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REVIEW ARTICLE

Science & Society, Vol. 82, No. 1, January 2018, 139–145

MARX’S UNFINISHED BUT MAGNIFICENT

CRITIQUE OF POLITICAL ECONOMY

After Marx’s death the faithful Engels found himself faced with casting into
order and publishing the manuscripts of Capital, Volumes II and III, and
thereby completing the process begun with the appearance of Volume I in
1867. He explained to August Bebel in a letter of August 30, 1883 that this
was “an enormous task. Alongside parts that have been completely finished
are others that are merely sketched out, the whole being a brouillon with the
exception of perhaps two chapters. Quotations from sources in no kind of
order, piles of them jumbled together, collected simply with a view to future
selection” (Marx and Engels, 1975­–2005, Vol. 47, 53). In the event, Volume
II, on the process of circulation, proved comparatively easy to edit, and was
published in 1885.
Then Engels started on Volume III, basing himself on the manuscript
Marx wrote in 1864–5, which has now been published by Brill in its Histori-
cal Materialism series.1 He told Bebel (April 4, 1885): “Book III is in hand.
It is quite extraordinarily brilliant. This complete reversal of all previous
economics is truly astounding. Our theory is thereby provided for the first
time with an unassailable basis while we ourselves are enabled to hold our
own successfully against all comers” (Marx and Engels, 1975–2005, Vol. 47,

1 The Economic Manuscript of 1864–1865: Capital Book Three: Forms [Gestaltungen] of the Process as
a Whole, by Karl Marx. Edited by Fred Moseley. Translated by Ben Fowkes. $387.00. Leiden,
The Netherlands: Brill, 2015.

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271). Yet it took him nearly ten years to publish Volume III. Engels’ own
explanation for the delay centered on the difficulty he found in editing the
very extensive and disordered Chapter 5 of the manuscript, pithily titled
“The Division of Profit into Interest and Profit of Enterprise. (Industrial
or Commercial Profit). Interest-Bearing Capital,” but devoted largely to a
study of the credit system, what we would now call financial markets. (Marx’s
own heading for the final part of this chapter, “The Confusion,” seems apt.)
Thanks to the Herculean MEGA2 project — the Marx–Engels Gesam-
tausgabe, which aims to publish Marx’s and Engels’ complete works — we
now know much more about how Marx developed his critique of political
economy after taking refuge in London from the defeat of the 1848 revolu-
tions, through first the London Notebooks of 1850–53 and then a succession
of manuscripts and books — the Grundrisse (1857–8), A Contribution to the
Critique of Political Economy (1859), the Economic Manuscript of 1861–63, the
Economic Manuscript of 1864–65, and Capital, Volume I (1867).2 The publica-
tion of the 1864–65 Manuscript in German in 1992 provoked a controversy
over Engels’ editing. In particular scholars involved in the MEGA2 project
accused him of extensively changing Marx’s original and of presenting his
analysis as far more finished and less provisional than it actually was (see in
particular, Heinrich, 1996–7; Vollgraf, and Jucknickel, 2002).
This new translation allows English-speaking readers to decide for them-
selves. It is welcome for other reasons as well. First of all, we now have all of
Marx’s major economic manuscripts in English (the Grundrisse appeared in
1973; the very important 1861–63 Manuscript in the early 1990s), and are
therefore in a good position to assess Marx’s critique of political economy.
We can measure its scale: the 1861–63 Manuscript fills nearly four volumes
of the English Collected Works, and this edition of the 1864–65 Manuscript
runs to nearly a thousand pages. But, more importantly, we can trace the
complex process of both expansion of content and conceptual reformula-
tion than runs across the extraordinary decade beginning with the outbreak
of the global financial crisis of 1857–8 that prompted Marx to start writing
the Grundrisse and ending with the publication of Capital, Volume I. The
perfectionism that drove Marx constantly to refine his analysis conceptu-
ally and update it empirically is to my mind the main reason why he never
finished Capital, leaving Engels the mammoth undertaking that dominated
the latter’s final years.
Second, this edition of the 1864–65 Manuscript is of great scholarly value.
Its translator, Ben Fowkes, was responsible for the superb Penguin edition of
Capital, Volume I, which first appeared in 1976. David Fernbach’s translations

2 See, on the MEGA2 project, Bellofiore and Reuten, 2009; for recent discussions of these
manuscripts, Callinicos, 2014; Pradella, 2015.

