Marxs excerpt notebooks on the crisis of the mid-1860s

Susumu Takenaga (Daitobunka University) 1. Foreword

The Japanese editorial board of MEGA2, founded at the end of the last century, i.e. about 15 years ago, of which I am a member, is entrusted the editorial work of the volumes 17, 18 and 19 of the fourth part of MEGA2 from IMES, International Marx Engels Foundation, responsible organ carrying out MEGA2 project. In these volumes are to be published the excerpt notebooks Marx and Engels piled up during the mid-1860s on various subjects of their research interest, in parallel with the writing of manuscripts of the whole of 3 volumes of Capital. The Japanese editorial board began its work with the volume 18, which is to include excerpts made mainly by Marx between February 1864 and September 1868. As the text editing work of this volume has come almost to end a few years ago, we shifted our main effort to the preparation of the volume 19 while continuing to work on the volume 18 in expectation of finally publishing it in a near future. In the volume 19 are to be included the notebooks containing excerpts and scraps made by Marx during about one year at the end of the 1860s mainly from newspapers. As for the volume 17, regrettably anything has not been done up to the present. In this volume are to be published the excerpts taken by Marx from a number of books on political economy in a very short time in the year 1863 overlapping the last phase of his writing of the 23 manuscript notebooks including Theories on surplus value. For the editorial work of the volume 19, we could obtain one of the most important official subsidies in Japan, Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research, from the academic year 2011 for 4 years from JSPS, Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science. Thanks to this financial aid we could advance in a relatively short time the preparation of the volume 19. In my presentation, I am going to talk about the excerpts and scraps contained in the notebooks of Marx to be included in this volume of MEGA2 and their particularities, on the basis of the experience of our editorial work we began a few years ago and are actually continuing. My presentation is organised as following: in section 2, I will outline the excerpt notebooks to be included in the volume 19 of the part IV of MEGA2 and the literature Marx read for taking these excerpts, in section 3, I will try to make explicit the background of Marxs taking such excerpts in showing how he viewed the economic situation (i.e. the crisis) of the time, and the last section 4 will be devoted to the presentation of our editorial work of the part IV of MEGA2.

2. Marxs excerpt notebooks to be included in the volume 19 of the part IV of MEGA2 and the literature excerpted there
All of the excerpt notebooks to be included in the volume 19 are those made by Marx. They are composed of the following 8 notebooks presumably filled in during one year from September 1868 to September 1869 (for the time being we follow the conjecture concerning the time period of the making of notebooks of Marx and Engels given by Richard Sperl in his Allgemeiner Prospekt der Bnde 13 bis 32 (Neufassung), berarbeitete Fassung im Ergebnis der Beratung in der Unterkommission IV. Abteilung Anfang Mrz 1995). Except for one notebook kept in Russian Centre (RGASPI) in Moscow, the other 7 are all held in International Institute for the Social History in Amsterdam. All of these 7 notebooks have been converted into digital images in place in October 2008 by members of the Japanese editorial board of MEGA2, together with all of the excerpt notebooks of Marx and Engels conserved in the Institute to be included in the volumes 17 and 18 of the part IV. They are now available for us as a part of the fundamental material for the editorial work of these volumes. The following description is also based on these visual data.

1.Notebook No.B102(B108), presumably made from September to December 1868. The literature excerpted is as following: On the first page is given a rsum of the excerpts in this notebook. H. E. Roscoe, Kurzes Lehrbuch der Chemie, Braunschweig, 1867. Excerpts in 3 pages of Marxs original notebooks (infra ditto). The Money Market Review (from the 19th May 1866 to the 28th December 1867). Excerpts in 79 pages (Note that the excerpts of this newspaper are from back numbers going back more than 2 years). The Standard (a scrap from the number of the 4th December 1868), in 1 page. Index of the articles excerpted in this notebook from The Money Market Review, the last 3 pages.

On this excerpt notebook of Marx, a research group of UFMG has recently published a remarkable research article: Joo Antonio de Paula et al., Notes on a Crisis: The Exzerpthefte and Marxs Method of Research and Composition, Review of Radical Political Economics, online version of Sep. 18, 2012. This article is based on the research of Marxs original notebook in Amsterdam to analyze in detail Marxs study on the crisis in the mid-1860s. The

publication of this kind of research in a well-known academic journal is encouraging for the editorial work of the MEGA volume containing the same and other related original resources.

2. Notebook No.B101(B109), presumably made from October 1868 to January 1869. Page 1. Description on the content of this notebook, indicating that it consists of excerpts from the two newspapers. The Economist, from the 6th January 1866 to the 28th December 1867, in 181 pages (excerpts taken from back numbers, issued during almost the same period as The Money Market Review excerpted in the notebook B102(B108), see supra). The Social Economist (scrap, a part of a page cut from the number issued on the 1st October 1868, i.e. almost at the same time as Marxs work on this notebook). Scrap pasted on a space traversing the pages 21 and 22 as if intervening midway among the excerpts from The Economist. Index of the articles excerpted from The Economist issued from 1866 to 1867. Pages 183-6. The Money Market Review, from the 19th May 1866 to the 28th December 1867, in 94 pages (excerpts from the same newspaper issued almost during the same period as in the notebook B102(B108), though excerpted are different articles.). Index of the articles excerpted from The Money Market Review. Pages 285-7.

