This is the master reference for Marx’s critique of political economy: the Grundrisse notebooks of 1857–58 and the three volumes of Capital, gathered into one concept-organized document. It exists to be written from. Every load-bearing formulation in the corpus is carried here whole, as a block quotation anchored to its printed page in the Penguin editions, and sorted under the concept it builds, so that a writer drafting on value, surplus-value, the falling rate of profit, or any of the other categories finds the receipts already collected rather than having to re-read four volumes to refind them.
The through-line the whole synthesis follows is the one that organizes the corpus itself: the movement from the apparent to the actual. Political economy before Marx took the finished forms of bourgeois society — price, wage, profit, interest, rent — at face value, as natural facts to be related to one another. The critique of political economy is a critique of the categories, not merely of their misuse: it shows each finished form to be a form of appearance that expresses a definite social relation while simultaneously concealing it, and it reconstructs, step by step, the actual relations that produce the appearance. That is why the corpus is a single argument and not four books on economics. The commodity-form conceals the social character of labour; the wage-form conceals the division of the working day into paid and unpaid labour; profit conceals surplus-value; average profit severs each capital’s revenue from its own exploitation of labour; interest erases production altogether; ground-rent lets the earth itself appear to bear value; and the trinity formula assembles these completed mystifications into what Volume III calls the religion of everyday life. Marx’s own statement of the method sits at the head of this sequence and is gathered in the final entry of the lexicon: all science would be superfluous if the form of appearance of things directly coincided with their essence.
The corpus bounded here is primary text only: Capital, Volume I in the Ben Fowkes translation (Penguin, 1976); Volumes II and III in the David Fernbach translations (Penguin, 1978 and 1981); and the Grundrisse in the Martin Nicolaus translation (Penguin, 1973). No interpretive or reception literature is folded in at this version; the corpus carries its concepts on its own. The document is built from the eighteen part briefs on the three volumes and the five Grundrisse briefs in the SAARUTU library, and it is a living, versioned instrument: new briefs fold in, and the dossiers grow.
Chronology is load-bearing in this corpus, and it does not run in publication order. The Grundrisse comes first in composition: the rough notebooks of 1857–58, written at speed during the first world economic crisis, in which Marx worked out for himself the categories that Capital later presents in finished form. It was not published until the twentieth century, and it says many things more explicitly and more philosophically than the published work: the method of rising from the abstract to the concrete, the historical scope of the categories, the fragment on machines and its horizon of disposable time. Where Capital presents a result, the Grundrisse often shows the thinking that produced it, which is why this document weaves it throughout rather than treating it as an appendix.
Note the inversion the manuscripts force on the reader: the main manuscript of Volume III largely precedes the later drafts from which Engels assembled Volume II. The order of the volumes is architectural, not biographical — production, circulation, then the process as a whole — and the corpus should be cited with that architecture in mind. Where a concept shifts between the Grundrisse and Capital, or between the volumes, the lexicon entries below place the formulations side by side and mark the shift as a shift rather than smoothing it into tidy development.
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