherer, F. M. Standard oil as a technological innovator. Review of Industrial
Organization, v. 38 (3), 2011, pp. 225–233. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/
23884925. Accessed 15 June 2021.
Schumpeter, J. A. A teoria do desenvolvimento econômico. São Paulo: Nova
Cultural (1985), 1911.
Schumpeter, J. A. Business cycles: A theoretical, historical and statistical analysis of
the capitalist process (2 vols.). New York and London: McGraw-Hill, 1939.
Schumpeter, J. A. Capitalismo, socialismo e democracia. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar
Editores (1984), 1942.
Schumpeter, J. A. History of economic analysis. London: Allen & Unwin, 1954.
Teece, D. Technological innovation and the theory of the firm: The role of
enterprise-level knowledge, complementarities, and (dynamic) capabilities. In:
Hall, B.; Rosenberg, N. (eds), Handbook of the economics of innovation.
Volume I. Amsterdam: North Holland, pp. 679-730, 2010.
The New York Times. The Munich experiments, 1882 (https://timesmachine.
nytimes.com/timesmachine/1882/10/22/102795096.pdf)
Thurber, F. B. Railroads and the people. Scribner’s Monthly Magazine
(november) v. 21: 258-265, 1880.
Vanberg, V. J. Schumpeter and Mises as “Austrian economists”. Journal of
Evolutionary Economy, v. 25: 91–105, 2015.
Index
A
Adoratskij, Vladimir, 9, 13
American Bell Telephone Co., 192
Anderson, Kevin, 4, 74, 168, 170
Andrews, Samuel, 188
Aricó, José, 48, 49, 51, 55, 57
AT&T, 200
B
Bain, Joe, 183, 198, 199
Bank of England, 77, 80, 85, 91, 93,
115, 117, 118, 123, 125, 138,
140, 142, 145, 165
Barriers to entry, 183, 198, 199
Bell, A.G., 171, 192
Bénac, Henri, 66
Bensaid, Daniel, 50
Burkett, Paul, 32, 33
C
Callinicos, Alex, 146
Capabilities, 180, 198, 200
Capital , 4, 10, 11, 20, 22, 24, 27,
29, 31–34, 36–44, 46, 52, 54,
57–59, 61, 62, 64–66, 176, 182,
187, 195
Caves, R., 199
Center-periphery divide, 159, 160,
164, 175, 176
Chandler, Alfred, 114, 126, 186, 189,
190, 193, 198, 200
Chasin, José, 154
China, 54, 170
Cícero, Vicenzo, 66
Communist Manifesto, 4
Complex system, 184, 201
Credit, 22–24, 38, 84, 89, 92, 94,
105, 110, 111, 113, 115, 121,
124–127, 142, 147, 150–153
Critique of the Gotha Program, 4, 29
D
Deprez, M., 171, 193
Dialectics, 32, 33, 38, 61, 62
Dunning, J., 200
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive
license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2025
J. A. de Paula et al. (eds.), Marx for the 21st Century, Marx, Engels,
and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22011-1
211
212
INDEX
E
Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts ,
3, 6
The Economist , 80, 85, 93, 105, 106,
116, 118, 136–140, 142, 145,
165, 169, 186, 187
Edison, Thomas, 171, 174, 193, 196
Electricity, 158–160, 171, 173, 174,
180, 190, 191, 193, 198
Engels, Friedrich, 3–5, 9–12, 20–23,
46–48, 55, 73–78, 81–85, 109,
113, 132, 149, 159, 171, 180,
184, 187
Entrepreneurial gain, 195
Environmental destruction, 202
Evans, David Morier, 136, 137
Expansionary forces, 201
Extra-profits, 180
Exzerpthefte (Excerpt notebooks), 6,
24, 71, 93
H
Hegel, G.W.F., 30, 32, 34, 36, 38,
61, 65, 66
Heinrich, Michael, 22, 23, 30, 31,
33, 57, 59, 60, 105, 124, 148
Hospitalier, Édouard, 171, 174, 176,
191–193, 196, 197, 200
Hymer, Steven, 200
F
Fausto, Ruy, 33
Firms, 86, 114, 125, 126, 141, 179,
190, 192, 193, 197, 199, 200
Foundations of a Critique of Political
Economy (Grundrisse), 6
Furtado, Celso, 164
I
India, 47, 51, 54, 81, 108, 158,
