Theories of Surplus Value (German: Theorien über den Mehrwert) is a draft manuscript written by Karl Marx between January 1862 and July 1863. It is mainly concerned with the Western European theorizing about what he described as the Mehrwert (added value or surplus value) from about 1750, critically examining the ideas of British, French and German political economists about wealth creation and the profitability of industries. At issue are the source, forms and determinants of the magnitude of surplus-value and Marx tries to explain how, in his view after failing to solve basic contradictions in its labour theories of value, what he terms the 'classical school of bourgeois political economy' eventually broke up, leaving only "vulgar political economy" which no longer tried to provide a consistent, integral theory of capitalism, but instead offered only an eclectic amalgam of theories which seemed pragmatically useful or which justified the rationality of the market economy.
Background Theories of Surplus Value was part of the large Economic Manuscripts of 1861–1863, entitled by Marx A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy and written as the immediate sequel to the first part of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy published in 1859. The total 1861–1863 manuscript consists of 23 notebooks (the pages numbered consecutively from 1 to 1472) running to some 200 printed sheets in length. Theories of Surplus Value forms the longest (about 110 printed sheets) and most fully elaborated part of this huge manuscript, and it is the first and only draft of the fourth, concluding volume of Das Kapital. As distinguished from the three theoretical volumes of Das Kapital, Marx called this volume the historical, historico-critical, or historico-literary part of his work.
Marx began to write Theories of Surplus Value within the framework of the original plan of his Critique of Political Economy as he had projected in 1858–1862. On the basis of what Marx says about the structure of his work in his introduction to the first part of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, in his letters of 1858–1862 and in the 1861–1863 manuscript itself, this plan titled Plan for the Critique of Political Economy can be presented in the following schematic form as projected by Marx in 1858–1862:
Capital: Introduction: Commodity and Money Capital in general: The production process of capital: Transformation of money into capital Absolute surplus-value Relative surplus-value The combination of both Theories of surplus-value The circulation process of capital The unity of the two, or capital and profit The competition of capitals Credit Share capital Landed property Wage-labour The state Foreign trade The world-market Theories of Surplus Value was originally conceived by Marx as an excursion in the history of economic thought, placed in the section of his theoretical study of "capital in general". It was intended as a conclusion to the section on the production process of capital. This plan however proved to be more than Marx could carry out in his lifetime. When Theories of Surplus Value was finally published in German by Karl Kautsky in 1905-1910, this by no means meant that all of Marx's writing on political economy were now available to the public. This task was mostly completed decades later, in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, with the publication of the Grundrisse (1857-58), the Results of the Immediate Production Process (1864) and various other manuscripts included in the German MEGA2 edition and in English translations.
Publication history
In his preface (dated 5 May 1885) to his edition of Volume II of Das Kapital and in several letters during the following ten years, Friedrich Engels indicated his intention to publish the manuscript of Theories of Surplus Value, which was to form Volume IV. However, although he succeeded in publishing the second and third volume of Das Kapital, Engels was unable to publish the Theories before he died in 1895. In 1923, David Riazanov (Ryazanov) of the Marx–Engels Institute in Moscow (the predecessor of the Marx–Engels–Lenin Institute) purchased many of Marx's original manuscripts and many other 19th century socialist archives with generous finance from the Soviet government, including the Theories of Surplus Value notebooks. From that point on, the access to, the editing and the publication of the text was under the control of the Russian and East German communist authorities. After 1991, the manuscript was transferred to the Russian Center for Preservation and Study of Records of Modern History (RTsKhIDNI) and since the late 1990s it is stored with the centralized Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History (Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsial'no-politicheskoi istorii [RGASPI]) in Moscow.
German edition In 1905–1910, Karl Kautsky published a first edited version of Marx’s manuscript in three volumes (1,754 pages; the second volume consists of two separate parts), with Dietz publishers in Stuttgart. However, Kautsky rearranged the original sequence of topics discussed in the notebooks and deleted or modified some text. For this reason, his edition is not regarded as a fully accurate rendering of Marx's thought (although it sheds light on how Kautsky understood Marx). Kautsky’s first volume of Marx’s notes dealt with the theories of surplus value up to Adam Smith, the second volume with David Ricardo (in two parts) and the final one with the breakup of the Ricardian school and "vulgar economics". This edition is out of print and rare. A complete, annotated three-volume edition was first published in German (1956, 1959, 1962) by the Institute of Marxism–Leninism of the Socialist Unity Party in East Germany. The text was subsequently included in the Marx Engels Werke published by Dietz in Volumes 26.1 (1965), 26.2 (1967) and 26.3 (1968). Like the Kautsky edition which it imitates to an extent, the East German edition rearranged the original text under various topic headings. This version is regarded as more accurate and complete than Kautsky's, but it still lacks the sequence of the original manuscripts and is not a completely literal translation. It is now out of print.
Russian edition A Russian edition was first published in Moscow as Marx-Engels, Collected Works, Volumes 26.1 (1962), 26.2 (1963) and 26.3 (1964).
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