Grundrisse

Notwithstanding its deficiencies, this is a publishing event of magnitude for Anglo-American intellectuals. The Grundrisse, as it is always called (its full title would be Basic Principles of the Critique of Political Economy) forms a crucial and intrinsically electrifying link between Marx's early work, his 1850's economic studies, and Capital itself; the manuscripts which compose it were lost for decades, and the work was generally unavailable in the West until 1953. In English, only tiny excerpts have appeared by way of Gorz, Marcuse, Lichtheim, Fischer and Marek; Hobsbawm presented bigger slices in Precapitalist Economic Formations (1965}. McLellan's translation is not only readable but elegant. However. McLellan, perhaps the most prominent British Marxologist (a term homologous with "entomologist," not "Marxist"), fails to tell us what he has cut or why in this selection - by no means a slight selection, but far too slender to merit the Grundrisse title tout court. The excerpts are broken into very brief chapters with one-sentence prefaces and roughly analytic titles like "Capital and Labor as Productive and Unproductive," "Exchange Relationships in Feudal and Capitalist Society," "Individuals and Society," etc. The Introduction, which focuses on the biographical externalities of Marx's compositions, is inadequate. McLellan briefly and rightly suggests that as a supremely comprehensive outline draft of Capital, the Grundrisse can be viewed as Marx's "most fundamental" work, given the incompleteness of Capital; but he doesn't even try to locate these writings in the substance of Marx's theoretical development, and in a most anti-Marxian spirit he refers to the key "noneconomic" elements as "digressions," though affirming their importance. More might have been expected from the author of the interesting and useful Marx Before Marxism (1970). But all the donnishness and skimpiness cannot extinguish the historical and theoretical importance of this work (Martin Nicolaus has given the fullest English precis so far in a 1968 New Left Review article). Finally, McLellan tells us that another translator's complete English version will not be available for a few years. (Kirkus Reviews)