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"Wage Labour and Capital" (German: Lohnarbeit und Kapital) was an 1847 lecture by the critic of political economy and philosopher Karl Marx, first published as articles in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung in April 1849.[1] It is widely considered the precursor to Marx’s influential treatise Das Kapital.[2] It is commonly paired with Marx's 1865 lecture Value, Price and Profit. Previously, Marx had been studying political economy; evidence of this being his unpublished Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (eventually published in the early 1930s after his death) and The Poverty of Philosophy in France in 1847.
In 1883, a Russian translation was published as a book and included an excerpt from Capital volume 1 in the appendix, chapter 23 on Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation.[3] In 1885, a pamphlet version was first published as an English translation.[4] An 1885 pamphlet based on the newspaper articles was published in Hottingen-Zürich without Marx's knowledge and with a brief introduction by Friedrich Engels.[1] The German edition was revised by Engels in 1891 and published by Vorwärts after the Anti-Socialist Laws had lapsed the previous year.[5] In 1893, an updated English translation from the 1891 German edition was published in London.[6]
It may be said that what Marx produced in the lectures of late 1847 was the future argument of Capital in embryo.