Prefatory note

This is a shortened version of a paper on Marx’s 1857 Introduction presented to and discussed in a series of Centre seminars. It has been somewhat revised in the light of those discussions, though I have not been able to take account of some further, more substantive criticisms generously offered by John Mepham, among others. The 1857 Introduction is Marx’s most substantial text on ‘method’, though even here many of his formulations remain extremely condensed and provisional. Since the Introduction presents such enormous problems of interpretation, I have largely confined myself to a ‘reading’ of the text. The positions taken by Marx in the Introduction run counter to many received ideas as to his ‘method’. Properly grasped and imaginatively applied – as they were in the larger corpus of the Grundrisse to which they constantly refer – they seem to me to offer quite striking, original and seminal points of departure for the ‘problems of method’ which beset our field of study, though I have not been able to establish this connection within the limits of the paper. I see the paper, however, as contributing to this on-going work of theoretical and methodological clarification, rather than as simply a piece of textual explication. I hope this conjuncture will not be lost in the detail of the exposition.

The 1857 Introduction is one of the most pivotal of Marx’s texts (1). It is also one of his most difficult, compressed and ‘illegible’. In his excellent Foreword to the Grundrisse , Nicolaus warns that Marx’s Notebooks are hazardous to quote, ‘since the context, the grammar and the very vocabulary raise doubts as to what Marx “really” meant in a given passage’.

Vilar observes that the 1857 Introduction is one of those texts ‘from which everyone takes whatever suits him’ (2). With the growing interest in Marx’s method and epistemology, the Introduction occupies an increasingly central position in the study of Marx’s work. I share this sense of its significance, while differing often from how many of Marx’s explicators have read its meaning. My aim, then, is to inaugurate a ‘reading’ of this 1857 text. It is, of course, not a reading tabula rasa , not a reading ‘without presuppositions’. It reflects my own problematic, inevitably. I hope it also throws some undistorted light on Marx’s.

Marx’x notes on method a ‘reading’ of the 1857 Introduction

CULTURAL STUDIES 17(2) 2003, 113–149