3. Notebook No.B105(B113), 1869, I Notebook, presumably made before May 1869. Index of the content on the cover by Engels handwriting. Titled 1869, I Heft on the page 2. Bank of England and Money Market, Operation of Clearing House, consisting mainly of numerical tables giving data during the year 1868. Pages 3 to 18. Tables composed by Marx himself picking numerical data up from many numbers of The Money Market Review issued during the year. Identification of the sources (numbers and pages of the newspaper) needed. The Money Market Review, from the 4th January to the 26th December 1868, in 40 pages. Excerpts during the period following that of the numbers excerpted in the notebooks B102(B108) and B101(B109). The Economist, from the 4th January to the 26th December 1868, in 28 pages. Excerpts during the period following that of the numbers excerpted in the notebooks B102(B108) and B101(B109). Index of the articles excerpted from The Money Market Review and The Economist. Pages

87-9. G. J. Goschen, The Theory of the Foreign Exchanges, London, 1866, in 21 pages. E. F. Feller/C. G. Odermann, Das Ganze der kaufmnnischen Arithmetik, 1859, in 30 pages. Table of contents, page 139.

4. Notebook No.B106(B114), Notebook II, 1869, presumably made from February 1869 to August 1872. Index of the contents on the cover by Engels handwriting. Titled Heft II 1869 on the non-numbered 1st page. Scrap of a newspaper article occupying 1 notebook page, dated by Marx as of the 19th May 1869, with no newspaper title. This scrap was proved to have been taken from a page of The Daily News issued on the 20th May 1869, the date given by Marx being mistaken. E. F. Feller/ C. G. Odermann, Das Ganze der kaufmnnischen Arithmetik, 1859. Continuation of the excerpts in the notebook B105(B113), in 36 pages. From the page 37 begin the excerpts from John Leslie Foster, An Essay on the Principle of Commercial Exchanges, 1804. Marx read Fosters work sent by Engels, at the end of February 1869 (see his letter of the 1st March 1869, MEW, Bd.32, S.263). These excerpts must therefore be included in the volume 19. The excerpts occupy 15 pages of the notebook from page 37 to 51. The material to be included in the volume 19 ends at this point. The following part of the excerpts contained in this notebook is to be included in the volume 21 on the assumption that it was made after September 1869 (see Sperl, Allgemeiner Prospekt..., supra) .

5. Notebook No.P001 On the cover is inscribed the title Trade and Finance, 1868 Marx. Marxs handwriting? This notebook contains only scraps from the same newspaper. 54 double spread pages in quantity. The title is not that of the newspaper, but it indicates the title of the serialized articles published in the newspaper The Daily News. But there exist also scraps of articles independent of the series. The scraps are taken from numbers issued from August 1868 to August 1869.

6. Notebook No.P002 On the cover is inscribed the title Trade and Finance, 1869. Marxs handwriting? Just as the notebook P001, its contents consist only of scraps from the same newspaper. 49 double spread pages in quantity. The scraps are taken from numbers issued from August 1869 to

the beginning of 1870. A question arises about the consistency with the editorial policy of the volume 19 to include excerpts and scraps made till the end of September 1869 (see Sperl, Allgemeiner Prospekt..., supra).

7. Notebook No.P003 On the cover is inscribed the title Social Cases, 1869. Marxs handwriting? Is used a notebook for school children with drafts and serial page number (probably written by one of Marxs children). This notebook contains only scraps from the same newspaper. 31 double spread pages in quantity. Scraps are pasted on about half of the total pages of the notebook. The rest (the latter half of the pages) remains as they were filled with drafts supposedly written by a child of Marx. Just as in the case of P001 and P002, the title does not indicate the name of the newspaper, but the title of the series of articles published in The Daily News at the time. The scraps are taken from numbers issued from August 1869 to December 1870. A question arises about the consistency with the editorial policy of the volume 19 to include excerpts and scraps made till the end of September 1869.

8. As Marxs excerpt notebooks to be included in the volume 19, in addition to the above 7 kept in Amsterdam, there exists still one other which is conserved in Russian Centre in Moscow. It is not exactly a notebook, but a brochure entitled The Illustrated Universal Pocket Diary and Almanac for 1869, in some of the blank space of which Marx inserted his notes. These are supposed to be from the period between March 1869 and August 1871. The data of the original in the form of digital picture just as those we had taken in Amsterdam in 2008 have been kindly sent to us from Moscow in April 2013 by Ljudmira Vasina. The contents of it are roughly as follows: list of addresses, calculations, mathematical formula (for calculating the rate of surplus value and the rate of profits), bibliography, list of the numbers in the years 1870 and 1871 of Volksstaat Marx did not dispose of at hand, excerpts from M. Wirth, Geschichte der Handelskrisen, Frankfurt a. M., 1858.

