THE 'ECONOMICS'^269The same plan, in a simpler form, was reiterated in the Preface (published
in 1859 ) to his Critique of Political Economy. 'Capital, landed property,
wage-labour; state, foreign trade, world market'.^15
The surviving manuscripts (written in the six months from October
1857 to March 1858 ) have become known as the Grundrisse from the first
word of their German title Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Oekonomie
('Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy').^16 They do not cover at
all equally the sections of the above table of contents. They are obviously
for the most part a draft of the first section of the work. The whole is
divided into two parts: the first on money, and the second, much longer,
part on capital; the latter is divided into three sections on the production
of capital, circulation and conversion of surplus-value into profit. How-
ever, these economic discussions are intertwined with wide-ranging
digressions on such subjects as the individual and society, the nature of
labour, the influence of automation on society, problems of increasing
leisure and the abolition of the division of labour, the nature of alienation
in the higher stages of capitalist society, the revolutionary nature of
capitalism and its inherent universality, and so on. It is these digressions
that give the Grundrisse its primary importance by showing that it is a
rough draft for a work of enormous proportions; what Marx later pre-
sented to the world in his volume Capital covered only a fraction of the
ground that had been marked out in the Grundrisse. Sections devoted to
such topics as foreign trade and the world market show that Marx was
led to sketch out to some extent the fundamental themes of the other
five books of his 'Economics'. In Marx's own words: 'In the manuscript
(which would make a thick book if printed) everything is topsy-turvy and
there is much that is intended for later parts.'^17
Like virtually all of Marx's major writings, the Grundrisse begins with
a critique of someone else's ideas: he evidendy found it easier to work
out his own views by attacking those of others. Thus the first few pages
contain a critique of the reformist economists, Carey and Bastiat, brilli-
antly portrayed as respectively embodying the vices (and virtues) of the
mid-nineteenth-century 'Yankees' and the disciples of Proudhon. After
ten pages or so there was no further discussion of the theories of Carey
and Bastiat - Marx commenting acidly: 'It is impossible to pursue this
nonsense further.'^18 Having sharpened his critical faculties by these attacks
on minor theorists, he then proceeded to carve out his own path. The
jumbled nature of these manuscript notes, the variety of subjects discussed
and the tremendous compression of style - all make it difficult to give a
satisfactory brief account of their contents and virtually impossible to
paraphrase them. The Grundrisse is a vast uncharted terrain: as yet the