BOOKS
635
deal with Marx. One of them is his selection of the
Grundrisse
published in
1971. Since then, the complete English translation, by Martin Nicolaus, of this
text has appeared in a Penguin edition and it takes only a modest prophetic
gift to foresee a number of learned books and articles in English devoted to the
Grundnsse
in the next few years. In fact, it appears that the
Grundnsse
is
becoming a progressively more fashionable text, and not necessarily because
these writings reveal a surprisingly new face of Marxism. Apart from the
Introduction, which is really a very important work of Marx (and the most
comprehensive exposition of his method in social science), but one well–
known for seventy years, the
Grundnsse
does not compel us to repaint Marx's
intellectual portrait. The ftrst edition, in 1939-1940, was virtually unknown;
the second one, in 1953, took many years to become a common source for
those interested in the history of Marxism (the French translation appeared in
1967-1968). In fact, from 1844 onwards, Marx wrote and rewrote one and the
same book, different variants ofwhich we may now compare and of which the
Grundnsse,
as McLellan convincingly argues, are the most comprehensive .
McLellan shows that the three volumes of
Das Kapital
are but a fraction of the
plan conceived by Marx in the late ftfties, and that the
CTTUndnsse
has to be
considered as the only existing rough sketch of the whole . This fact alone, of
course, establishes their importance; many subjects that Marx did not get to
in
Das Kapital
are mentioned or discussed here (landed property, wages,
precapitalist formations, foreign trade). Still, his thinking on many of these
subjects was known from other sources, and it would be an exaggeration to say
that a new, previously unknown Marx is revealed in this text. What is really
important about the
Grundnsse
(again, apart from the Introduction) is, ftrst,
the insights we gain into the working of Marx's mind and, second, the fact
that this text appears to be the deftnitive link between his philosophical
anthropology of the early forties and
Das Kapital,
and so shows the continuity
of his thought. The view of Marx struggling with himself to ftnd the perfect
foundation of his ideas deserves attention even
if
we know the more concise
and more precise form they take in
Das Kapital.
And it is worth seeing how
the anthropological concept of alienation takes another form in the Marxian
theory of value that is formulated in his criticism of Proudhon and Ricardo.
In fact, the signiftcance of the
Grundnsse,
both as a close view of Marx's
mind at work and as a bridge from his half-Feuerbachian humanism to his
economic doctrines, is especially striking in its treatment of the question Marx
himself considered
to
be the core of his system: the theory of value and
surplus value .
Certainly, the idea that the Marxian labor theory of value is simply
another variant of the concept of alienation he took over from Bauer, Hess,
and Feuerbach at the very start of his intellectual peregrinations sounds
