Compendium

A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy

Zur Kritik der politischen Ökonomie

Karl Marx, 1859

Marx’s first published instalment of his critique of political economy (Berlin, 1859). It analyses the commodity as the unity of use value and exchange value, the labour that creates value, and money as measure of value, means of circulation and hoard, with historical sketches of earlier theories of value and money. The Preface tells how Marx came to economics and gives his most famous summary of historical materialism, base and superstructure; the unfinished Introduction of 1857, printed as an appendix, sets out his method. Capital reworked much of the material in its opening chapters.

Edition
Translated by N. I. Stone from the second German edition (Charles H. Kerr, 1904), with the 1857 Introduction as an appendix
Source
Project Gutenberg

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Contents

  1. Translator’s Preface (1904) 7 min 4

    N. I. Stone introduces the first English translation (1904): the book was the first installment of Marx’s planned critique of political economy, later superseded by Capital; it remains relevant to American debates over money such as the Free Silver campaign; and its preface contains the classic statement of the materialist interpretation of history. He explains choices of terminology and the addition of the 1857 Introduction.

  2. Preface (1859) 12 min 16

    Marx sets out his six-book plan (capital, landed property, wage labour, the state, foreign trade, the world market) and describes how he came to economics: through newspaper controversies over wood theft and peasant poverty, his critique of Hegel, and exile in Paris and Brussels. He then gives the most famous summary of historical materialism: relations of production form the economic foundation on which legal and political superstructures rise; social being determines consciousness; when productive forces outgrow the relations of production an epoch of social revolution begins; no social order perishes before its productive forces are fully developed; and bourgeois society closes the “prehistory” of humanity. He recalls the abandoned German Ideology, the Manifesto, and his years of research in the British Museum.

  3. I Commodities 1 h 25 min 50

    The commodity has two aspects: use-value, its usefulness, and exchange value, the proportion in which it exchanges for others. Exchange value is determined by labour-time, specifically abstract, socially necessary labour, so that exchange expresses relations between people as relations between things. The chapter shows how the exchange of commodities leads to the emergence of a universal equivalent (money), and closes with a short history of the labour theory of value from Petty and Boisguillebert through Franklin, Steuart, Smith and Ricardo, listing four objections the theory must answer.

  4. II.1 Money: The Measure of Value 52 min 33

    Money first serves as the measure of value: all commodities express their values ideally as quantities of gold, giving them prices, while the names of coins become standards of price. Marx criticises theories that treat money as a merely ideal unit of account (Locke, Berkeley, Steuart, the debates during the Bank Restriction) and the labour-money schemes of John Gray and Proudhon.

  5. II.2 Money: The Medium of Circulation 1 h 30 min 25

    Money as medium of circulation. The circuit commodity–money–commodity (C–M–C) splits barter into sale and purchase, creating the possibility of crises (against Say’s Law). The quantity of money in circulation is determined by prices and the velocity of circulation, not the other way around. Gold wears down into coin, is replaced by tokens and paper money, and paper money issued by the state represents a quantity of gold; excess issue raises prices.

  6. II.3 Money: Money 1 h 12 min 32

    Money as money in its own right: as a hoard, the object of the passion for abstract wealth; as a means of payment, turning buyers and sellers into debtors and creditors, with chains of payments that can collapse in monetary crises; and as world money, gold and silver settling international balances.

  7. II.4 Money: The Precious Metals 11 min 7

    Why gold and silver became money: their uniformity, divisibility, durability and high value relative to weight suit them to embody abstract labour-time. Nature does not produce money; it is a social relation that finds its most fitting material in the precious metals.

  8. II.C Theories of the Medium of Circulation and of Money 1 h 12 min 45

    A critical history of theories of money: the mercantilists’ identification of gold with wealth; Hume’s quantity theory; Sir James Steuart’s more concrete analysis; Ricardo’s theory and the Bullion Report of 1810; James Mill; and the Currency School that inspired Peel’s Bank Act of 1844. Marx argues that these theories mistook the symptoms of crises in the movements of money for their causes.

  9. Introduction (1857), 1: Production in General 15 min 6

    Marx’s unpublished 1857 introduction begins with production. Economists start from the isolated individual (the hunter and fisher of Smith and Ricardo), a “Robinsonade” that projects modern bourgeois individualism back onto history, when humans are social animals who individualise only in society. “Production in general” is a useful abstraction, but economists use it to present capitalism’s specific features as eternal laws.

  10. Introduction (1857), 2: Production, Distribution, Exchange and Consumption 33 min 13

    Production, distribution, exchange and consumption are not separate spheres but moments of one whole. Production and consumption create each other (“production produces not only an object for the subject, but also a subject for the object”); distribution of products presupposes a prior distribution of the means of production and of people; and production is the dominant moment that shapes the others.

  11. Introduction (1857), 3: The Method of Political Economy 26 min 7

    The method of political economy: rather than starting from a chaotic concrete whole such as population, analysis should rise from simple abstract categories to the concrete, “the concentration of many determinations.” Even the simplest categories, such as labour in general, are historical products, fully valid only for modern society; “the anatomy of man is a key to the anatomy of the ape.” Categories should be ordered by their relations within capitalism, not by historical sequence, and Marx sketches the plan of his work.

  12. Introduction (1857), 4: Production, Relations of Production, State and Law 11 min 10

    Unfinished notes for topics to cover: war as the forerunner of economic forms, idealist versus materialist history, international relations, objections to materialism, the dialectic of productive forces and relations of production, the uneven development of art and material production, chance and necessity. The section ends with Marx’s famous reflection on why Greek art, bound to a vanished stage of society, still gives aesthetic pleasure.