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View allA Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy
Marx
1859
Marx's first published statement of value theory — and the single paragraph on history everyone quotes.
A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy
Karl Marx · 1859
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.
5 chapters · 71,304 words · ~5.4 hr read
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.