Economic Manuscripts of 1863–1865

Marx’s direct draft on the three volumes of the theoretical part of Capital. Written between August 1863 and the end of 1865, first published in German and Russian in the Arkhiv K. Marksa i F. Engelsa, 1933, Vol. II(IIV) and in the second Russian edition of the Complete Works of Marx Engels, Vol. 49.

After completing Economic Manuscripts of 1857–1858 and Economic Manuscripts of 1861–1863, Marx created each theory on his own in the process of criticizing the theories of bourgeois economists. From this, between July 1863 and the end of 1865, he continued his economic research, wrote and completed the Economic Manuscripts of 1863–1865, forming these theories into a three-book theoretical system. This manuscript includes: (1) the manuscript of Capital, Book One, Chapter Six. Results of the Direct Production Process (pp. 441–495), and some fragmentary single-page manuscripts (the rest of the manuscript of Book One has not been preserved); (2) Capital, Book Two (“Manuscript I”) (149 pages in total) and a writing plan for Book Two; (3) the main manuscript of Capital, Book Three (575 pages in total).

The manuscript of Book One, The Process of Production of Capital. Among all the manuscripts of Capital, Vol. 1, what we see is only Chapter Six. Results of the Direct Production Process, which was not included in the officially published Capital, Vol. 1. At first, Marx intended this chapter to be the final chapter of Capital, Vol. 1. In this chapter, Marx studied the commodities as the product of capital, pointed out that capitalist production is the production of surplus-value, expounded the production and reproduction of capitalist relations of production, revealed the irreconcilable contradictions of capitalism, and proved the gradual formation of the subjective and objective conditions of the inevitable fall of the capitalist system and the inevitable victory of the socialist system. In addition, Marx also elaborated on the question of the formal and real subsumption of labor under capital, the question of productive and unproductive labor, the question of gross and net product, etc.

“Manuscript I” of Book Two, The Process of Circulation of Capital. In Chapter One. The Circulation of Capital, through the research on the successive metamorphoses of money-capital, productive capital and commodity-capital, Marx analyzed the new formal determinations taken by capital in the process of circulation, thus explained the circuit of capital. In Chapter Two. The Turnover of Capital, Marx studied the effect of the turnover of fixed capital on the production of surplus-value and the rate of profit. In Chapter Three. The Reproduction and Circulation of the Aggregate Social Capital, Marx mainly examined the process of reproduction of social capital.

The “Main Manuscript” of Book Three, The Formations of the Process as a Whole. Marx said: “The aim of the volume as a whole is to locate and describe the concrete forms which grow out of the movements of capital as a whole.” Chapter One. The Conversion of Surplus-Value into Profit and of the Rate of Surplus-Value into the Rate of Profit; Chapter Two. Conversion of Profit into Average Profit; Chapter Three. The Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall; Chapter Four. Conversion of Commodity-Capital and Money-Capital into Commercial Capital and Money-Dealing Capital (Merchant’s Capital); Chapter Five. Division of Profit into Interest and Profit of Enterprise. Interest-Bearing Capital; Chapter Six. Transformation of Surplus-Profit into Ground-Rent; Chapter Seven. Revenues and their Sources. Chapters One, Two and Seven studied profit as the form of appearance of surplus-value; Chapters Four, Five and Six clarified the concrete forms of commercial profit, interest and ground-rent, and inquired into the relationship between industrial capitalists, commercial capitalists, interest-bearing capitalists, land operators and landowners, as well as their relationship with the proletariat. Chapter Seven criticized the Trinity Formula of vulgar economy, pointing out that profit, interest and ground-rent are only transmuted forms of surplus-value, and revealed that the process of capitalist production as a whole and its manifestations were a complete mystification the capitalist relations of production, so as to cover up the truth and confuse the people. Chapter Seven is not only a summary of Book Three, but also the summary of all three volumes of Capital.

The Economic Manuscripts of 1863–1865 played an absolutely inestimable role in the formation of Marxist political economy. In this manuscript, Marx not only made a lot of theoretical progress, but also structurally established the three-volume structural system of Capital, which shows that Marx has skillfully applied materialist dialectics, especially the scientific logical method of rising from the abstract to the concrete. It is “a magnificent book”. At the same time, in the manuscript, Marx exhaustively examined for the first time the impact of the transition from formal to real subsumption of labor on the working class, and also made a comprehensive and systematic analysis of the process of circulation of capital and the process of capitalist production as a whole, and “the whole of capitalist production is dealt with in context for the first time and all official bourgeois economics rejected out of hand.”