Volume IV / 18 of the ongoing Marx–Engels–Gesamtausgabe (MEGA) sees several large notebooks by Marx published for the first time. These include, most notably, four of his notebooks on agriculture, dating from 1865 to 1868. Also included is a notebook on fixed capital and credit, dating from 1868. The first notebook on agriculture, dating from 1865–1866, shows how Marx was preparing to write what was to become the section on capitalist agriculture and the theory of ground rent in Volume III of Capital, which he did in the final months of 1865. The following three notebooks on agriculture, dating from 1868, document his continuing work on the manuscripts of volumes II and III of Capital. Marx had resumed work on these volumes in the winter of 1867–1868, and he started studying the recently published literature on agronomics and agriculture in order to bring his knowledge up to date. He filled three notebooks with excerpts from works by natural scientists such as Justus von Liebig on agricultural chemistry and from political economists on agriculture in England, France, Japan, and North America. In 1868, he discovered the work of Carl Nicolaus Fraas, which he studied intensively. Charmed by the historical approach to the study of agriculture and climate change that he found in the work of Fraas, Marx resumed his study of Georg von Maurer's work on the history of agrarian, rural, and urban institutions in Europe.
Volume IV / 18 also includes four booklets in which Marx had scribbled notes on various day-to-day affairs, postal addresses of friends and acquaintances, lists of bibliographical notes, and more. In the second of these booklets, written between May 1864 and the middle of 1865, we find Marx's first efforts to come to grips mathematically with the relationship between the rate of surplus value and the rate of profit. At this time, he was writing the very first drafts for the planned volumes II and III of Capital. Much later, in the 1870s, he would return to this topic and write a dozen manuscripts on the mathematical analysis of these relationships, which were crucial for his understanding of the dynamics of modern capitalism (these manuscripts have already been published in the MEGA II/14). This booklet also contains notes for a biographical sketch of his late friend Wilhelm Wolff, who had just bequeathed him a considerable sum. The third booklet, also written in 1864–1665 and devoted mostly to matters relating to the International Workingmen's Association (IWA), is notable, since here we find not only rough drafts of several resolutions of the General Council of the IWA, of which Marx was a member, but also some brief notes for his lecture on “Value, Price and Profit”, held at two sessions of the General Council on 20 and 27 June 1865, and later to become a famous exposition of the basics of Marx's political economy. Also included, among its bibliographical lists, are several books dealing with Japan, clearly indicating Marx's interest in the country. The fourth booklet, dating from 1867, is devoted entirely to notes made while proofreading the first volume of Capital.
The notebooks on agriculture show how Marx tried to develop a new and sound basis for his theory of ground rent. He realized quite early on that to become a good political economist and to criticize the already well-established science of political economy he had to go beyond the realm of political economy and delve deeply into the natural sciences. Reading Engels's very first sketch of a critique of political economy in 1844, Marx noted that the newly founded agricultural chemistry could provide him with sound arguments to counter the prevailing Ricardian orthodoxy. Eagerly, he adopted Engels's hints at a critique of both Ricardo and Malthus, who both believed in a quasi-natural “law of diminishing returns” in agriculture. Engels had already mentioned the work of Justus von Liebig, and Marx followed his lead when he resumed his study of political economy in the 1850s. Quite soon, he believed he had settled some of the issues that the classical economists, the Ricardians in particular, were unable to resolve – such as the issue of absolute rent. In this early stage of his studies, as documented in the “London notebooks” of the early 1850s, and again following Engels's lead, he discovered not only American economists such as Henry Carey, who opposed Ricardian orthodoxy, but also natural scientists such as Justus von Liebig, who gave a new scientific basis to his own thoughts on agricultural economics. The writings of von Liebig on agricultural chemistry convinced him that political economists were wrong to believe in a natural “law of diminishing returns in agriculture” – a law that, even today, has its advocates among economists. According to von Liebig, the process of soil exhaustion by intensive cultivation and farming could be stopped, and even reversed, by modern techniques of manuring soils, using both natural and synthetic fertilizers. Marx was pleased and embraced the idea that capitalism, the chemical industry, and the emerging world market for natural fertilizers would allow progress in agriculture, and even the transition to industrial forms of large-scale farming. This insight reinforced his belief that the rate of profit would not fall because of diminishing returns in agriculture and rising food prices, as Ricardians taught, but for other reasons.
Marx left his theory of ground rent unfinished. He was aware of its shortcomings. Hence he returned to the study of the agrarian question and the issue of ground rent in 1861, again in 1864–1865, while working on the first draft of Capital, Volume III, and again in 1868, when he resumed work on this volume. He became aware of the debate triggered by von Liebig's theory of the exhaustion of soil fertility as a consequence of an increasingly extensive and intensive agriculture, and tried to come to grips with the insights of both sides in the argument. He had to become an expert on these issues because he had already, quite boldly, anticipated the long-term effects of the capitalist mode of production in the sphere of agriculture in Capital, Volume I. In this respect, it is quite remarkable that Marx simultaneously and in parallel studied the development of modern agriculture and the changes in fixed capital related to credit, as the notebooks of 1868 clearly show. The amount of fixed capital had risen and was still rising, both in major industry and large-scale agriculture, as the statistical material made evident, and so, too, the trade statistics and official parliamentary reports on commerce that Marx studied.