One of the tasks indispensable for the preparation of the volume 19 of the part IV of MEGA2 , aiming at a faithful reproduction of the excerpt notebooks of Marx, is to collate the contents of these notebooks with the original documentary sources from which he made excerpts (books, newspaper and journal articles, statistics and reports) and to record one by one the differences between them. The precondition for this is to seek and find out where these

documentary sources are conserved today and to collect them. In contrast to the volume 18, for the editorial work of the volume 19, the number of the original sources is much smaller (5 books and 5 newspapers and periodicals), and this task was much easier and has fortunately been accomplished in a few years. Now all of them are available for us. In the process of carrying out this task, the recent information technology including internet search was extremely helpful in reducing the time and effort (and also money) we have had to spend. However, in collating the excerpted text with the original source, the excerpts from newspaper articles present particular and peculiar difficulties we dont encounter in the case of the excerpts from books or journals. There may not be special difficulties in finding out from where the excerpts were taken in order to collate them, if Marx had clearly indicated the title of the article excerpted, the page number, the publication date and the title of the newspaper. The source data he indicates on the excerpted articles are for the most cases only the title of the newspaper and the date of its publication. But it is not rare that even these minimal clues are not available. Even if these are given, in the case of excerpts from newspapers of large format with considerable page number (those which are included in the above list, The Economist, The Daily News, The Money Market Review rightly belong to this sort.), usually a great effort and long time is required to localize the original article. It is much more so when no date is given and the excerpts or scraps are taken not in a certain chronological order but at random. In such cases the localization in the original source often presents desperate difficulties. Unfortunately, in some sample searches of Marxs newspaper scraps I have tried till now, such cases were experienced many times. In respect of its total dimension, the volume 19 is rather larger among volumes of the part IV of MEGA2, but the number of the excerpted literature is relatively small. It may seem therefore that not so much effort is required for seeking and collecting the original documents, and for collating them with the excerpts. But, considering that the journal articles occupy the majority in the excerpted or cut out literature and that the particular problems mentioned above must arise when trying to localize the excerpts or scraps in the original source, very possibly effort and time beyond expectation will become necessary for the collation. On the other hand, the above list of the original literature from which Marx made excerpts or scraps indicates the following characteristics of the literature recorded in the notebooks to be included in the volume 19. 1. The books are very few, their total number is only 5, and three of them on political economy concern the foreign exchange and the history of crises, 2. Excerpts from newspapers and periodicals occupy a heavy weight, and from newspapers a large number of scraps are made along with excerpts. And, except for the scraps cut out from The Daily News

presumably made successively at about the same time as the publication of each of its number, almost all the other excerpts and scraps are taken from the back numbers going back as far as 2 years. From this one can suppose that Marx had strong interest in the development of economic situation of the time, that he tried to observe the facts of the crisis broken out in the latter half of the 1860s from its monetary and financial aspects in going back to the immediate past, i.e. 1866. As far as his activities of making excerpts and scraps are concerned, unlike during the period from the first half of the 1860s to the proximate past, Marx at that time seems to have attached more importance to the observation of the evolution of the contemporary economic situation, rather than to hunting eagerly the economic literature of wide range to fill notebooks with excerpts. These characteristics are clear, in contrasting the volume 19 with the volume 18 which is to include the excerpts made between February 1864 and September 1868 and with the volume 17 which is to include the excerpts made between May and June 1863.

3. Marxs research activities for Capital during the period from September 1868 and September 1869, and his view on the economic situation of the time --background of the making of excerpt notebooks to be included in the volume 19-The most important material for getting acquainted with the activities of Marx and Engels in various fields during a certain period is, apart from the excerpt notebooks they left, the writings and letters they drafted and published during that period. But, among the volumes of the parts I and III of MEGA2 covering the years from 1868 to 1869, the volume 21 of the part I is the only one which has been published up to now. On the other hand, the volumes 16 and 32 of MEW also cover the above period. Hence, by referring to the writings and letters of Marx and Engels of this period published in these volumes, we will ascertain what were Marxs research and writing activities at that time for preparing Capital, which formed the background for his work on the excerpts and scraps to be included in the volume 19. From the time just after the publication of the Volume I of Capital in September 1867, Marx employed himself in accomplishing the following Volume II (including Book II on the process of circulation of capital and Book III on the process of capitalist production as a whole) in order to publish it in a short time, but because of the difficulties of various nature such a prospective of his had to recede gradually with the passing of time. About one year later, in his letter to Danielson (the first Russian translator of the volume I of Capital) of the 7th October 1868, he says as follows: You must not wait for the second volume [of Capital], the publication of which will be delayed by perhaps another 5 months. [...] In any case, Volume I