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 MARX’S CRITIQUE OF POLITICAL ECONOMY 141

of the second and third volumes for the same edition have sometimes been
criticized for being insufficiently sensitive to the Hegelian terminology that
Marx often uses. Fowkes is more willing to register the presence of this
vocabulary, though it’s a pity that he follows Fernbach in rendering the
Hegelian keyword begrifflos — concept-less — as “irrational,” which misses
the point. The object of Volume III, Marx says in the opening sentence of
the Manuscript, is “the unity of the processes of production and circula-
tion” to which Volumes I and II are respectively devoted (Marx, 2015, 49).
The book portrays a process of externalization (as Fowkes rightly translates
Entäusserung) in which, as the surplus value generated in the process of
production that Marx analyses in Volume I is fragmented into industrial and
commercial profit, interest, and rent and distributed to different economic
fractions, there emerge “new forms (Gestaltungen) in which the threads of the
inner connection get lost, the relations of production become independent
of each other and the components of value ossify into independent forms”
(Marx, 2015, 895). Treated on their own, economic forms such as financial
markets or real estate are indeed “concept-less,” in the sense that they lack
the explanation that could only come from being set in the context of the
process of production and distribution of value and surplus value.
Fred Moseley in his excellent editorial introduction suggests that it is
in this sense that we must understand the subtitle Marx himself gave to the
manuscript: Die Gestaltungen des Gesammtprocesses (Forms, or Figures, of the Total
Process), and which Engels replaced with The Process of Capitalist Production as a
Whole. (Engels also turned the seven often huge and shapeless chapters into
which Marx divided the Manuscript into parts and broke each up into smaller
chapters.) Moseley rightly thinks the change in subtitle was a mistake, since
Marx meant by Gestaltungen “the concrete (particular) surface forms of appearance
of capital and surplus value” — forms that can only be properly understood
in the context of the “total process” of the production and accumulation of
surplus value (Moseley, 2015, 6). Perhaps Engels thought the original title
better fits the final four chapters of the Manuscript (on commercial profit,
interest, rent, and the revenues and their sources) since the first three are
about the rate of profit, its equalization, and tendency to fall, all attributes of
aggregate capital rather than of specific fractions such as industrial, commer-
cial, and interest-bearing capital, though it seems more plausible to regard all
as “forms of the total process.” Moseley elsewhere makes the strange claim:
“The book is not about the process of capitalist production as a whole; the
analysis of the whole has already been accomplished by the prior analysis of
capital in general (production and circulation). Rather, this book is about the
particular forms of surplus-value that develop out of the process as a whole already
theorized, i.e., out of capital in general and the general form of surplus value”
(Moseley, 2016, 86). This implies that capital as the unity of the production

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and circulation processes would have no properties of its own; not only is this
inherently improbable, but the first three chapters of the 1864–65 Manuscript
are precisely about some of these properties.
Moseley itemizes the changes to and omissions from the Manuscript that
Engels made and takes the sensible line that these were often helpful and
generally do not represent a substantial change in Marx’s argument. So those
who hope that a very different Marx will emerge in the 1864–65 Manuscript
will be disappointed. This is not to say that Engels never misrepresents Marx.
Notoriously, he adds in his Part 3 (“The Law of the Tendential Fall in the Rate
of Profit”): “In actuality, however, the rate of profit will fall in the long run, as
we have already seen” (Marx, 1981, 337; translation modified). Even if Marx
believes this, he is interested in the tendency less as a long-term law than in
its interrelation with the cycle of boom and slump, as indicated by the final
paragraph of Chapter 3 of the Manuscript, which Engels (also mistakenly) cut:

The tremendous productive power, in proportion to the population, which is de-

veloped within the capitalist mode of production, and — even if not to the same
degree — the growth in capital values (not only in their material substratum), these
growing far more quickly than the population, contradicts the basis on behalf of which
this immense productive power operates, since this basis becomes ever narrower in
relation to the growth of wealth; and it also contradicts the conditions of valorization
of this swelling capital. Hence crises. (Marx, 2015, 375.)3