When Engels began work on Marx's manuscripts for Capital, Volume III, he looked through these notebooks and created tables of content for each of them, duly reproduced in this volume. Regarding the scope of Marx's studies from 1868 until his death in 1883, Engels presumed he would have largely reworked the section on agriculture and ground rent in Volume III. Now that more and more of Marx's notebooks have become available in the MEGA, we can make more informed guesses about how and to what end Marx might have used the knowledge on agriculture and capitalist production he had gained during his last years.
The editors of this volume believe Marx had already become aware of the ecological consequences of capitalism and was turning into a votary of ecological socialism himself. Beyond doubt, both Marx and Engels were aware of the damage that modern industrial capitalism was inflicting upon the environment in all urban and industrial areas. Equally, they had a clear idea concerning such issues, as they observed them even in antiquity and in some colonial countries. But the claim made, in particular by Kohei Sato, goes much too far. For Engels as for Marx, environmental issues were local, regional phenomena. The concept of environmental destruction or climate change as a global issue was beyond their imagination. In historical terms, they regarded capitalism as bound to disturb, even disrupt, the symbiosis between man and nature. Something that could and should be fixed only beyond capitalism.
The publication of Marx's notebooks from various periods has seduced some Marxists, first and foremost in Anglo-Saxon academia, to mount a strong defence against the outright dismissal of Marx as racist, Eurocentric, sexist, ecologically naïve, or as a blind dead old white man, widely popular in those very quarters. Presenting Marx as an anti-imperialist, anti-racist or fully fledged ecologist might please some radicals, but it is far off the mark.
In Volume I / 16, we find the journalistic articles written by Marx and Engels between October 1857 and December 1858, plus most of the articles they wrote at that time for the New American Cyclopedia project. Their journalistic articles dealt with a broad range of topics, a quite impressive achievement given that during this same period Marx spent a lot of time and energy writing the first draft of his critique of political economy, a quite lengthy manuscript, today known as Grundrisse. He also wrote his three “books of crisis” (published in MEGA IV/14). The journalistic articles were written for and published in the New York Daily Tribune, at that time the largest and most influential newspaper in the English-speaking world; many of Marx's articles were published as editorials, often without the author's name.
There is a series of articles by Marx on the events of the first world economic crisis, the crisis of 1857–1858, which he and Engels had long expected. From the start of this crisis in August 1857 until its petering out in the early summer of 1858, Marx commented upon its course and key moments – the spreading of the crisis from New York to England and France, and further to continental Europe and the rest of the world. In several articles he dealt with the efforts of the British government to deal with the crisis – first and foremost by suspending the Bank Charter Act of 1844, which he had always regarded as a completely mistaken piece of legislation. He criticized the views on the crisis put forward by leading economists of the time. In particular, Marx was much concerned about the fact that France had hardly been affected by the crisis raging in Britain and Europe and that was spreading further into colonial territories beyond Europe. Looking for an explanation of this peculiarity, he started his “books of crisis”, beginning with a book on “France”.
Then, Marx and Engels commented on the events of the Indian revolt, which had begun in June 1857. Engels dealt with the military aspects, in particular when it was crushed by British troops. Marx looked at the economic and financial repercussions of this colonial war, which marked the beginning of a new kind of British colonial rule in India. He also reported and commented on the events of the Second Opium War being waged by Britain and France against China at the same time. He served his readers well by presenting them a full story of the First and Second Opium Wars, reflecting on the probable outcome – another highly inequitable contract that, thanks to their military superiority over the forces of the Qing Empire, the European powers would eventually impose on China.
In a similar vein, Engels wrote two long articles on the tardy progress the Russian Empire had recently made in Central Asia. He described and analysed the slow, but methodical and unstoppable Russian expansion into the steppes of Central Asia. Within a few years, this methodical way of occupying and colonizing vast territories of thinly populated steppe country had led the Russian Empire to the very frontiers of the British Empire in Afghanistan. A clash between the two was inevitable in the long run, Engels believed.
Lastly, we find several articles by Marx dealing with the Bonapartist regime in France. Ever since the Second Empire had been established, Marx expected its collapse and looked for harbingers of an imminent crisis. He interpreted events such as another attempt on the life of Napoleon III and the subsequent repressions imposed by the Bonapartist state as clear indicators of a profound change in the character of the regime. The regime had lost the support of the French peasants and was forced to rely on the army and the army alone. That led Marx to regard the Second Empire as increasingly fragile and bound to fail.
Most of the articles for the New American Cyclopedia were written by Engels, and all of them except three are printed in this volume. Most deal with military matters and biographies of historical personalities – some of those had been written by Marx, including the article on Simón Bolívar (for which Marx continues to enjoy some fame in Latin America even today).
