Grundrisse
The Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie is a lengthy, unfinished manuscript written by Karl Marx in 1857–1858. Comprising seven notebooks of economic studies, the work represents the first major draft of Marx's critique of political economy and is widely considered the preparatory work for his magnum opus, Das Kapital. The text was written for self-clarification during the Panic of 1857, and remained unpublished during his lifetime. A first edition was published in German in Moscow in 1939 and 1941, but the work only became widely available and influential in the 1960s and 1970s; a full English translation appeared in 1973.
The manuscript's scope is vast, covering all six sections of Marx's intended economic project. It explores key themes such as alienation, the nature of capital as a self-expanding process or "value in motion," and an analysis of pre-capitalist economic forms. It contains the well-known "Fragment on Machines," in which Marx analyses the effects of automation, foreseeing a point where social knowledge becomes a direct productive force, a concept he termed the "general intellect." The work also outlines the dialectical method Marx considered "scientifically correct," which proceeds from simple abstract categories to an understanding of the concrete world as a "rich totality of many determinations and relations."
Because of its raw, experimental style and its late publication, the Grundrisse is often described as the "laboratory" for the more structured arguments of Das Kapital. The Ukrainian Marxist Roman Rosdolsky's seminal study, The Making of Marx's 'Capital', was crucial in establishing the manuscript's importance as the link between Marx's early philosophical writings and his later economic analysis, with some scholars such as David McLellan calling it the "centrepiece" of his entire corpus. Its eventual publication had a profound impact on Marxist scholarship, revealing a more philosophical and historical dimension to Marx's thought and sparking diverse interpretations among thinkers from Louis Althusser to the Autonomist school.
Background and publication
wrote the Grundrisse manuscripts during the winter of 1857–1858 while living in exile in London. The work was prompted by the Panic of 1857, a major global financial crisis that Marx believed might be the final, catastrophic crisis of capitalism, spurring on a revolutionary upheaval. He worked frantically to outline his economic theories, resulting in a series of seven notebooks written for self-clarification rather than direct publication. In a December 1857 letter to Friedrich Engels, Marx described his progress: "I am working like mad all night and every night collating my economic studies so that I at least get the outlines clear before the déluge ". David Harvey describes the text as "a set of notes that Marx was frantically writing to himself at a rather frantic time." Another motivation for the work was Marx's desire to deal with the "false brothers" of the socialist workers' movement, the Proudhonists. The Grundrisse begins with a devastating polemic against the Proudhonist theories of labour-money, particularly the ideas of Alfred Darimon.The manuscript begins with an introduction that was actually a separate text written earlier, about which Marx himself had "serious reservations," possibly feeling it was too abstract or Hegelian. In his 1859 Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, he stated that he was omitting the introduction because "it seems to me confusing to anticipate results which still have to be substantiated". For the rest of his life, the notebooks remained unpublished and largely unknown. The first sections to be published were the Introduction and an essay on Frédéric Bastiat and Henry Charles Carey, which were released by Karl Kautsky in 1903 and 1904. The existence of the seven main notebooks was not announced until 1923 by David Riazanov, director of the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow. They were first published in German in Moscow in two volumes in 1939 and 1941, but this edition received little attention. A more accessible single-volume German edition was published in East Berlin in 1953.
The manuscript's significance in the English-speaking world grew after the Ukrainian Marxist scholar Roman Rosdolsky discovered a rare copy in the New York Public Library in 1947. Having survived years in Nazi concentration camps, Rosdolsky devoted much of his subsequent life to studying the text. His seminal work, The Making of Marx's 'Capital', was the first major study to systematically analyse the Grundrisse and establish its importance as the crucial link between Marx's early philosophical writings and the economic analysis of Das Kapital. Before the full English translation, a widely influential selection of extracts was translated and edited by David McLellan in 1971. In his preface, McLellan described the Grundrisse as the "last of major writings to be translated into English" and presented his edition with the "modest aim of making available the most important passages of this vital text". The first full English translation, by Martin Nicolaus, was published in 1973 by Penguin Books in association with New Left Review, an event that Harvey states had a "huge impact upon" Marxist scholarship, including his own work.