Nevertheless, the Volume III that we can see taking shape in the 1864–65
Manuscript is not radically different from the book Engels published 30 years
after Marx wrote it. Recognizing this of course doesn’t settle the many sub-
stantive controversies that surround the book. One of course concerns the
transformation of values into prices of production, which is dealt with in
Chapter 2 of the Manuscript, a subject on which Moseley has recently pub-
lished an important book of his own (Moseley, 2016). Another, of more urgent
political relevance, concerns the extent to which the Manuscript provides the
basis of a theory of capitalist crisis. This is tied up with the more philologi-
cal question of how far this text takes us towards the completion of Capital.
In the Grundrisse Marx famously draws a distinction between “capital in
general” and “many capitals,” the former covering the basic relations and
tendencies constitutive of capital, the latter representing the sphere of com-
petition that realizes these tendencies. Corresponding to this conception,
Marx’s plans for his critique of political economy in the late 1850s envis-
aged six books: “1. On Capital (contains a few introductory chapters). 2. On
Landed Property. 3. On Wage Labor. 4. On the State. 5. International Trade.

3 See the discussion of Marx’s law as the interplay of tendency and counter-tendencies in
Callinicos and Choonara, 2016.

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 MARX’S CRITIQUE OF POLITICAL ECONOMY 143

6. World Market” (letter to Ferdinand Lassalle, February 22, 1858; Marx and
Engels, 1975–2005, Vol. 40, 270). So Capital was meant to be only the first of
the six books; the first part of this book would cover capital in general, with
subsequent parts dealing with competition, credit, and share capital; only in
the last of the six books would we get to the world market and crises. Much
ink has been spilled over whether or not Marx stuck to this schema. A major
problem for those (such as Moseley) who think that he did is the mass of
material on competition, credit, and crises in the 1864–65 Manuscript, above
all in the gargantuan Chapter 5 that nearly stumped Engels.
Michael Heinrich by contrast criticizes Engels for trying to make Chapter
5 seem like a more or less finished analysis, rather than a “research manuscript”
in which Marx inconclusively explored how to understand finance in particular
(Heinrich, 1996–7). More recently he has linked this to the idea that the theory
of the falling rate of profit is indeterminate, and that Marx, after finishing the
1864–65 Manuscript, was unable to resolve this problem and instead became
preoccupied with understanding the workings of global financial markets in-
creasingly centered, in the era of the Great Depression of the late 19th century,
on the United States (Heinrich, 2013). It is certainly true that Marx continued
his studies of financial markets after completing the Manuscript. Thus, unable
to follow closely the crisis of 1866 at the time because he was finishing off
Volume I, Marx studied it carefully in 1868, paying particular attention to the
evidence it provided of changes in the structure of capitalism, notably with
the growing significance of joint-stock companies and their impact on the
stock market (de Deus, de Paula, da Gama, and Suprinyak, 2016). But this is
only evidence of a retreat from the theory of the falling rate of profit on the
assumption that this theory is incompatible with a focus on the instabilities
inherent in financial markets. The theory of crises most fully (though far from
completely) developed in the 1864–65 Manuscript, and already sketched out in
earlier drafts, posits an interaction between the tendency of the rate of profit
to fall and the cycle of bubble and panic on financial markets, which feeds
the accumulation of capital in good times and accomplishes in bad times the
destruction of capital required to restore profitability (Callinicos, 2014, ch.
6). To judge by what Marx worked on in the 1870s — arguably a good sign of
what he was dissatisfied with — he seems to have been preoccupied less with
the falling rate of profit than with the problems of circulation and reproduc-
tion addressed in Volume II; most of Engels’ edition of the latter is based on
drafts dating from the 1870s (Marx, 1978, 103–4).
Moseley argues that, in covering financial markets in so much detail in
the draft of Volume III, Marx, was contradicting the six-book plan he had set
himself in the late 1850s. For Moseley, “almost all of Section 5 [of Chapter 5,
“Credit. Fictitious Capital”] belongs to the later section on credit” (Moseley,
2015, 27). He concludes that “it would have been better and logically more

