Works of Karl Marx 1857–58
Written: 1857–58.
Translated by: Jack Cohen, 1964.
Transcribed by: director@marx.org.
Translated: by F. Cohen for International Publishers, 1964.
Transcribed for the Internet: by director@marx.org on Jan. 23 1994; re-formatted in Jan. 2002 by Andy Blunden.
Proofread Alvaro Miranda (January 2021).
As these were not intended for publication, but rather Marx’s self-clarification, no care was given to the construction of paragraphs. Rather than leave such interminable paragraphs intact, they have been broken up.
Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations is part of a huge manuscript Marx wrote in researching and preparing what would become A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy published in 1859.
Marx’s collection of personal notebooks, of which this text was a part, would finally be published for public perusal in Russian in Moscow, 1939–41. It was printed in German in 1953 as the Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie — or the Grundrisse, or Outline, for short.
Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations is pp. 471–514 of the Grundrisse and was published separately in Berlin, 1952, as a pamphlet called Formen die der Kapitalistischen Produktion vorhergehen.
Part I: The process which precedes the formation of the capital relation or of original accumulation
Part II: Exchange of labour for labour rests on the worker’s propertylessness
Last updated: 22 January 2021