constitutes a whole, complete in itself. (MEW, Bd.32, S.563) As the manuscripts of the Books II and III making up the two parts of the Volume II (the former is called the first manuscript, the latter the main manuscript) had been already written till the end of 1865, Marx may have expected to accomplish the Volume II in a short time in relying on these already written manuscripts. Naturally he was to tackle first the former part, Book II, for which he would work on the basis of the first manuscript. What he wrote as a result of this first step is now called the second manuscript of the Book II of Capital. But it was far from what Marx had aimed at as the final draft of the first part of the Volume II. And as for the Book III which was to become the second part, during the 1860s no further elaboration was attempted on the basis of the main manuscript, which is clear from the manuscript materials relating to the Book III written after the main manuscript, published in 2003 in the volume 14 of the part II of MEGA2. In view of these circumstances, in the above letter to Danielson Marx may be considered to be too optimistic in saying that the publication [of the second volume of Capital] will be delayed by perhaps another 5 months, and what conforms to the case is rather his advice to separate for the moment the Volume I (which constitutes a whole, complete in itself) from the Volume II (Marx adopted more explicitly the same orientation for the French translation of Capital, carried out a little later). We can thus think that Marxs writing activity for elaborating Capital during the period covered by the volume 19 of the part IV of MEGA2 was limited to that of the second manuscript of the Book II on the process of circulation of capital. And this effort of his proceeded with repeated interruptions. Of the letters of Marx written between September 1868 and September 1869, very few mention explicitly or implicitly his work on manuscript writing of Capital (only 3 among the letters included in the volume 32 of MEW, except for that to Danielson quoted above). The following is the quotation of some related passages from these 3 letters: To Engels of the 14th November 1868: Since the practice is said to be superior to any theory, I ask you to write me as circumstantially as possible the way in which you manage your commercial enterprise, so far as it concerns the bankers etc. (with concrete examples). [...] As the Volume II is too theoretical for the most part, I intend to disclose the reality of fraud and commercial morality in making use of the chapter on credit. (Bd.32, S.204, emphasis in original) To Engels of the 13th February 1869: I am now very busy with my book. In fact, after several weeks of interruption by the fever of catarrh I have just resumed the work... (Bd.32,

S.255) About half a month later, in the letter to Kugelmann of the 3 rd March Marx says: It will probably take until the summer before I am finished with Vol. II. Then with the manuscript I shall come to Germany with my daughter [Jenny] and see you then. (Bd.32, S.596) Considering that Marx spent more than half a year only for the final step (making the fair copy) of the manuscript of the Volume I, we can barely take for serious this announcement. To Kugelmann, his fan, Marx had once made a similar announcement on the planned accomplishment of the Volume I. Now, of all the documents listed in the previous section and from which excerpts or scraps are taken in the notebooks to be included in the volume 19, those explicitly mentioned in the letters Marx wrote during the same period are the following 7 (2 among the 5 books and all of the 5 newspapers and periodicals).

John Leslie Foster, An Essay on the Principle of Commercial Exchanges, 1804 Marx seems to have attached at that time so much importance to this book, that he asked Engels by letter to send it to him as many as three times (the 25th September 1868, the 15th and the 24th February 1869), and at last he heard of its sending from Engels in his letter of the 25 th February 1869. The excerpts from Foster s book beginning from the page 37 of the notebook B106(B114) may be considered to have been made at this time. In response to this letter he wrote to Engels the following remarks on this book (the 1st March 1869): Ditto received Foster on Saturday [the 27th February] evening. The book is indeed important for its time. First, because Ricardos theory is fully developed in it, and better than in Ricardo on money, rate of exchange, etc. Second, because you can see here how those jackasses, Bank of England, Committee of Inquiry, the theoreticians racked their brains over the problem: England debtor to Ireland. Despite the fact that the rate of exchange is always against Ireland, and money is exported from Ireland to England. Foster solves the puzzle for them: it is the depreciation of Irish paper money. In fact, two years earlier than him (1802), Blake had fully explained this difference between the nominal and the real rate of exchange, about which, incidentally, Petty had said everything necessary but after him this business was forgotten once again. (MEW, Bd.32, S.263) The above story about how Marx obtained this book, his remarks on it written only 2 days after having received it, are telling evidences that he highly estimated this book he had noticed beforehand and just read.

H. E. Roscoe, Kurzes Lehrbuch der Chemie nach den neuesten Ansichten der Wissenschaft, unter Mitwirkung des Verfassers bearbeitet von Carl Schorlemmer, Braunschweig, 1867 From this book are made short excerpts in 3 pages at the beginning of the notebook B102(B108) presumably made between September and December 1869. What Marx is talking about in his letter to Engels of the 20th March 1869 may be on this book. I am profoundly grateful to Schorlemmer for the second edition of Chemistry. Tomorrow, I am going to begin to reread the Second Part, Organic Chemistry (I suppose this part needs some changes) as a diversion for Sunday. (MEW, Bd.32, S.283) In this letter, dated a several months later than the notebook B102(B108), Marx talks of rereading the book, which may suggest that he is now reporting to Engels that he is going to read it again after having made excerpts during the last months of the year 1868.

The Daily News In the 7 excerpt and scrap notebooks to be included in the volume 19 of the part IV of MEGA2, listed in the previous section, the title of the newspaper The Daily News does not seem to be mentioned, unlike other newspapers such as The Economist. In fact, the numerous scraps of newspaper articles pasted on the pages of the notebooks P001, P002, P003 have proved to have been taken from The Daily News, with a very few exceptions. Marx and Engels seem to have continued to pay attention to this newspaper for a long time, not limited to the end of the 1860s. It belongs to the category of newspapers the titles of which are most frequently mentioned in their letters and in their articles published in various media. Among the letters exchanged between them during the period covered by the volume 19, it is mentioned in the following 4: from Marx to Engels of the 9th September 1868, from Engels to Marx of 16th September 1868, from Marx to Engels of the 24th February 1869, from Marx to Engels of 15th April 1869.

