A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy

Preface

I examine the system of bourgeois economy in the following order: capital, landed property, wage-labour; the State, foreign trade, world market.

The economic conditions of existence of the three great
classes into which modern bourgeois society is divided are analysed
under the first three headings; the interconnection of the other three
headings is self-evident. The first part of the first book, dealing
with Capital, comprises the following chapters: 1. The commodity, 2.
Money or simple circulation; 3. Capital in general. The present part
consists of the first two chapters. The entire material lies before me
in the form of monographs, which were written not for publication but
for self-clarification at widely separated periods; their remoulding
into an integrated whole according to the plan I have indicated will
depend upon circumstances.

A general introduction, which I had drafted, is omitted, since on
further consideration it seems to me confusing to anticipate results
which still have to be substantiated, and the reader who really wishes
to follow me will have to decide to advance from the particular to the
general. A few brief remarks regarding the course of my study of
political economy are appropriate here.

Although I studied jurisprudence, I pursued it as a subject
subordinated to philosophy and history. In the year 1842-43, as editor
of the Rheinische Zeitung, I first found myself in the embarrassing
position of having to discuss what is known as material interests. The
deliberations of the Rhenish Landtag on forest thefts and the division
of landed property; the official polemic started by Herr von Schaper,
then Oberprasident of the Rhine Province, against the Rheinische
Zeitung about the condition of the Moselle peasantry, and finally the
debates on free trade and protective tariffs caused me in the first
instance to turn my attention to economic questions. On the other
hand, at that time when good intentions “to push forward” often took
the place of factual knowledge, an echo of French socialism and
communism, slightly tinged by philosophy, was noticeable in the
Rheinische Zeitung. I objected to this dilettantism, but at the same
time frankly admitted in a controversy with the Allgemeine Augsburger
Zeitung that my previous studies did not allow me to express any
opinion on the content of the French theories. When the publishers of
the Rheinische Zeitung conceived the illusion that by a more
compliant policy on the part of the paper it might be possible to
secure the abrogation of the death sentence passed upon it, I eagerly
grasped the opportunity to withdraw from the public stage to my study.

The first work which I undertook to dispel the doubts assailing me was
a critical re-examination of the Hegelian philosophy of law; the
introduction to this work being published in the Deutsch-Französische
Jahrbücher issued in Paris in 1844. My inquiry led me to the
conclusion that neither legal relations nor political forms could be
comprehended whether by themselves or on the basis of a so-called
general development of the human mind, but that on the contrary they
originate in the material conditions of life, the totality of which
Hegel, following the example of English and French thinkers of the
eighteenth century, embraces within the term “civil society”; that the
anatomy of this civil society, however, has to be sought in political
economy. The study of this, which I began in Paris, I continued in
Brussels, where I moved owing to an expulsion order issued by M.
Guizot. The general conclusion at which I arrived and which, once
reached, became the guiding principle of my studies can be summarised
as follows.

In the social production of their existence, men inevitably
enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will,
namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the
development of their material forces of production. The totality of
these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of
society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political
superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social
consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the
general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not
the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their
social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain
stage of development, the material productive forces of society come
into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this
merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property
relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto.
From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn
into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The
changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the
transformation of the whole immense superstructure.

In studying such transformations it is always necessary to distinguish between the
material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which
can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal,
political, religious, artistic or philosophic – in short, ideological
forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out.
Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about
himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its
consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be
explained from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict
existing between the social forces of production and the relations of
production. No social order is ever destroyed before all the
productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and
new superior relations of production never replace older ones before
the material conditions for their existence have matured within the
framework of the old society.

Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only
such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always
show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions
for its solution are already present or at least in the course of
formation. In broad outline, the Asiatic, ancient,[A] feudal and modern
bourgeois modes of production may be designated as epochs marking
progress in the economic development of society. The bourgeois mode of
production is the last antagonistic form of the social process of
production – antagonistic not in the sense of individual antagonism
but of an antagonism that emanates from the individuals' social
conditions of existence – but the productive forces developing within
bourgeois society create also the material conditions for a solution of
this antagonism. The prehistory of human society accordingly closes
with this social formation.

