A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy
Marx
1859
A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy
Karl Marx · 1859
Marx's first published statement of value theory — and the single paragraph on history everyone quotes.
Start reading5 chapters · 71,304 words · ~5.4 hr read
This is the 1859 book Marx wrote before Capital, and in some ways the clearest window into what he thought he was doing. Chapter I on commodities and Chapter II on money rehearse, in more compressed form, the analysis that opens Capital eight years later — useful to read either as a warm-up or as a second angle on ideas readers already met there. The real reason this book gets assigned on its own, though, is the Preface: one paragraph lays out the materialist conception of history — the claim that a society's economic structure is the real foundation beneath its legal, political, and intellectual life — as tightly as Marx ever stated it anywhere. Read the appended 1857 Introduction alongside it for Marx's own reflection on method.
Contents
Prefaces
The translator's introduction to this 1904 English edition, followed by Marx's own 1859 preface — the one paragraph on base and superstructure that outlines historical materialism in miniature.
Commodities and Money
The two economic chapters: the twofold character of the commodity, then a long analysis of money as measure, medium, and hoard.
The 1857 Introduction
Marx's own unfinished methodological draft, printed here as an appendix — production, distribution, exchange, consumption, and the method of political economy.