Karl Marx: A biography by David McLellan

(C. Jardin) #1
THE 'ECONOMICS' 327

four walls of this house'. He continued: 'My wife has completely lost her
temper for years. It is quite explicable in the circumstances but none the
less unpleasant for that. She wears the children to death with her com-
plaints and irritability and ill humour, though no children bear everything
m a more jolly way. But there are certain limits.'^243 And Jenny herself
found Marx's temper scarcely any better.^244 The situation only improved
with the move of Engels to London and the galvanising effect of the
Paris Commune.


NOTES

1. Marx to Engels, MEW xxix 225. The tide, Grundrisse (which was to be one
of Marx's major works), is no more than the German term for 'outlines'.
2. Marx to Engels, MEW xxix 259 f.
j. MESW 1 360. This Introduction was first published by Kautsky in 1903.
4. Marx's Grundrisse, ed. D. McLellan (London and New York, 1971 ) p. 16.
5. Ibid., p. 18.
6. Ibid., p. 21.
7. Ibid., p. 22.
8. Ibid., p. 29.
9. Ibid., p. 33.
10. Ibid., p. 34.
1 1. Ibid., p. 39.
1 2. Ibid., p. 42.
1 Ibid., p. 45. Further on the Introduction, see the excellent commentary in
K. Marx, Texts on Method, ed. T. Carver (Oxford, 1974).
14. Ibid., pp. 42 f.
1 s K. Marx, 'Preface to Critique of Political EconomyMESW 1 361.
16. It should be noted that this tide is not Marx's, but stems from the first
editors of his manuscripts. It could be misleading in that 'Critique of Political
Economy' was the subtide of Capital and, as is shown later, the Grundrisse is
much more than a rough draft of Capital.
17 Marx to Engels, MEW xxix 330. The schema in six parts given in the
General Introduction and the Preface is plainly not the same as that of Capital,
Book 1 , published in 1867. Karl Kautsky concluded that Marx must have
c hanged the plan of his projected work on Economics. This was certainly
the received opinion until the publication of the Grundrisse, which only
emerged from the Moscow archives in 1939-41. However, Marx's correspon-
dence with Lassalle and the Index to the first volume of his 'Economics'
contained in the Grundrisse shows that Marx had in mind the plan of the
three volumes of Capital as early as 1857. The change was not one of
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