Grundrisse: Footnotes

NOTEBOOK I: The Chapter on Money

1. Alfred Darimon (1819–1902), a follower of Proudhon. He edited Proudhonist newspapers in 1848, wrote on financial questions in the 1850s and was a democratic opponent of Napoleon III until 1864 when he went over to the Bonapartists.

2. In French in the original. Throughout this edition, passages in French, Italian and Spanish have been translated in the main body of the text; English has been left; Greek and Latin have been left in the text and translated in the notes.

3. Should read: ‘ … while the amount of securities decreases by 12,159,388; i.e. the decline of securities exceeds the decline of metal … ’. The correction of these and similar errors would in no way touch the substance of Marx’s conclusions concerning Darimon’s statistical ideas.

4. Isaac Péreire (1806–80), French banker and railway king who, together with his brother Émile, founded the Crédit Mobilier in 1852. A close associate of Napoleon III.

5. Michel Chevalier (1806–79), follower of Saint-Simon up to 1833; later Bonapartist. From 1850 he was Professor of Political Economy at the Collège de France, and a supporter in the 1850s of Bonaparte’s move towards free trade.

6. Ricardo’s pamphlet, Proposals for an Economical and Secure Currency, London, 1816.

7. A reference to the period during which the Bank Restriction Act was in operation (1797–1819).

8. A play on the two meanings of the French word ‘espèces’: (1) sorts; (2) specie.

9. The Currency Act of 1844, which stringently limited the number of banknotes the country banks could issue, and also limited the fiduciary issue of the Bank of England to £14,000,000; any further issue had to be backed by coin or bullion.

10. Émile de Girardin (1806–81), French journalist, who edited La Presse from 1830 to 1857 and wrote the introduction to Darimon’s book. A politician entirely lacking in scruples, he was a moderate republican in 1848, a Montagnard deputy to the Legislative Assembly in 1850 and a Bonapartist in 1852.

11. Potentially. Cf. Aristotle, Metaphysics, Bk VIII, Ch. 6, 2.

12. John Francis Bray (1809–95), economic pamphleteer and political activist in the England of the 1830s. In 1837 he became treasurer of the Leeds Working Men’s Association. He advocated utopian socialist ideas in the pamphlet Labour’s Wrongs and Labour’s Remedy, Leeds, 1839, and was described by Marx as an ‘English Communist’ (The Poverty of Philosophy, Moscow, 1966, p. 60).

13. John Gray (1799–1850), economic pamphleteer and utopian socialist, author of The Social System, Edinburgh, 1831, and Lectures on the Nature and Use of Money, Edinburgh, 1848.

14. See below, pp. 153–60.

15. Hegel, Science of Logic, tr. A. V. Miller, London, 1969, p. 416.

16. Cf. Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, pp. 52–68.

17. Kaufmannsstand: This refers above all to the merchants of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, who formed an ‘estate’ rather than a ‘class’.