In the midst of work on ‘A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy’, Marx writes, in a letter packed with more ideas than many libraries, to Engels of his initial plans for six volumes of ‘Capital.’

‘Plans for ‘Capital” (1858) by Karl Marx to Frederick Engels from Selected Correspondence, 1846-1895. International Publishers, New York. 1936.

London, April 2, 1858.

Following is a short outline of the first part. The whole Scheisse [shit] is to be divided into six books: I. Capital; II. Landed property; III. Wage labour; IV. State; V. International trade; VI. World market.

I. Capital contains four sections: A. Capital in general (this is the material of the first part); B. Competition, or the action of the many capitals upon one another; C. Credit, where capital appears as the general element in comparison with particular capitals; D. Share capital as the most complete form (passing over into Communism) together with all its contradictions.

The transition of capital to landed property is also historical, as the modern form of property in land is a product of the effect of capital upon feudal, etc., landed property. Similarly the transition of landed property to wage labour is not only dialectical but historical, since the final product of modern landownership is the general institution of wage labour, which in turn appears as the basis of the whole shit. Well (it is difficult for me to write to-day), we now come to the corpus delicti [evidence for the crime].

I. Capital. First section: Capital in General. In the whole of this section it is assumed that the wages of labour are constantly equal to their lowest level. The movement of wages themselves and the rise or fall of the minimum come under the consideration of wage labour. Further, landed property is taken as =0; that is, nothing as yet concerns landed property as a particular economic relation. This is the only possible way to avoid having to deal with everything under each particular relation.

(1) Value. Purely reduced to quantity of labour. Time as the measure of labour. Use value–whether considered subjectively as usefulness of the work, or objectively as utility of the product appears here simply as the material presupposition of value, which for the time being drops completely out of the determination of the economic form. Value as such has no other “material” but labour itself. This determination of value, first indicated by Petty, clearly worked out by Ricardo, is merely the most abstract form of bourgeois wealth. In itself already presupposes: the dissolution of (1) primitive communism (India, etc.); (2) of all undeveloped, pre-bourgeois modes of production not completely dominated by exchange. Although an abstraction, this is an historical abstraction which could only be adopted on the basis of a particular economic development of society. All objections to this definition of value are either derived from less developed conditions of production, or are based on a confusion by which the more concrete economic determinations (from which value is abstracted and which, from another point of view, can therefore also be regarded as a further development of it) are set up in opposition to value in this abstract undeveloped form. Considering the lack of clarity among Messrs. the Economists themselves as to how this abstraction is related to the later and more concrete forms of bourgeois wealth, these objections were more or less justified.

From the contradiction between the general character of value and its material existence in a particular commodity, etc.–these general characteristics are the same which later appear in money-arises the category of money.

(2) Money. Something about the precious metals as the medium of money relations.

(a) Money as measure. Some notes on the ideal measure of Stewart, Attwood, Urquhart; put forward in a more comprehensible form by the advocates of labour-money (Gray, Bray, etc. Some hits on occasion at the Proudhonists). The value of the commodity translated into money is its price, which for the time being still only appears in this purely formal differentiation from value. According to the general law of value, a particular quantity of money merely expresses a particular quantity of embodied labour. So long as money is measure, the variability of its own value makes no difference.

