A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy

With the font to the Critique of Political Economy Karl Marx first published an elaborated form his theory of the capitalist mode of production in 1859, which he and Engels Capital, published in 1867, 1885 and 1894, and later extensively represented in the three volumes.

Formation

The written during the period from August 1858 to January 1859 text was published by Franz Duncker, Berlin. Already in August 1857, Marx had designed an introduction, which he is not used.

This he explains in the preface with reflections on the proper method of presentation because " every anticipation only to be proved forming results seem disturbing, and the reader who wants me at all follow, one must decide to ascend from the individual to the general. " As Marx foreword by January 1859 writes. A large part of the preparatory work, Marx had done from September 1857 to August 1858, which were first published from 1939 to 1941, when plans of the critique of political economy ( rough draft ), which together are referred to with the introduction in 1904 published as floor plans of the Critique of Political Economy. In his 1867 published major work Das Kapital Marx has the recognition and presentation of the theory further modified and differentiated and expanded to other historical examples.

Content

The focus of the value of the goods are in his dual representation form of use value and exchange value, the concrete and abstract labor, working as a quantitative measure of the work, the money, the circulation, accumulation, production and trade crises.

Marx here describes the perverse conception of economic relations within civil society and the bourgeois economists:

In the capital he is this coin the term of " commodity fetishism ".

Importance for the interpretation of the Critique of Political Economy

A notice published in the August 1859 review to Marx's work as well as the epilogue to the third volume of Capital, both of which came from Frederick Engels, are the starting point of a so-called "historical" reading of the Critique of Political Economy. This interprets the so-called "simple form of value " of the goods as a historical model of an isolated exchange without regard of the capitalist determination, while capitalism begins only historically later with the transformation of money into capital. On the other hand goes "logical" interpretation assumes that Marx presented in the publications of 1859 and 1867 by means of the categories of the value of the goods and the money an already developed capitalist society on only different levels of conceptual abstraction ( dialectical method of presentation ) has. This interpretation was first represented in the 1920s by Isaac Ilyich Rubin and again by representatives of the new reading of Marx in the 1970s.

Output

• Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. First issue. Franz Duncker (W. Besser 's Verlagshandlung ), Berlin, 1859 Digitalisat
• Marx-Engels collected works ( MEW ) Vol 13, pp. 7-160, Dietz Berlin 1971