Wednesday, August 23, 2006
Key passages for section 4 (pp.135-172): "the commodity... is not the objectification of labour time in general"
It might be said that the title of labour time should go not to gold but, as Weitling proposed, with Englishmen ahead of him and French after, Proudhon & Co. among them, to paper money, to a mere symbol of value...
The worker would reap the joys of the rising productivity of his labour, instead of creating proportionately more alien wealth and devaluing himself as at present...
[But this is unworkable for several reasons]
The replacement of metal money (and of paper or fiat money denominated in metal money) by labour money denominated in labour time would therefore equate the real value (exchange value) of commodities with their nominal value, price, money value. Equation of real value and nominal value, of value and price. But such is by no means the case. The value of commodities as determined by labour time is only their average value... Price is distinguished from value not only as the nominal from the real; not only by way of the denomination in gold and silver, but because the latter appears as the law of the motions which the former runs through... The two are constantly different and never balance out, or balance only coincidentally and exceptionally. The price of a commodity constantly stands above or below the value of the commodity, and the value of the commodity itself exists only in this up-and-down movement of commodity prices. Supply and demand constantly determine the prices of commodities; never balance, or only coincidentally...
[Moreover, there is not just a difference of degree, but also of kind, between value and price]
The commodity... is different from its value, its existence as value is different from its existence as product. Its property of being a value not only can but must achieve an existence different from its natural one. Why? Because commodities as values are different from one another only quantitatively; therefore each commodity must be qualitatively different from its own value. Its value must therefore have an existence which is qualitatively distinguishable from it...
... The commodity's exchange value obtains a material existence separate from the commodity... The definition of a product as exchange value necessarily implies that exchange value obtains a separate existence, in isolation from the product. The exchange value which is separated from commodities and exists alongside them as itself a commodity, this is -- money...
The commodity... is not the objectification of labour time in general, which exists only as a conception (it is only a conception of labour separated from its quality, subject merely to quantitative variations), but rather the specific result of a specific, of a naturally specified, kind of labour which differs qualitatively from other kinds)... The commodity first has to be transposed into labour time, into something qualitatively different from itself... in order then to be compared as a specific amount of labour time, as a certain magnitude of labour, with other amounts of labour time, other magnitudes of labour. For the purpose of merely making a comparison -- an appraisal of products -- of determining their value ideally, it suffices to make this transformation in the head (a transformation in which the product exists merely as the expression of quantitative relations of production). This abstraction will do for comparing commodities; but in actual exchange this abstraction in turn must be objectified, must be symbolized, realized in a symbol...
To the degree that production is shaped in such a way that every producer becomes dependent on the exchange value of his commodity, i.e. as the product increasingly becomes an exchange value in reality, and exchange value becomes the immediate object of production -- to the same degree must money relations develop, together with the contradictions immanent in the money relation, in the relation of the product to itself as money. The need for exchange and for the transformation of the product into a pure exchange value progresses in step with the division of labour, i.e. with the increasingly social character of production. But as the latter grows, so grows the power of money, i.e. the exchange relation establishes itself as a power external to and independent of the producers...
Money – the common form, into which all commodities as exchange values are transformed, i.e. the universal commodity – must itself exist as a particular commodity alongside the others, since what is required is not only that they can be measured against it in the head, but that they can be changed and exchanged for it in the actual exchange process... Money does not arise by convention, any more than the state does...
It is impossible to suspend the complications and contradictions which arise from the existence of money alongside the particular commodities merely by altering the form of money (although difficulties characteristic of a lower form of money may be avoided by moving to a higher form)... So also is it impossible to abolish money itself as long as exchange value remains the social form of products. It is necessary to see this clearly in order to avoid setting impossible tasks, and in order to know the limits within which monetary reforms and transformations of circulation are able to give a new shape to the relations of production and to the social relations which rest on the latter...
[In order for the labour-money or time-chit system to work, many other things than money conventions would have to be changed].
How is the convertibility of this chit secured? Only two cases are possible. Either all owners of commodities (be these products or labour) desire to sell their commodities at their exchange value, or some want to and some do not. If they all want to sell at their exchange value, then they will not await the chance arrival or non-arrival of a buyer, but go immediately to the bank, unload their commodities on to it, and obtain their exchange value symbol, money, for them: they redeem them for its money. In this case the bank is simultaneously the general buyer and the general seller in one person. Or the opposite takes place. In this case, the bank chit is mere paper which claims to be the generally recognized symbol of exchange value, but has in fact no value. For this symbol has to have the property of not merely representing, but being, exchange value in actual exchange. In the latter case the bank chit would not be money, or it would be money only by convention between the bank and its clients, but not on the open market. It would be the same as a meal ticket good for a dozen meals which I obtain from a restaurant, or a theatre pass good for a dozen evenings, both of which represent money, but only in this particular restaurant or this particular theatre. The bank chit would have ceased to meet the qualifications of money, since it would not circulate among the general public, but only between the bank and its clients. We thus have to drop the latter supposition.
