Preface to a Contribution to the Critique of Political EconomyKarl Marx

Marx's 1859 Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy is a few pages long and contains his most compressed statement of historical materialism. He recounts his path from law and Hegelian philosophy through the critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right to the study of political economy in Paris and Brussels. Then he states the guiding thesis. In the social production of their existence, men enter into definite relations of production independent of their will. The totality of those relations constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. Social being determines consciousness; consciousness does not determine social being. When productive forces come into conflict with existing relations of production, an era of social revolution begins, and the economic foundation's transformation leads to the transformation of the whole superstructure. The Preface does not argue the thesis at length. It announces the method of the larger critique of political economy that would culminate in Capital, and it gave later Marxists their standard formula for the relation of base to superstructure.