Style and method
The Grundrisse is stylistically unique among Marx's major works. Harvey categorises Marx's writing into four types—journalism, published works like Das Kapital, experimental manuscripts, and notes written for self-clarification. He places the Grundrisse firmly in the fourth category, describing its style as "Marx writing purely for himself, using whatever tools and ideas that he has in his head, prepared to unleash a stream of his own consciousness." This results in a text that is at once "exciting, frustrating, imaginative and sometimes boringly repetitive," where concepts are often fluid and meanings evolve as the text unfolds. A significant challenge for readers is distinguishing whether Marx is developing his own conceptual framework or reporting on and critiquing the views of other political economists.Methodologically, the Grundrisse outlines what Marx considered the "scientifically correct method" for political economy. This method begins by rejecting a start from "the real and the concrete," such as a country's population, which he dismisses as a "chaotic conception of the whole." Instead, the inquiry must first proceed analytically from the "imagined concrete" toward "ever more simple concepts" and "thinner abstractions" like labour, division of labour, need, and exchange value. From these simplest determinations, the journey must be "retraced" by ascending from the abstract back to the concrete. The goal is to reproduce the concrete in the mind, not as a chaotic whole, but as a "rich totality of many determinations and relations." For Marx, the concrete is "concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse."
The central methodological abstraction employed throughout the Grundrisse is the concept of "capital in general". This concept is used to analyse the fundamental characteristics of capital as a whole, separate from the particular forms it takes in the real world as "many capitals" interacting through competition, credit, and the state. The investigation of "capital in general" allows Marx to abstract from real-world phenomena to grasp the "inner living organisation" and inherent laws of the capitalist mode of production before analysing how those laws manifest in the concrete realities of competition.
Key themes
Totality and circulation
According to David Harvey, the Grundrisse is fundamentally structured as an inquiry into the different "circulation processes" that constitute capital as an "organic totality". Marx depicts capital not as a thing but as a complex ecosystem in constant formation, an open and evolving system defined by its internal contradictions and its metabolic relation to nature and human culture. This totality consists of multiple, distinct circulation processes that are simultaneously "autonomous and independent but subsumed within" the whole system. Harvey identifies several such circulatory systems that Marx analyses:- The circulation of commodities through exchange.
- The circulation of money as money.
- The circulation of the capacity to labour.
- The circulation of money as capital.
- The circulation of fixed capital.
- The circulation of interest-bearing capital.
Alienation and the critique of individualism
The Grundrisse begins with a critique of the isolated, rational individual—epitomised by Robinson Crusoe—that served as the foundation for 18th-century political economy. Marx argues that this "isolated individual" is not a natural starting point but a historical product of a society based on market exchange, which dissolves earlier collective forms like the kinship group or tribe.This analysis leads to a radical reformulation of Marx's earlier concept of alienation. In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, alienation was presented as a humanist concept, where capital frustrates the realisation of an essential human nature or "species being". In the Grundrisse, however, alienation becomes a concrete, historical condition where the labourer is separated from the objective conditions of labour. Scholar David McLellan argues that the Grundrisse treats the themes of alienation from the Paris Manuscripts in a "much 'maturer' way", having achieved a "synthesis of his ideas on philosophy and economics". For McLellan, the concept of alienation is "central to most of the more important passages of the Grundrisse".
The central thesis, which Harvey identifies as the "keystone" of this theory, is that "Individuals are now ruled by abstractions, whereas earlier they depended on one another. The abstraction, or idea, however, is nothing more than the theoretical expression of those material relations which are their lord and master." These abstractions—value, money, capital—are not mere ideas but objective social forces that emerge from market relations. This alienated condition applies not just to the worker but also to the capitalist, who is not a free agent but is compelled to act by the "coercive laws of competition" which dictate the endless accumulation of capital. The seeming freedom of the market individual masks a deeper subordination to these impersonal, alien powers.