163–165, 170, 171, 175
Industrial revolution, 161, 162, 164,
174, 176, 184–187
Industry life cycle, 199
Inequality, 202
Innovation, 86, 119, 134, 145, 152,
158, 165, 166, 180, 183, 185,
188, 190, 192, 194, 196, 197,
200, 202
Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale
Geschiedenis (International
Institute of Social History), 11,
77
IISG Archives, 77
International division of labor,
166–168, 171, 175, 176
Internationale Marx-Engels-Stiftung
(International Marx-Engels
Foundation), 12
G
General Electric Company, 193
The German Ideology, 3, 6, 11, 13, 20
Giannotti, José Arthur, 28
Gindin, S., 202
Global capitalism, 157, 160, 167,
168, 190, 200, 202
Goschen, George Joachim, 78, 90,
91, 93
K
Kautsky, Karl, 3–5, 11, 74
Kerosene, 188–190, 197, 198
Keynes, J.M., 184
Klepper, S., 198, 199
Kliman, Andrew, 148
Kondratiev. N., 176, 196, 197
Kosik, Karel, 34–36
Krätke, Michael, 29–31, 60–62, 105,
165
INDEX
L
Lander, Edgardo, 48, 49
Limited Liability Act, 118, 122, 145
Louçã, Francisco, 174, 184
Lukács, Georg, 32, 39, 154
Lundan, Sarianna M., 200
M
Marginal Glosses on Adolph Wagner’s
Treatise, 29
Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA),
3, 5, 6, 8–10, 12, 13, 29, 34, 57,
59, 74–76, 84, 144, 160, 180,
194
Marx, Karl, 2–6, 8–11, 20, 21, 23,
24, 27–30, 32, 33, 35, 37,
41–62, 64–66, 72–78, 80–85,
88, 90–94, 105, 106, 108–113,
115–119, 121–127, 131, 132,
134–137, 139–145, 147–155,
158–163, 165–171, 173–176,
180–197, 201
Marx und Engels Werke (MEW), 80
Mergers, 193, 200
Modern industrial capitalism, 201
The Money Market Review, 80, 93,
105, 115, 117, 119, 120, 145,
165, 186, 187
Monopoly, 184, 188, 194
Mori, Kenji, 105, 144, 146
Moseley, Fred, 57, 149, 150
Multinational firm, 200
Multinationality, 200
N
Nicolaievski, Boris, 28, 29
O
Odyssey, 34–36, 42
213
Ohio Bureau of Labor Statistics
(OBLS), 190
Overend, Gurney & Co., 73, 85–88,
91, 92, 115, 120, 145
P
Panitch, L., 202
Paris Exhibition 1881, 191
Perez, Carlota, 162, 175
Petroleum, 188–190
Porter, M., 199
Pradella, Lucia, 125, 168
Profit, 21, 79, 84, 108–110, 133,
148–150, 152, 169, 179–181,
183–185, 191, 194–196,
198–202
Profit rate, 21, 109, 112, 184, 199
R
Railways, 80, 81, 84, 92, 114–117,
121, 123, 125, 126, 161,
165–169, 184–188, 190
Rate of profit, 59, 65, 79, 105, 124,
132, 133, 147–150, 152, 165,
183, 198, 199
Riazanov, David, 5, 6, 8, 9, 13, 74–76
Ribeiro, Leonardo Costa, 202
Ricardo, David, 41, 181, 195
Rónai, Paulo, 40
Rockefeller, John, 188, 189
The Rocket, 162
Rosdolsky, Roman, 31, 33, 57–60,
81, 106
Rosenberg, Nathan, 173, 180, 191
Ross, David, 198, 199
Rubel, Maximilien, 44, 57
Rubin, I.I., 41, 182, 201
Russia, 12, 29, 51–54, 57, 81, 108,
126, 127, 168–170
214
INDEX
S
Sainz de Robles, Frederico Carlos, 36
Santos, José Henrique, 66
Scaron, Pedro, 37, 46–49, 57, 61, 64,
168
Scherer, F., 198, 199
Schmalensee, R., 198, 199
Schumpeter, J.A., 180, 190, 192,
194–198
Self-organized system, 201, 202
Shanin, Theodor, 52, 54, 158, 160,
169–171
Siemens, 171, 173, 193, 196, 197,
200
Standard Oil, 188, 189, 197, 198
Surplus-profit, 179
T
Technological revolution, 160, 162,
163, 174–176, 184, 194
Teece, David, 179, 180, 200
Theories of Surplus Value, 82, 181
Theory of the firm, 200
Times , 187
U
United States, 12, 79–81, 108, 119,
126, 140, 166, 167, 176, 187,
188, 190, 192, 200
V
Vanderbilt, 188, 189
Vedda, Miguel, 36
Vollgraf, Carl-Erich, 134, 135, 143
W
Wada, Haruki, 53
War, 4, 35, 47, 74, 79, 134, 145,
188, 202
Z
Zazulich, Vera, 127