The Economist Needless to say that this weekly newspaper founded in 1843 is one of the major media of political and economic information representative of England, and it is to be supposed that Marx and Engels, living in England, naturally regarded this newspaper as one of their main sources of information. Not limited to the period covered by the volume 19, in many occasions they mentioned it and quoted its articles. Concerning the period from September 1868 to

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September 1869, Marx and Engels were talking about the situation of the English cotton industry during the American Civil War (1861-5) in their correspondence at the end of the year 1868 (from Marx to Engels of the 9th and the 12th December, from Engels to Marx of the 13th December) in referring to an article of The Economist of the 14th April 1866 (according to an editors note of MEW, Bd.32, though this reference is not made explicit on the letter of their letters), and Marx quotes in his following letter to Engels of the 14th November 1868 a passage from this newspaper: As for The Economist, the next story will sound strange to you, that is, after the example of [William Thomas] Thornton in The Fortnightly Review, The Economist literally said as follows: No law of demand and supply, in any sense which has yet been assigned to these words, exists; that neither in fact, nor in tendency, do market prices conform to the rule which is commonly supposed to govern them. (Bd.32, S.202) Again according to an editors note of MEW, the article of The Economist quoted here is from its number of the 3rd November 1866. These two articles of the year 1866 quoted in the letters of the end of 1868 are from among the many articles of this newspaper excerpted in the notebook B101(B109). They are found respectively in the pages 45 to 46 and in the page 106 of this notebook. Besides, along with the notebook B101(B109), excerpts from The Economist are made also in the notebook B105(B113), and the whole of the excerpts in these two notebooks makes up a large quantity comparable to that of The Money Market Review.

The Money Market Review The excerpts from this newspaper are made in the 3 notebooks (B101, B102, B105), of a quantity a little larger than those from The Economist, probably the largest among the excerpted materials to be included in the volume 19. However, Marx mentioned this newspaper only once when he was taking excerpts from it, in the following letter to Engels of the 23 rd January 1869: According to The Money Market Review, Knowles paid 7s. 6p. for 1. What has become of this brave man? (Bd.32, S.247) The date of this letter overlaps with the presumed period of the making of the excerpt notebooks given above.

The Social Economist, Industrious Partnerships Record and Cooperative Review There is only one scrap from 2 pages of this newspaper in the notebook B101, and as far as according to the data of MEW, Marx mentioned this newspaper only once during the time, in his following letter of the 15th February 1869 to Laura and Paul Lafargue: The Social Economist, a most stupid publication by old Holyoake, who is his own Cromwell lives upon

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Stepneys pocket. There is no sham philanthropic pie he has not his hand, or rather his pocket, in. (Bd.32, S.593)

The Standard Among the notebooks to be included in the volume 19, from this newspaper is taken only one scrap pasted on a page toward the end of the notebook B102. But, not limited to this period, both Marx and Engels mention it several times in their letters and published articles. During this period, Marx mentions it only once in his letter to Engels of the 16th September 1868, in the context of informing him of the reactions of various newspapers to the 3 rd congress of the International, just held in Brussels, as follow: The Standard, which first attacked us, sneaks before the working class in a leading article yesterday. It knocks the capitalists and will now even pull grimaces about the land question. (Bd.32, S.150)

As can be confirmed from the above, the contents of the excerpts and scraps of Marx to be included in the volume 19 of the part IV of MEGA2 have characteristics different from those of the excerpt notebooks of the 1860s anterior to this period. The main factor which brought about such characteristics was, along with the advancement of Marxs work for the elaboration of Capital, the economic situation of the latter half of the 1860s, among others the outburst of the new economic crisis of 1866, with traits distinct from the preceding one at the end of the 1850s (the period at which Marx wrote the first manuscript of the critique of political economy known today as Grundrisse and he published its first part as Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Part One.). Most of the contents of the excerpts and scraps of Marx to be included in the volume 19 can be considered to indicate a part of Marxs reactions to such an evolution of the economic situations in the latter half of the 1860s (he intended to collect the basic data for observing the vicissitudes of the crisis from their monetary and financial aspects in order to derive from them his own certain theoretical point of view). But the crisis phenomena which arose in the mid-1860s (downfall of the prices and production, rise of unemployment) reached their peak from 1866 to 1867, at a time when Marx was concentrated on the final elaboration of the first volume of Capital. Probably because of this, in the articles and letters Marx (and Engels) wrote from September 1868 to September 1869, their reactions to the economic situations of the time seem to be scarcely shown. During this period Marx and Engels certainly spoke several times of the current economic situation in their correspondence (cf. letters of Engels to Marx of the 11th December 1868, of the 10th May, of the 22nd June 1869,

