Crises and the General Law of Capitalist Accumulation

Abstract

By mid 1863 Marx had established the outlines of the analysis that would form the core of his Capital The manuscripts of 1861–3 provide the first draft of the bulk of Volume One of Capital, and, in a more fragmentary form, much of the analysis that would be developed in Volumes Two and Three. Marx continued working intermittently on the manuscript of Capital, amidst bouts of ill-health and increased political activity with the formation of the First International in the autumn of 1864. However, none of the drafts made after 1863 have been published. Volumes Two and Three of Capital were put together after Marx’s death by Engels, with the bulk of the materials for Volume Three deriving from Marx’s manuscripts of 1864–5, and Volume Two from later manuscripts, written in 1870 and in 1877–8. The final manuscript of Volume One of Capital was written between 1865 and 1867, but Marx continued to revise it for subsequent editions, rewriting the first section on value for the second German edition of 1872, and making substantial further revisions for the French edition, published in instalments between 1872 and 1875.