I am working from the Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1970 Edition.
Engels' Introduction was written in 1891.
“The following work appeared as a series of leading articles in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, from April 4th, 1849. It is based on the lectures delivered by Marx in 1847 at the German Workers' Society in Brussels. The work as printed remained a fragment; the words at the of No. 269 “to be continued,” remained unfulfilled in consequence of the events which just then came crowding one after another: the invasion of Hungary by the Russians, the insurrections in Dresden, Iserlohn, Elberfeld, the Palatinate, and Baden, which led to the suppression of the newspaper itself (May 19th, 1849.) The manuscript of the continuation was not found among Marx's papers after his death.” (p 5)
As with Engels; work in editing Volume II, and III of Capital, he was faced with the question of whether to keep to Marx's original wording and formulations. For Capital, he decided to do so, other than where whole sections, and even chapters were missing, which he inserted under his own name, or, in relation to various calculations, and examples that had to be reworked or replaced.
He did so, because the manuscripts for Capital and Theories of Surplus Value were the product of Marx's mature analysis of capital and capitalist relations, and so, Engels argued, the reader was owed Marx's words and thoughts, not those of anyone else. The 1891 Edition, however, was being published as a propaganda pamphlet, in a run of 10,000 copies, coming at the time of the new upsurge in the labour movement, resulting from the start of the new long wave uptrend (circa 1890-1914). So, Engels says, the question arose as to whether Marx himself would have wanted to update some of those ideas and formulations that he had developed in the 1840's, when he was only commencing upon his economic studies. In the later editions of other works from that time, such as The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx had already done so.
“In the ’forties, Marx had not yet finished his critique of political economy. This took place only towards the end of the fifties. Consequently, his works which appeared before the first part of A Contribution To The Critique of Political Economy (1859) differ in some points from those written after 1859, and contain expressions and whole sentences which, viewed from the point of view of the later works, unfortunate, and even incorrect.” (p 5)
As with the later editions of The Poverty of Philosophy, those expressions revolve around the distinction, made by Marx, in the 1850's, between labour (value creating activity), and labour-power (use-value, commodity), which, as wage-labour, is sold at its value (the labour-time required to reproduce the labourer), as a commodity, and bought by capital. It is this distinction that resolved the contradiction, faced by Smith and Ricardo, of explaining the existence of surplus value. It had led Smith to abandon The Labour Theory of Value, because he could not reconcile the existence of surplus value, in the exchange with landed property (rent), or capital (profit). If the labourer was paid the value of their labour, then, under pre-capitalist relations, there was no room for surplus value in the form of rent, paid to the landlord. Similarly, under capitalist relations there was no room for surplus value as profit paid to the capitalist.
Smith's confusion led him to abandon the Labour Theory of Value, when considering society following the introduction of landed property and capital. He fell into a cost of production theory of value, which is a precursor of the later marginalist theories of value/price. According this theory, Smith says that the value of a commodity is a composite of the natural prices of labour and capital. His use of the idea that the value resolves into the revenues of these factors of production, plays into this confusion, and has also affected the ideas of the TSSI.
The idea that the value resolves entirely into revenues (Smith's Absurd Dogma, as Marx calls it), is itself wrong, because it fails to take into account the value of constant capital transferred to end production, which resolves not into revenues, but capital. It also forms the basis of Say's Law, and the errors of Malthus, and later Keynes. But, as Marx also describes, in Capital III, and Theories of Surplus Value, the idea of the value of a commodity, resolving into these components, is not at all the same as saying that the value of the commodity is a composite of the values of those components.
In order that social reproduction proceeds, on at least the same scale, the use-values (means of production and labour-power) consumed in current production, must be replaced “on a like for like basis”, but the unit values of these commodities may have changed, by the time the realised value of the commodity has to buy them anew. A rise in values, causes a tie-up of capital, and a fall in values a release of capital.
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