ABSTRACT
Having sent the incomplete manuscript for the Contribution off to the publisher early in 1859, Marx faced the task of arranging and redrafting the remaining material for presentation as the ‘third chapter’. This was now to be published as a companion volume to the 1859 work. He devised a plan for the chapter that comprised three sections under the heading ‘Capital’ (G(EV), 969ff. ):
I Production Process of Capital II Circulation Process of Capital
III Capital and Profit
This plan was set down in the spring of 1859, but it was to be more than two years before Marx was seriously to begin re writing the relevant Grundrisse material. 5
The work that Marx then began was to grow well beyond its apparently intended scope and involved him in further extensive critical investigations into political economy. Such was his enthusiasm, though, that by the end of the summer of 1863, he had written a massive manuscript in 23 notebooks, together with eight supplementary notebooks containing excerpts from his wider reading. It is possible to set out much of the contents of the main manuscript, but little is known of the contents of the eight excerpt notebooks designated A to H and written in the spring of 1863 (see editorial note 119 in TSV, I, 488). These are extant but no details of them have been published to date.
