Marx's Grundrisse

This is the first paperback edition in English of substantial extracts from the Grundrisse, the 1000-page manuscript in which Marx synthesized, for the only time in his life, the humanism of his youth with his later researches in history and economics. Comprising the draft notes for the massive projected treatise on political economy of which Dask Kapital was to have been merely the beginning, the manuscript remained inaccessible outside Russia until the 1950s. The Grundrisse (outlines) contains an historically detailed account of the process of alienation, analyses of the nature of work and, above all, a vision of the fully automated society in which social wealth could be devoted to the all-round development of the faculties of each individual.

Dr David McLellan prefaces each extract in his selection with a brief explanatory note and, in a discerning introduction to the work as a whole, places the Grundrisse in the development of Marx's thought and vindicates its claim to be Marx's most important work.

'The extracts are most effectively and unobtrusively edited and the introduction is a little gem of creative scholarship... any assessment of Marxism which fails to come to grips with the Grundrisse must now be considered inadequate.'
GUARDIAN