For years Karl Marx had planned to continue the work begun in Das Kapital with further books, in which he proposed to take up and expand many of the ideas and questions he had already raised. The Grundrisse - which was the outline for this massive plan - was left by him, at his death, in the form of notes and partly completed sections. Though long available in the Moscow archives, it was not published in German until 1939, and this is its first appearance in English.
The Grundrisse throws light on many obscure corners of Marx's thought and, in this light, the English reader can now assess how far his economic and philosophic outlook changed and how far it has simply been misinterpreted. For here is a major part of Marx's work which was unknown even to Lenin.