Marx's 'Reworking Manuscript' in English

We are looking to fund the first full English translation of Marx's Ergänzungen und Veränderungen zum ersten Band des Kapitals (sometimes referred to as "the reworking manuscript"), which has played a significant role in German-language discussions around Marx's intellectual development and the history of Capital since its original publication in 1987 for the Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe.

The manuscript was written by Marx between December 1871 and January 1872 as a self-commentary on the first German edition of Capital, Volume I in preparation for the second edition, and many of the revisions made to the latter edition stem from the theoretical issues raised in this preparatory text. In particular, Marx alludes to shortcomings in the first edition where the reader might come to believe in the possibility of an individual or isolated commodity, leading him to affirm the communal ("gemeinschaftlich") value-objectivity of commodities against a notion of a substance belonging to a single commodity independent of all others.

Excerpts of Ergänzungen und Veränderungen zum ersten Band des Kapitals were recently translated for an appendix to Michael Heinrich's How To Read Marx's Capital: Commentary and Explanations on the Beginning Chapters, published by Monthly Review in 2021, but the full manuscript, which in the MEGA runs around 50 pages, has until now never been available in English. With the excerpts made newly available by Heinrich's work, as well as many recent discussions in relevant English-language Marx scholarship, we feel that now is the perfect time to translate the full manuscript.

In order to achieve that goal, we are trying to raise $2000 to translate and edit the full manuscript into a small book which will be independently published with a brief introduction.