BY KARL MARX Translated from the Second German Edition by N. I. Stone With an Appendix Containing Marx’s Introduction to the Critique Recently Published among His Posthumous Papers CHICAGO CHARLES H. KERR & COMPANY Copyright, 1904 By the International Library Publishing Co....

The present translation has been made from the second edition of the “Zur Kritik der Politischen Oekonomie,” published by Karl Kautsky in 1897 with slight changes from the original edition of 1859; changes that had been indicated by Marx on the margins of his own copy of the book. As will be seen from the author’s preface, the work was originally issued as the first instalment of a complete treatise of political economy. As he went on with his work, however, Marx modified his plans and eight yea

I consider the system of bourgeois economy in the following order: Capital , landed property , wage labor ; state , foreign trade , world market . Under the first three heads I examine the conditions of the economic existence of the three great classes, which make up modern bourgeois society; the connection of the three remaining heads is self evident. The first part of the first book, treating of capital, consists of the following chapters: 1. Commodity; 2. Money, or simple circulation; 3. Capi

At first sight the wealth of society under the capitalist system presents itself as an immense accumulation of commodities, its unit being a single commodity. But every commodity has a twofold aspect, that of use value and exchange value . 2 A commodity is first of all, in the language of English economists, “any thing necessary, useful or pleasant in life,” an object of human wants, a means of existence in the broadest sense of the word. This property of commodities to serve as use-values coinc

The analysis of commodities according to their twofold aspect of use-value and exchange value by which the former is reduced to work or deliberate productive activity; and the latter, to labor time or homogeneous social labor, is the result of a century and a half of critical study by the classical school of political economy which dates from William Petty in England and Boisguillebert in France 16 and closes with Ricardo in the former country and Sismondi in the latter. Petty reduces use-value

In a parliamentary debate on Sir Robert Peel’s Bank Act of 1844 and 1845, Gladstone remarked that not even love has made so many fools of men as the pondering over the nature of money. He spoke of Britons to Britons. The Dutch, on the contrary, who, from times of yore, have had, Petty’s doubts notwithstanding, “angelical wits” for money speculation have never lost their wits in speculations about money. The main difficulty in the analysis of money is overcome as soon as the evolution of money fr

The circumstance that commodities are converted into gold only in ideas as prices and that gold is therefore turned into money only in idea, gave rise to the theory of the ideal unit of measure of money . Since, in the determination of prices, gold and silver serve only ideally as money of account, it was asserted that the names pound, shilling, pence, thaler, franc, etc., instead of denoting certain weights of gold and silver or labor incorporated in some way, stood rather for ideal atoms of va

As the universal thirst for gold prompted nations and princes in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the period of infancy of modern bourgeois society, to cru sades beyond the sea in search of the golden grail, 116 the first interpreters of the modern world, the founders of the monetary system, of which the mercantile system is but a variation, proclaimed gold and silver, i. e. money, as the only thing that constitutes wealth. They were quite right when, from the point of view of the simple

The subject of our discussion is first of all material production by individuals as determined by society, naturally constitutes the starting point. The individual and isolated hunter or fisher who forms the starting point with Smith and Ricardo, belongs to the insipid illusions of the eighteenth century. They are Robinsonades which do not by any means represent, as students of the history of civilization imagine, a reaction against over-refinement and a return to a misunderstood natural life. T

Before going into a further analysis of production, it is necessary to look at the various divisions which economists put side by side with it. The most shallow conception is as follows: By production, the members of society appropriate (produce and shape) the products of nature to human wants; distribution determines the proportion in which the individual participates in this production; exchange brings him the particular products into which he wishes to turn the quantity secured by him through

When we consider a given country from a politico-economic standpoint, we begin with its population, then analyze the latter according to its subdivision into classes, location in city, country, or by the sea, occupation in different branches of production; then we study its exports and imports, annual production and consumption, prices of commodities, etc. It seems to be the correct procedure to commence with the real and concrete aspect of conditions as they are; in the case of political econom

Notes on the points to be mentioned here and not to be omitted: 166 1. War attains complete development before peace; how certain economic phenomena, such as wage-labor, machinery, etc., are developed at an earlier date through war and in armies than within bourgeois society. The connection between productive force and the means of communication is made especially plain in the case of the army. 2. The relation between the idealistic and realistic methods of writing history; namely, the so-called

Arbuthnot, 258 . Aristotle, 19 , 41 , 53 , 78 -79, 153 , 154 , 184 . Athenaeus, 87 . Attwood, 100 . Bailey, 84 . Barbon, 95 . Bastiat, 34 . Berkeley, Bischop, 32 , 95 -96, 155 . Bernier, 173 . Blake, 133 , 250 . Blanc, Louis, 231 . Boisguillebert, 56 , 59 , 121 , 133 , 166 , 168 , 198 . Bosanquet, 124 , 235 , 242 . Bray, 106 . Brougham, 70 . Buchanan, 147 . Büsch, 231 . Carli, 205 . Castlereagh, Lord, 100 . Cato, 170 . Chevalier, 154 , 215 . Clay, 258 . Cobbet, 123 . Cooper, 32 . Corbet, 124 . D