The bank would thus be the general buyer and seller... It would need the power to establish the exchange value of all commodities, i.e. the labour time materialized in them, in an authentic manner. But its functions could not end there. It would have to determine the labour time in which commodities could be produced, with the average means of production available in a given industry... The bank would be not only the general buyer and seller, but also the general producer. In fact either it would be a despotic ruler of production and trustee of distribution, or it would indeed be nothing more than a board which keeps the books and accounts for a society producing in common. The common ownership of the means of production is presupposed, etc., etc...
The very necessity of first transforming individual products or activities into exchange value, into money, so that they obtain and demonstrate their social power in this objective [sachlichen] form, proves two things: (1) That individuals now produce only for society and in society; (2) that production is not directly social, is not ‘the offspring of association,’ which distributes labour internally. Individuals are subsumed under social production; social production exists outside them as their fate; but social production is not subsumed under individuals, manageable by them as their common wealth. There can therefore be nothing more erroneous and absurd than to postulate the control by the united individuals of their total production, on the basis of exchange value, of money, as was done above in the case of the time-chit bank...
Those who want to make the labour of the individual directly into money... want therefore to determine that labour directly as general labour, i.e. to negate precisely the conditions under which it must be made into money and exchange values, and under which it depends on private exchange. This demand can be satisfied only under conditions where it can no longer be raised. Labour on the basis of exchange values presupposes, precisely, that neither the labour of the individual nor his product are directly general; that the product attains this form only by passing through an objective mediation by means of a form of money distinct from itself...
The dissolution of all products and activities into exchange values presupposes the dissolution of all fixed personal (historic) relations of dependence in production, as well as the all-sided dependence of the producers on one another. Each individual’s production is dependent on the production of all others; and the transformation of his product into the necessaries of his own life is [similarly] dependent on the consumption of all others. Prices are old; exchange also; but the increasing determination of the former by costs of production, as well as the increasing dominance of the latter over all relations of production, only develop fully, and continue to develop ever more completely, in bourgeois society...
The individual carries his social power, as well as his bond with society, in his pocket...
The social character of activity, as well as the social form of the product, and the share of individuals in production here appear as something alien and objective, confronting the individuals... their mutual interconnection here appears as something alien to them, autonomous, as a thing. In exchange value, the social connection between persons is transformed into a social relation between things...
The less social power the medium of exchange possesses... the greater must be the power of the community which binds the individuals together, the patriarchal relation, the community of antiquity, feudalism and the guild system... Each individual possesses social power in the form of a thing. Rob the thing of this social power and you must give it to persons to exercise over persons.
Relations of personal dependence (entirely spontaneous at the outset) are the first social forms... Personal independence founded on objective [sachlicher] dependence is the second great form, in which a system of general social metabolism, of universal relations, of all-round needs and universal capacities is formed for the first time. Free individuality, based on the universal development of individuals and on their subordination of their communal, social productivity as their social wealth, is the third stage. The second stage creates the conditions for the third...
[This third stage] presupposes the development of material and cultural conditions... If we did not find concealed in society as it is the material conditions of production and the corresponding relations of exchange prerequisite for a classless society, then all attempts to explode it would be quixotic...
Since... the autonomization of the world market (in which the activity of each individual is included), increases with the development of monetary relations (exchange value) and vice versa... together with the development of this alienation, and on the same basis, efforts are made to overcome it: institutions emerge whereby each individual can acquire information about the activity of all others and attempt to adjust his own accordingly, e.g. lists of current prices, rates of exchange, interconnections between those active in commerce through the mails, telegraphs etc. (the means of communication of course grow at the same time). This means that, although the total supply and demand are independent of the actions of each individual, everyone attempts to inform himself about them, and this knowledge then reacts back in practice on the total supply and demand. Although on the given standpoint, alienation is not overcome by these means, nevertheless relations and connections are introduced thereby which include the possibility of suspending the old standpoint. The possibility of general statistics, etc...
Individuals are now ruled by abstractions, whereas earlier they depended on one another. The abstraction, or idea, however, is nothing more than the theoretical expression of those material relations which are their lord and master. Relations can be expressed, of course, only in ideas, and thus philosophers have determined the reign of ideas to be the peculiarity of the new age, and have identified the creation of free individuality with the overthrow of this reign...
Read more!
The worker would reap the joys of the rising productivity of his labour, instead of creating proportionately more alien wealth and devaluing himself as at present...
