Marx's Grundrisse: Footnotes
6. Aliens who resided in Athens but were not classed as citizens.
7. According to Roman tradition, Numa Pompilius was the second king of Rome.
8. Citizens of one Greek city-state who were granted full citizenship in another.
* The dissolution of the still earlier forms of communal property and real community goes without saying.
** For in that case the capital presupposed as condition of wage labour is wage labours own product, and is presupposed by it as its own presupposition, created by it as its own presupposition.
*** Once capital and wage labour are posited as their own presupposition, as the basis presupposed to production itself, then what appears initially is that the capitalist possesses, in addition to the fund of raw materials and necessaries required for the labourer to reproduce himself, to create the required means of subsistence, i.e. to realize necessary labour, a fund of raw material and means of labour in which the worker realizes his surplus labour, i.e. the capitalists profit. On further analysis this takes the form that the worker constantly creates a double fund for the capitalist, or in the form of capital. One part of this fund constantly fulfills the conditions of his own existence and the other part fulfills the conditions for the existence of capital. As we have seen, in the case of the surplus capital -- and surplus capital in relation to its antediluvian relation to labour -- all real, present capital and each of its elements has equally been appropriated without exchange, without an equivalent, as objectified, appropriated alien labour.
**** The first glance shows what a nonsensical circle it would be if on the one hand the workers whom capital has to put to work in order to posit itself as capital had first to be created, to be brought to life through its stockpiling if they waited for its command, Let There Be Workers!; while at the same time it were itself incapable of stockpiling without alien labour, could at most stockpile its own labor, i.c. could itself exist in the form of not-capital and not-money; since labour, before the existence of capital, can only realize itself in forms such as craft labour, petty agriculture etc., in short, all forms which can not stockpile, or only sparingly; in forms which allow of only a small surplus product and eat up most of it. We shall have to examine this notion of stockpiling [Aufhäufung] still more closely later on.
11. Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, Vol. III, Bk III, Ch. 4.
12. 'This' refers back to 'manufacture'.
* Although arceia among the Greeks, corresponding to the principalis summa rei creditae. [editor's note: This statement is taken directly from Du Cange, Glossarium mediae et infimae Latinitatis, ed. G. A. L. Henschel, Paris, 1842, Vol. 2, p. 139, article entitled '2. Capitale'. However, Du Cange was wrong. The word arceiameans 'government buildings', never 'loan' or 'principal sum of money owed' as suggested there; the Greek word for loan, which Du Cange probably had in mind, is cpeox.]
14. métairie: share-cropping, the modern métayage. Bail de bestes à cheptel: lease with livestock as capital. Cf. Du Cange, Glossarium, Vol. 2, p. 139.
15. 'Those who have to pay a head tax'.
16. Adam H. Müller (1774-1829, leading advocate of the Romantic reaction in history and economics during the early nineteenth century; Austrian state official under Metternich, ennobled for his propagandistic activities), Die Elemente der Staatskunst, Erster Theil, Berlin, 1809, pp. 226-41.
17. 'I shall grant a tenth part of my own to God both in livestock and in dead fruits of the earth', quoted by Du Cange, Glossarium, p. 140, from Athelstan's Ordinance of 925 on tithes.
19. '(false!)' was inserted afterwards, above the line. [MELI note]
20. In English in the original.
21. Marx's distinction between Rohstoff and Rohmaterial has no English equivalent. Rohstoff the raw material in its pristine state, before being subjected to human labour; Rohmaterial is the raw material which has been formed by human labour but has yet to enter into the final product. Cf. Capital, Vol. I, Moscow, 1954, pp. 178-82.
** It is here presupposed of course that it follows a correct instinct. It could eat up the seed grain, let the field lie fallow, and build roads. But it would thereby not have accomplished the necessary labour, because it would not reproduce itself, not maintain itself as living labour capacity through this labour. Alternatively the living labour capacities may be directly murdered, as e.g. by Peter I, to build Petersburg. This sort of thing does not belong here.
* That capital has to do not with isolated, individual labour but with combined labour, just as it is in and for itself already a social, combined force, is a point which should perhaps be treated already in the general history of the rise of capital.
** The greater the extent to which production still rests on mere manual labour, on use of muscle power etc., in short on physical exertion by individual labourers, the more does the increase of the productive force consist in their collaboration on a mass scale. The opposite features, particularization and individualization, are displayed by the semi-artistic crafts; the skillfulness of individual, but uncombined labour. Capital, in its true development, combines mass labour with skill, but in such a way that the former loses its physical power, and the skill resides not in the worker but in the machine and in the scientific combination of both as a whole in the factory. The social spirit of labour obtains an objective existence separate from the individual workers.
*** Among the Romans, the army constituted a mass -- but already divorced from the whole people -- which was disciplined to labour, whose surplus time also belonged to the state; who sold their entire labour time for pay to the state, exchanged their entire labour capacity for a wage necessary for the maintenance of their life, just as does the worker with the capitalist. This holds for the period when the Roman army was no longer a citizens army but a mercenary army. This is here likewise a free sale of labour on the part of the soldier. But the state does not buy it with the production of values as aim. And thus, although the wage form may seem to occur originally in armies, this pay system is nevertheless essentially different from wage labour. There is some similarity in the fact that the state uses up the army in order to gain an increase in power and wealth.
**** If the state lets this sort of matter be conducted through state-contractors, then this still always takes place indirectly through the corvée or taxes.
* Competition is better suited to create the necessity of e.g. the railway in a country where the previous development of its forces of production would not yet push so far. The effect of competition among nations belongs in the section on international intercourse. The civilizing influences of capital particularly show themselves here.
25. Cf. Hegel, System of Philosophy, I, Logic, para. 161: 'The concept remains at home with itself in its process; no new content is posited by the process, only an alteration of form is produced.'
26. Sismondi, Nouveaux Principes d'économie politique, Vol. I, p. 89.
28. Cherbuliez, Richesse ou pauvreté, p. 64.
29. In Cherbuliez; raw material, instrument of labour, and supply of articles of consumption.
30. Cherbuliez, Richesse ou pauvreté, pp. 25-6.
31. William Thompson (1783-1833) was an Irish landowner who embraced Owenism, and criticized political economy from a utopian socialist position, but on the basis of Ricardo's doctrines.
32. 'That,' i.e. that situation.
33. 'Of the same' (desselben) probably refers back to recognition of nature ([and] practical power over nature). The contraction is ambiguous.
34. Storch, Cours d'économie politique, Vol. I, pp. 411-12.
35. Malthus, The Measure of Value Stated and Illustrated, with an Application of it to the Alterations in the Value of the English Currency since 1790, London, 1823, p.17.
36. William Thompson,An Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth, Most Conducive to Human Happiness, Applied to the Newly Proposed System of Voluntary Equality of Wealth, London, 1824, p. 176.
* For from the present standpoint we still only have labour or capital at all points of circulation.
37. Ramsay, An Essay on the Distribution of Wealth, p. 55.
** Except if one imagines that all capitals produce to order for each other, and that the product is therefore always immediately money, a notion which contradicts the nature of capital and hence also the practice of large-scale industry.
39. Thomas de Quincey (1785-1859), the essayist, author of Confessions of an Opium Eater, was also a writer on political economy, and a follower of Ricardo.
40. Ramsay, An Essay on the Distribution of Wealth, p. 43. The references are to the page numbers of Ramsay's book. The quotations themselves are as usual in a mixture of English and German.