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letter of Marx to Engels of the 1st March 1869), but there they never discussed the economic situation of England or Europe historically and in a long term perspective. They only informed mutually of what happed in their neighbourhood or of what they saw (probably by chance) in the newspapers. The observations of Marx on the newly developing crises in historical and long term perspective can be found rather in his letters and articles written in 1866 and the following year, above all in the volume I of Capital, the final draft of which was finished only during the first days of April 1867. Marx says in his letter to Engels of the 17th May 1866 as follows: The present crisis seems to me to be only a premature special financial crisis. It may become serious, only if the things go wrong in the United States, but perhaps the time is not yet mature for this. (Bd.31, S.219) To this Engels answers in his letter of the 25th as follows: In any case the crisis has come too early. If it were a sufficiently solid crisis which would come in 67 or 68, it could perhaps destroy us. (Bd.31, S.220) These letters appear to show that in the earlier phases of the crises happened in the mid-1866 both of them could not still have a clear view on their character and development. On the contrary, in the volume I of Capital published in September 1867, relying on the observations continued till the end of March in the same year, Marx says on the ongoing crisis as follows (the quotations are all taken from c. the General Law of Capitalist Accumulation in 1) The Capitalist Accumulation of Chapter Six. The Process of Accumulation of Capital): At this moment, March, 1867, the Indian and Chinese market is again overstocked by the consignments of the British cotton manufacturers. In 1866 a reduction in wages of 5 per cent. took place amongst the cotton operatives. In 1867, as consequence of a similar operation, there was a strike of 20,000 men at Preston. (Karl Marx, Das Kapital, Kritik der politischen konomie, erster Band, Hamburg, 1867, MEGA2, II, 5, Dietz Verlag, Berlin, 1983, S.525) To these sentences in the note of Marx, Engels added afterward the following supplement: That was the prelude to the crisis which broke out immediately afterwards. F. E. (Karl Marx, Das Kapital, Kritik der politischen konomie, erster Band, Hamburg, 1890, MEGA2, II, 10, Dietz Verlag, Berlin, 1991, S.585) The crisis of 1866, which fell most heavily on London, created in this centre of the world market, more populous than the kingdom of Scotland, an increase of pauperism for the year 1866 of 19.5% compared with 1865, and of 24.4% compared with 1864, and a still greater increase for the first months of 1867 as compared with 1866. (MEGA2, II, 5, S.527)

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It will be remembered that the year 1857 brought one of the great crises with which the industrial cycle periodically ends. The next termination of the cycle was due in 1866. Already discounted in the regular factory districts by the cotton famine, which threw much capital from its wonted sphere into the great centres of the money-market, the crisis assumed, at this time, an especially financial character. Its outbreak in 1866 was signalised by the failure of a gigantic London Bank, immediately followed by the collapse of countless swindling companies. (MEGA2, II, 5, S.540) That the crisis broke out in 1866 and became more violent toward 1867, and that this crisis bore a financial character beginning with the bankruptcies of huge banks, these two points are the kernel of Marxs view on the crisis he observed up to the fi rst quarter of 1867, attested by the above quotations from Capital. As for the former point, there seems to be no clue for knowing how he seized the later process (particularly from 1868 to 1869) in the documents included in the volumes 16 and 32 of MEW. The latter point would serve as an explanation of the reason for which many of the excerpts and scraps to be included in the volume 19 concern monetary and financial matter, as this was detailed above. By the way, exiled to London, Marx had to be engaged in journalist activities for a long time to earn a living for him and his family. Above all, it is well known that he continued to send, as European correspondent, to the American newspaper, New York Daily Tribune, articles transferring the latest situations in Europe. But it was during ten years from 1852 to 1862 that he contributed to this newspaper, and, as far as according to the data of MEW, after this period neither Marx nor Engels were not continuously sending articles to any particular newspapers. If it had been for such newspaper articles, we could have probably known something more about how he viewed the economic situation in Europe at that time. From what we have seen above, it is possible to tell the reason why, among the great number of excerpts and scraps from several newspapers Marx took during one year from September 1868, those from the two, i.e. The Money Market Review and The Economist, which are the most numerous, are taken for a period beginning from a time going back more than two years to the time of excerpt making. That is, from the autumn 1868 when already more than 2 years had passed from the outburst of the crisis, Marx began collecting data on this crisis from the outset in preparation for his own studies to be carried out soon after. This may have been what Marx aimed at when making most of these excerpts and scraps. In the last place of this section, we will see how these excerpts and scraps were treated in Marxs later work on Capital (excluding hence the mentions and quotations by Engels and also

