The present text by Marx is the surviving portion of the first draft (Urtext) of the work A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Most of it was written between early August and mid-November 1858, that is, after Marx had completed the Grundrisse - Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy.

However, due to the large extent of the manuscript, Marx then interrupted its writing and proceeded to compose the book A Critique of Political Economy, which was published in 1859. Compared to both the 1859 edition and the "Part One" (chapters 1-3) of the first volume of Capital, in the present text, Marx derives the concept of capital in relation to the generalized simple circulation of commodities and money.

Thus, the Urtext allows us to understand an issue that has divided Marxist thought almost since the time of Marx himself: that of commodity and monetary circulation in its historical dimension. Marx, through a plethora of historical examples, clearly distinguishes not only between the circulation of commodities in pre-capitalist societies and capitalism but also the absence of any type of "necessary" genetic relationship or sequence between them.

He writes: the entire system of bourgeois production can only be presumed in order for exchange value to appear as a mere starting point on the surface and the process of exchange, as revealed in simple circulation, as the simple social metabolism, which nonetheless comprises the entirety of production as well as consumption.