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)
Written between The Communist Manifesto (1848) and the first volume of Capital (1867), Grundrisse--essential to the understanding of Marx's ideas--provides the only outline of his full political-economic theories.
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