At the end of a chapter, in his haste to go on to the next, Marx often left a few disconnected sentences to serve as the guidelines for an as yet unfinished analysis. Finally, there was the notorious handwriting, which even the author himself was sometimes unable to read.

I have confined myself to reproducing the manuscripts as literally as possible, altering in the style only what Marx himself would have altered, and only putting in explanatory parentheses and bridging passages where this was absolutely necessary, and the sense quite unambiguous. Whenever there was even the faintest doubt as to the meaning of a sentence, I preferred to print it word for word. The reworkings and interpolations that originate from me amount altogether to less than ten printed pages, and are of a purely formal character.

It is sufficient to enumerate the manuscript material that Marx left for Volume 2 to show the incomparable conscientiousness and severe self-criticism with which he strove to bring his great economic discoveries to the utmost degree of perfection before publishing them. This self-criticism seldom allowed him to adapt his presentation, either in content or in form, to his mental horizon, which was constantly expanding as the result of new studies. The material, then, consists of the following manuscripts.

Firstly a manuscript entitled ‘Zur Kritik der politischen Ökonomie’, 1,472 pages in twenty-three notebooks, written between August 1861 and June 1863. This is the continuation of the volume of the same title published in Berlin in 1859.* The themes investigated in Volume 1 of Capital are dealt with in pp. 1–220 (notebooks I–V) and again in pp. 1159–1472 (notebooks XIX–XXM), from the transformation of money into capital through to the conclusion. This is the first existing draft for Volume 1. Pages 973–1158 (notebooks xvi–xvii) deal with capital and profit, rate of profit, merchant’s capital and money capital, i.e. themes that were later developed in the manuscript for Volume 3. The themes treated in Volume 2, however, as well as many treated later in Volume 3, are not yet grouped together. They are dealt with in passing in the section that forms the main body of the manuscript, pp. 220–972 (notebooks vi–xv): Theorien über den Mehrwert. This section contains a detailed critical history of the crucial question in political economy, the theory of surplus-value, while at the same time most of the points that were specifically investigated later in the manuscript for Volumes 2 and 3, in their logical context, are developed here in polemical opposition to Marx’s predecessors. My intention is to publish the critical portion of this manuscript, leaving aside the passages already covered in Volumes 2 and 3, as Volume 4 of Capital.† But valuable though this manuscript is, it was of little use for the present edition of Volume 2.

The next manuscript in chronological order is that of Volume 3. The bulk of this, at least, was written in 1864 and 1865. Only after this was essentially complete did Marx proceed to finish off Volume 1, which appeared in 1867. This manuscript of Volume 3 I am now preparing for publication.

From the next period – after the appearance of Volume 1 – we have a collection of four folio manuscripts for Volume 2, numbered I–IV by Marx himself. Manuscript I (150 pages), which appears to date from 1865 or 1867, is the first independent version of Volume 2 in its present arrangement, but a more or less incomplete one. Here, too, nothing could be used. Manuscript III consists partly of a compilation of quotations and references to Marx’s extract-books (mostly related to the first part of Volume 2), partly of elaborations of individual points, in particular criticisms of Adam Smith’s* ideas on fixed and circulating capital, and on the source of profit; there is also a presentation of the relation between rate of surplus-value and rate of profit, which belongs to Volume 3. The references provided little that was new, while the elaborations were superseded by later versions, both for Volume 2 and Volume 3, and so also had to be mostly set aside. Manuscript IV is a version of Part One of Volume 2, and the first chapter of Part Two, which Marx left ready for publication, and it has been used in its due place. Even though it was evidently composed earlier than No. II, it is more complete in form, and could thus be used to advantage for the appropriate portion of the book. It only needed some additions from Manuscript II. This last manuscript is the only version of Volume 2 we possess which has been even approximately finished, and it dates from 1870. The notes for the final draft, which I shall discuss in a moment, say expressly that ‘the second version must be used as a basis’.

After 1870 there is a further pause, principally occasioned by illness.