The publication of this small volumefootnote1 makes accessible for the first time in English a fundamental work for the understanding and development of outstanding Marxist problems.
It is an extract from the vast draft which Marx made in 1857–58 to clarify his own thoughts in preparation for the Critique of Political Economy and Capital and which was published as the Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie (Rohentwurf) only in 1939 and 1941 by the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow.
Hobsbawm’s introduction brings out clearly the characteristics of Marx’s sketch and its abstract schema, which is not strictly history, but attempts to reveal the profound content of history (‘What happened in history’, in Childe’s words). And this content is progress, a progress defined by the slow but persistent realization of the humanist ideal, the free development of human potentiality. This realization is not produced by humanity’s perpetual striving towards an abstractly conceived ‘ideal’, it is the necessary resultant of the development implied from the start in the nature of man, a social animal whose essential activity—work—exploits nature, controls it and finally transforms it. Man’s gradual emancipation, starting from the natural conditions of his existence, implies a process of individualization whose development Marx follows from its origins to the capitalist stage.