(b) Money as a means of exchange, or simple circulation. Here only the simple form of this circulation itself is to be considered. All the circumstances which further determine it lie outside of it and are therefore only considered later. (They presuppose more developed conditions.) If we call the commodity C and money M, simple circulation does, it is true, exhibit the two circular movements or circuits: C-M-M-C and M-C- C-M (the latter constitutes the transition to Section c), but the point of departure and the point of return in no way coincide, or, if so, only accidentally. Most of the so-called laws laid down by the economists treat money circulation, not within its own limits, but as included under and determined by higher movements. All this to be done away with. (Comes partly under the theory of credit; but part must also be dealt with at points where money comes up again, but more fully defined.) Here then money as a means of circulation (coin). But at the same time as the realisation (not merely disappearing) of price. From the simple determination that the commodity, fixed as a price, is already ideally exchanged for money, before it is actually exchanged, arises of itself the important economic law that the amount of the circulating medium is deter- mined by the price and not vice versa. (Here something historical on the controversy relating to this point.) It follows further that velocity can replace mass, but that a definite mass is necessary for the simultaneous acts of exchange, in so far as these are not related to one another as + and -; this equalization and the consideration of it are however only to be touched on at this point in anticipation. I will not now go into further details of the further development of this section but will only remark that the falling apart of C-M and M-C is the most abstract and superficial form in which the possibility of crises is expressed. The development of the law that price determines the mass of circulation shows that presuppositions are here involved which by no means apply to all stages of society; it is absurd, therefore, to take, for instance, the influx of money from Asia to Rome and its influence on Roman prices, and simply to put it beside modern commercial conditions. The most abstract determinations, when more carefully examined, always point to a further definite concrete historical basis. (Of course–since they have been abstracted from it into these determinations.)

(c) Money as money. This is the development of the form M-C-C-M. Money as the independent existence of value, apart from circulation; the material existence of abstract wealth. Shows this in circulation, in so far as money does not merely appear as a means of circulation but as the realisation of price. In its capacity as (c), where (a) and (b) appear only as functions, money is the general commodity of contracts (here the variability of its value, due to the determination of value by labour time, is important) and an object of hoarding. (This function is still important in Asia and was important in the ancient world and Middle Ages generally. Exists now only as a subordinate part of the banking system. In times of crisis money in this form is again important. A consideration of money in this form and of the delusions it has produced in the course of world history. Destructive properties, etc.) Money as the realisation of all the higher forms in which value will appear; definite forms in which all value relations are externally limited. Money fixed in this form, however, ceases to be an economic relation–the form is lost in its material medium, gold and silver. On the other hand in so far as money comes into circulation and is again exchanged for C, the final process, the consumption of the commodity, again falls outside the economic relation. Simple money circulation does not contain the principle of self-reproduction within itself and therefore points beyond itself. Money, as the development of its determinations shows, contains within itself the demand for value which will enter into circulation, maintain itself during circulation and at the same time establish circulation–that is, for capital. This transition historical also. The antediluvian form of capital is trade capital, which always develops money. At the same time, real capital arises from that money or merchants’ capital which gains control of production.

(d) This simple circulation, considered in itself–and here we have the surface of bourgeois society, obliterating the deeper operations from which it arises–reveals no difference between the objects of exchange, except formal and temporary ones. This is the realm of freedom and equality and of property based on “labour.” Accumulation, which here appears in the form of hoarding, is therefore only greater thriftiness, etc. Next, on the one hand the absurdity of the economic harmonists and modern free traders (Bastiat, Carey, etc.) who assert this most superficial and abstract aspect as their truth applying to the more developed productive relations and their antagonisms. On the other hand the absurdity of the Proudhonists and similar socialists who try to apply ideas of equality corresponding to this exchange of equivalents (or to what is assumed as such) to the inequalities, etc., from which the exchange arises and to which it returns. As the law of appropriation in this sphere there appears appropriation by labour, an exchange of equivalents, so that the exchange merely returns the same value in a different material form. In short everything is “lovely,” but will very soon come to a horrible end, and indeed owing to the law of equivalence.

We now come, namely, to

(3) Capital. This is really the most important part of the first section, about which I most need your opinion. But I cannot go on writing to-day. This filthy jaundice makes it difficult for me to hold my pen and bending my head over the paper makes me giddy. So–for next time.

International Publishers was formed in 1923 for the purpose of translating and disseminating international Marxist texts and headed by Alexander Trachtenberg. It quickly outgrew that mission to be the main book publisher, while Workers Library continued to be the pamphlet publisher of the Communist Party.

PDF of later edition of book: https://archive.org/download/in.ernet.dli.2015.227457/2015.227457.Selected-Correspondence.pdf