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the cases where Marx made use of them in the context irrelevant to Capital), as far as can be known from the data of MEW. Of the documentary sources which consist of 5 newspapers and periodicals and of 5 books, i.e. 10 in total, in the majority of cases (3 for the former, 4 for the latter), no traces of later use in the above sense are found, despite Marx having made excerpts or scraps from them at the end of the 1860s. Above all, it is to be noticed that among the books those relating to political economy were not at all used. Concretely the not used documents are the following: Periodicals The Daily News The Standard The Social Economist Books John Leslie Foster, An Essay on the Principle of Commercial Exchanges, London, 1804 G. J. Goschen, The Theory of the Foreign Exchanges, London, 1866 H. E. Roscoe, Kurzes Lehrbuch der Chemie, Braunschweig, 1867 M. Wirth, Geschichte der Handelskrisen, Frankfurt a. M., 1858 The 3 books other than Roscoes on chemistry concern the history of crises and the theory of foreign exchanges, which belonged to Marxs concerns at that time paying attention to the crisis of the latter half of the 1860s and to its monetary and financial aspects, and at the same time, after the publication of the Volume I of Capital, these books have relations to some of the domains of the Part (Chapter) 5 of the Book III. However, after the end of the 1860 Marx did not resume serious work in any of these fields, and because of this the collected material was left altogether unused. On the contrary, concerning 2 newspapers and 1 book other than those given above, traces of sparse use (pertaining only to the sorts of use defined above) are found among the documents included in MEW.

The Economist The traces of use are found in the following two places. 1. in the supplement for the second edition to a note in the section 2 of the chapter on Primitive Accumulation of the second edition of Capital published in 1872, an article is quoted from the number of the 2nd June 1866 (Karl Marx, Das Kapital, Kritik der politischen konomie, erster Band, Hamburg, 1872, MEGA2, II, 6, Dietz Verlag, Berlin, 1987, S.660, this article is excerpted in pages 67-8 of

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the notebook B101(B109)). 2. in the chapter 14 on The Time of Circulation of Part 2 of the Book II of Capital Engels edited on the basis of the manuscripts of Marx written after 1868 and published in 1885 after the death of Marx (Karl Marx, Das Kapital, Kritik der politischen konomie, zweiter Band, Hamburg, 1885, MEGA2, II, 13, Akademie Verlag, Berlin, 2008, S.234. This place in Book II of Capital edited by Engels corresponds to the following place in Marxs second manuscript: Karl Marx, Manuskripte zum zweiten Buch des Kapitals, 1868 bis 1881, MEGA2, II, 11, Akademie Verlag, Berlin, 2008, S.212. Incidentally, in the manuscript the newspaper article is in its original i.e. English, but in Engels edition it is translated into German. In the Volume I of Capital Marx himself published, in principle every quotation was left in its original language, the measure Engels adopted seems to have followed his global editorial policy attaching importance to the accessibility for the vast readers of Germany or of German language area.), three articles published respectively on the 16th, the 30th June 1866 and on the 7th July 1866 are quoted. These articles are excerpted in the notebook B101(B109) respectively in page 72, 76-77 and 80.

The Money Market Review Two articles of this newspaper are quoted in the two places in the second section Components, Replacement, Repair, and Accumulation of Fixed Capital of Chapter VIII Fixed Capital and Circulating Capital of Part II of the Book II of Capital (MEGA2, II, 13, SS.157, 165. The corresponding places in the second manuscript are MEGA2, II, 11, SS.107, 108. But, in this second manuscript of the Book II Marx mentions this newspaper or quotes its articles still in other places than the above two Engels adopted in his edition. Cf. MEGA2, II, 11, SS.33, 121, 122, 124, 126, 194.). The former is an article from the number of the 21st December 1868, the second of the 25th January 1869 (the editors of MEW give in their note 12 an erroneous date of the 2nd December 1868 for the former and give no date for the latter. Cf. Bd.24, SS.170, 181.). The excerpts from this newspaper with these dates exist in the notebooks B102(B108) and B105(B113), respectively in page 76 and page 24, and the manuscript Engels made use of for his edition of the Book II of Capital was written at the same time as the making of these notebooks or later than that.

E. F. Feller/ C. G. Odermann, Das Ganze der kaufmnnischen Arithmetik, 1859 This textbook of applied mathematics excerpted in 30 pages of the notebook B105(B113) with its title 1869, I Notebook, presumably made during the first half of 1869, is quoted only

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once in MEW, in the note 41 of Chapter XVIII The Turnover of Merchants Capital, Price of Part IV of the Book III of Capital (Bd.25, S.325). But the text in this passage exists also in the corresponding place in the main manuscript (Karl Marx, konomische Manuskripte, 1863-1867, MEGA2, II, 42, Dietz Verlag, Berlin, 1993, S.386), it may hence be taken from the main manuscript written prior to the notebook B105(B113). This quotation cannot therefore be taken from the excerpt existing in the notebook B105(B113). Marx had already read the above book of Odermann prior to this notebook.

Of the huge amount of excerpts and scraps of Marx to be included in the volume 19, the part for which are left evident traces of his later use for economic research is very minor, as has been shown above. The overwhelming majority enclosed in the notebooks were never reviewed and were left as they were up to the present time away from their provenance as far as one and a half century. But the materials accumulated there suggest the theoretical interests Marx nourished at that time. These notebooks will contribute much as one of the fundamental sources to the future comparative studies with already known documents in MEW, new works and letters which will be made available with the continuation of the publication of MEGA2 and the materials contained in the volumes of MEGA2 already published but not yet sufficiently made use of for the study. Such comparative studies will be expected to make it possible to shed new lights on (and renew our reading of) Capital and other works of Marx and Engels already well known for a long time and seemingly invested with established evaluations and interpretations.