Frederick Engels, with whom I maintained a constant exchange of ideas
by correspondence since the publication of his brilliant essay on the
critique of economic categories (printed in the Deutsch-Französische
Jahrbücher, arrived by another road (compare his Lage der arbeitenden
Klasse in England) at the same result as I, and when in the spring of
1845 he too came to live in Brussels, we decided to set forth together
our conception as opposed to the ideological one of German philosophy,
in fact to settle accounts with our former philosophical conscience.

The intention was carried out in the form of a critique of
post-Hegelian philosophy. The manuscript [The German Ideology], two
large octavo volumes, had long ago reached the publishers in Westphalia
when we were informed that owing to changed circumstances it could not
be printed. We abandoned the manuscript to the gnawing criticism of
the mice all the more willingly since we had achieved our main purpose
– self-clarification. Of the scattered works in which at that time we
presented one or another aspect of our views to the public, I shall
mention only the Manifesto of the Communist Party, jointly
written by Engels and myself, and a Discours sur le libre échange, which I
myself published.
The salient points of our conception were first outlined in an academic, although polemical, form in my Misère de la philosophie...,
this book which was aimed at Proudhon appeared in
1847. The publication of an essay on Wage-Labour [Wage-Labor and
Capital] written in German in which I combined the lectures I had held
on this subject at the German Workers' Association in Brussels, was
interrupted by the February Revolution and my forcible removal from
Belgium in consequence.

The publication of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung in 1848 and 1849 and
subsequent events cut short my economic studies, which I could only
resume in London in 1850. The enormous amount of material relating to
the history of political economy assembled in the British Museum, the
fact that London is a convenient vantage point for the observation of
bourgeois society, and finally the new stage of development which this
society seemed to have entered with the discovery of gold in California
and Australia, induced me to start again from the very beginning and to
work carefully through the new material. These studies led partly of
their own accord to apparently quite remote subjects on which I had to
spend a certain amount of time. But it was in particular the
imperative necessity of earning my living which reduced the time at my
disposal. My collaboration, continued now for eight years, with the
New York Tribune, the leading Anglo-American newspaper, necessitated
an excessive fragmentation of my studies, for I wrote only
exceptionally newspaper correspondence in the strict sense. Since a
considerable part of my contributions consisted of articles dealing
with important economic events in Britain and on the continent, I was
compelled to become conversant with practical detail which, strictly
speaking, lie outside the sphere of political economy.

This sketch of the course of my studies in the domain of political
economy is intended merely to show that my views – no matter how they
may be judged and how little they conform to the interested prejudices
of the ruling classes – are the outcome of conscientious research
carried on over many years. At the entrance to science, as at the
entrance to hell, the demand must be made:

Qui si convien lasciare ogni sospetto

Ogni viltà convien che qui sia morta.

[From Dante, Divina Commedia:

Here must all distrust be left;

All cowardice must here be dead.]

Karl Marx

London, January 1859

A. As a second footnote to the Communist Manifesto, Engels wrote in 1888:

In 1847, the pre-history of society, the social organization existing previous to recorded history, [was] all but unknown. Since then, August von Haxthausen (1792-1866) discovered common ownership of land in Russia, Georg Ludwig von Maurer proved it to be the social foundation from which all Teutonic races started in history, and, by and by, village communities were found to be, or to have been, the primitive form of society everywhere from India to Ireland. The inner organization of this primitive communistic society was laid bare, in its typical form, by Lewis Henry Morgan's (1818-1861) crowning discovery of the true nature of the gens and its relation to the tribe. With the dissolution of the primeval communities, society begins to be differentiated into separate and finally antagonistic classes. I have attempted to retrace this dissolution in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, second edition, Stuttgart, 1886.