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 144 SCIENCE & SOCIETY

correct and consistent to move this more concrete section to the end of the
book, or perhaps to another book altogether, as Marx planned” (Moseley,
2015, 33). The trouble with this argument is that Marx deviates from the
plan elsewhere in the Manuscript, most obviously by incorporating landed
property, which was meant to follow the book on capital, in Chapter 6, “The
Transformation of Surplus-Value into Rent.” Moseley moreover seems to have
no problem with Marx dealing with competition, for example, in the equaliza-
tion of the rate of profit or the determination of the rate of interest, because
this is necessary properly to develop the account of the distribution of surplus
value that Moseley has long (and persuasively) argued is the main subject of
Volume III. But if it’s OK to ignore the plan when it comes to competition, why
not with credit too? Chapter 3, on the falling rate of profit, is no more about
the distribution of surplus value than is most of Chapter 5. This doesn’t mean
that Marx should or would have included most of the empirical material he
covers in Chapter 5 had he ever completed Volume III, but, as I have already
suggested, an analysis of the financial system and its disturbances was necessary
for the theory of crises he began to sketch out in Chapter 3.
It’s impossible to say what final shape Volume III would have taken had
Marx been able to overcome his passion for self-criticism sufficiently to publish
the book. But it seems to me undeniable that, by the time he came to write the
1864–65 Manuscript, he no longer felt bound by the six-book plan, despite the
somewhat ritualistic references he from time to time continues to make to its
constraints (while going on to ignore them). Despite the chaotic character of
parts of the draft, these incursions into the domains of competition and credit
were dictated by the evolving requirements of Marx’s overall argument. Thus
he told Ludwig Kugelmann on March 6, 1868 that competition would figure
in what became Volumes II and III “only in so far as called for in the treatment
of other themes” (Marx and Engels, 1975–2005, Vol. 42, 544). This shift was
part of the creative process of clarification and reformulation through which
Marx’s thought developed till the end. Debate about the resulting uncertain-
ties and ambiguities will no doubt go on. But Anglophone readers now have
the 1864–65 Manuscript itself. The critique of political economy stands before
us, massive and unfinished but magnificent, like Michelangelo’s slaves in the
Accademia in Florence. It’s up to us to decide what use we make of it.

Alex Callinicos

Department of European and International Studies

King’s College London
Virginia Woolf Building
22 Kingsway
London WC2B 6LE
alex.callinicos@kcl.ac.uk

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REFERENCES

Callinicos, Alex. 2014. Deciphering Capital: Marx’s Capital and Its Destiny. London:
Bookmarks.
———, and Joseph Choonara. 2016. “How Not to Write About the Rate of Profit: A
Response to David Harvey.” Science & Society, 80:4, 481–494.
de Deus, Leonardo Gomes, João Antonio de Paula, Hugo Eduardo da Gama Cer-
queira, and Carlos Eduardo Suprinyak. 2016. “A Theory in the Making: Marx’s
Drafts of Capital and the Notebooks on the Crisis of 1866.” Science & Society,
80:4, 468–80.
Heinrich, Michael. 1996–7. “Engels’ Edition of the Third Volume of Capital and
Marx’s Original Manuscript.” Science & Society, 60:4, 452–66.
———. 2013. “Crisis Theory, the Law of the Tendency of the Profit Rate to Fall,
and Marx’s Studies in the 1870s.” Monthly Review, 64:11. http://monthlyreview.
org/2013/04/01/crisis-theory-the-law-of-the-tendency-of-the-profit-rate-to-fall-
and-marxs-studies-in-the-1870s/
Marx, Karl. 1978. Capital. Volume II. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin.
———. 1981. Capital. Volume III. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin.
———. 2015. The Economic Manuscript of 1864–1865. Edited by Fred Moseley. Trans-
lated by Ben Fowkes. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill.
———, and Friedrich Engels. 1975–2005. Collected Works. 50 volumes. Moscow: Prog-
ress Publishers.
Moseley, Fred. 2015. “Introduction.” Pp. 1–44 in Marx, 2015.
———. 2016. Money and Totality: A Macro-Monetary Interpretation of Marx’s Logic in
Capital and the End of the “Transformation Problem.” Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill.
Pradella, Lucia. 2015. Globalization and the Critique of Political Economy: New Insights
from Marx’s Writings. Basingstoke, England: Palgrave.
Vollgraf, Carl-Erich, and Jürgen Jucknickel. 2002. “‘Marx in Marx’s Words’? On
Engels’ Edition of the Main Manuscript of Book 3 of Capital.” Journal of Political
Economy, 32:1, 35–78.

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