4. Editorial work of the volume 19 of the part IV of MEGA2

The volumes of the part IV comprise the excerpts and scraps from the books, articles of periodicals and newspapers etc., Marx and Engels read and the marginal notes they made about these materials. They had the habit of making extracts during their lifetime, so that the number of the volumes in the part IV is comparable to those in the other parts. The first step of the editorial work is to decipher the original excerpts handwritten in the notebooks and to input them as text into computer. But as is well known, the handwriting of Marx is notoriously difficult to read even for the native speaker of German, not to mention the far eastern Japanese. Even for the former, the decipherment of Marx s handwritings requires a long special training, and very few of the members of the Japanese editorial board can somehow read Marxs cacography. In such a condition it is not possible for us to input in computer Marxs original writings in directly deciphering them in order to make a primary text. But fortunately,

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during the period of preparation of MEGA1 (about 10 years around 1930) an enormous amount of Marxs and Engels handwritings were deciphered and typewritten by the staff of the Marx-Engels Institute or of the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute in Moscow. And most of them have been conserved in Marxism-Leninism Institute (reorganized today as the Russian State Archive for Social and Political History RGASPI with its Russian initials). Being made mainly by the Russian staff at that time probably helped by some German-speaking assistants staying then in Moscow, these typewritten manuscripts are not impeccable in the light of the new editorial criteria of MEGA2 and must be afterward checked against the original excerpt texts. Even though this is the case, for the non German-speaking members of the Japanese editorial board these typewritten texts can make much less difficult the deciphering work of Marxs original. The photocopies of these typewritten materials were sent to us from Moscow in 2002. But a part of the original texts was not deciphered and typed during the 1920s or 1930s, and we had to ask German-speaking colleagues in Berlin for the decipherment of this part. Thus the first step of our editorial work is to input in computer the photocopied typewritten manuscripts. For the members participating to the editorial work as part-time volunteers this first step took several years, but in any case it is now finished for the volume 18 and almost finished for the volume 19. As the volumes belonging to the part IV consist mainly of excerpts from the materials of research, and not of texts Marx and Engels wrote themselves, it is indispensable to collate these excerpts with the original texts. Such a collation is the second step of the editorial work. As for the volume 19, I have already presented in the section 2 how this second process proceeded and accomplished in dressing the list of original sources from which Marx took excerpts and scraps in each of the 8 notebooks to be included in this volume. So I pass directly to the next step. The next and third step consists of checking the text of the excerpts inputted on the basis of the typewritten manuscripts made in Moscow against Marxs original excerpts. About the two thirds of the whole of the original manuscripts of Marx and Engels are held in the International Institute of Social History (IISG) in Amsterdam which bought them from the German Social Democratic Party in the 1930s, and the rest of one third procured by the Max-Engels-Lenin Institute through various channels in the same 1930s are now conserved in RGASPI in Moscow. At about the same time as the typewritten manuscripts to be included in the volumes 17, 18 and 19 of the part IV of MEGA2 were sent to us from Moscow, we got equally from Moscow the facsimile of the corresponding parts of the photocopied original manuscripts of Marx. But as these photocopies were made many years ago before the Second World War and besides once

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more copied, they were not sufficiently clear for us to use as the original manuscripts for the purpose of checking the inputted texts. Thanks to the official grant-in-aid of Government we could get in 2007 for three years for the editorial work of the volume 18 of the part IV of MEGA2, 4 members of our group were dispatched to IISG in Amsterdam in order to take the digital pictures of high definition of the original manuscripts of Marx and Engels to be included in the volumes 17, 18 and 19. After getting back to Japan, we converted these pictures in PDF files, which made the pictures even more clear. The pictures in the form of digital files on computer permit us to apply diverse operations to them and to detect what can never be seen on the original manuscript written on paper, for example, water-marks, erased characters, hidden brushstrokes, by adjusting the luminosity, enhancing or dropping the picture contrast or by changing the colour tonality, etc., which can all be easily done on the computer screen. The third step of our editorial work is to check the inputted text collated with the original materials read by Marx against these original excerpt manuscripts of Marx transformed into digital pictures, in order to make the basic text for the MEGA2 volume. This most difficult phase in the whole of the editorial work for a non-German speaking group has come to end for the volume 18 and will soon finish also for the volume 19. The fourth and last step is to write all the parts of the apparatus criticus, of which the most important is the introduction. The introduction consists mainly in the dating of each of the excerpts with justifying evidences and in explaining the context of Marxs research activities in which these excerpts were made. As the texts included in a volume of MEGA2 are always arranged rigorously in the chronological order, their dating and its justification are the essential subject of the introduction. Other than the introduction, editor s note, name index, subject index, index of literature will have to be made in German. After all these operations will have finished, the whole of the results of our work will be handed over to a German-speaking reviewer (Gutachter), and whether the prepared texts shall pass into the printing process will be decided according to his opinion. But for this to be on agenda, still several years will be needed.

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