[But this is unworkable for several reasons]
The replacement of metal money (and of paper or fiat money denominated in metal money) by labour money denominated in labour time would therefore equate the real value (exchange value) of commodities with their nominal value, price, money value. Equation of real value and nominal value, of value and price. But such is by no means the case. The value of commodities as determined by labour time is only their average value... Price is distinguished from value not only as the nominal from the real; not only by way of the denomination in gold and silver, but because the latter appears as the law of the motions which the former runs through... The two are constantly different and never balance out, or balance only coincidentally and exceptionally. The price of a commodity constantly stands above or below the value of the commodity, and the value of the commodity itself exists only in this up-and-down movement of commodity prices. Supply and demand constantly determine the prices of commodities; never balance, or only coincidentally...
[Moreover, there is not just a difference of degree, but also of kind, between value and price]
The commodity... is different from its value, its existence as value is different from its existence as product. Its property of being a value not only can but must achieve an existence different from its natural one. Why? Because commodities as values are different from one another only quantitatively; therefore each commodity must be qualitatively different from its own value. Its value must therefore have an existence which is qualitatively distinguishable from it...
... The commodity's exchange value obtains a material existence separate from the commodity... The definition of a product as exchange value necessarily implies that exchange value obtains a separate existence, in isolation from the product. The exchange value which is separated from commodities and exists alongside them as itself a commodity, this is -- money...
The commodity... is not the objectification of labour time in general, which exists only as a conception (it is only a conception of labour separated from its quality, subject merely to quantitative variations), but rather the specific result of a specific, of a naturally specified, kind of labour which differs qualitatively from other kinds)... The commodity first has to be transposed into labour time, into something qualitatively different from itself... in order then to be compared as a specific amount of labour time, as a certain magnitude of labour, with other amounts of labour time, other magnitudes of labour. For the purpose of merely making a comparison -- an appraisal of products -- of determining their value ideally, it suffices to make this transformation in the head (a transformation in which the product exists merely as the expression of quantitative relations of production). This abstraction will do for comparing commodities; but in actual exchange this abstraction in turn must be objectified, must be symbolized, realized in a symbol...
To the degree that production is shaped in such a way that every producer becomes dependent on the exchange value of his commodity, i.e. as the product increasingly becomes an exchange value in reality, and exchange value becomes the immediate object of production -- to the same degree must money relations develop, together with the contradictions immanent in the money relation, in the relation of the product to itself as money. The need for exchange and for the transformation of the product into a pure exchange value progresses in step with the division of labour, i.e. with the increasingly social character of production. But as the latter grows, so grows the power of money, i.e. the exchange relation establishes itself as a power external to and independent of the producers...
Money – the common form, into which all commodities as exchange values are transformed, i.e. the universal commodity – must itself exist as a particular commodity alongside the others, since what is required is not only that they can be measured against it in the head, but that they can be changed and exchanged for it in the actual exchange process... Money does not arise by convention, any more than the state does...
It is impossible to suspend the complications and contradictions which arise from the existence of money alongside the particular commodities merely by altering the form of money (although difficulties characteristic of a lower form of money may be avoided by moving to a higher form)... So also is it impossible to abolish money itself as long as exchange value remains the social form of products. It is necessary to see this clearly in order to avoid setting impossible tasks, and in order to know the limits within which monetary reforms and transformations of circulation are able to give a new shape to the relations of production and to the social relations which rest on the latter...
[In order for the labour-money or time-chit system to work, many other things than money conventions would have to be changed].
How is the convertibility of this chit secured? Only two cases are possible. Either all owners of commodities (be these products or labour) desire to sell their commodities at their exchange value, or some want to and some do not. If they all want to sell at their exchange value, then they will not await the chance arrival or non-arrival of a buyer, but go immediately to the bank, unload their commodities on to it, and obtain their exchange value symbol, money, for them: they redeem them for its money. In this case the bank is simultaneously the general buyer and the general seller in one person. Or the opposite takes place. In this case, the bank chit is mere paper which claims to be the generally recognized symbol of exchange value, but has in fact no value. For this symbol has to have the property of not merely representing, but being, exchange value in actual exchange. In the latter case the bank chit would not be money, or it would be money only by convention between the bank and its clients, but not on the open market. It would be the same as a meal ticket good for a dozen meals which I obtain from a restaurant, or a theatre pass good for a dozen evenings, both of which represent money, but only in this particular restaurant or this particular theatre. The bank chit would have ceased to meet the qualifications of money, since it would not circulate among the general public, but only between the bank and its clients. We thus have to drop the latter supposition.
The bank would thus be the general buyer and seller... It would need the power to establish the exchange value of all commodities, i.e. the labour time materialized in them, in an authentic manner. But its functions could not end there. It would have to determine the labour time in which commodities could be produced, with the average means of production available in a given industry... The bank would be not only the general buyer and seller, but also the general producer. In fact either it would be a despotic ruler of production and trustee of distribution, or it would indeed be nothing more than a board which keeps the books and accounts for a society producing in common. The common ownership of the means of production is presupposed, etc., etc...
The very necessity of first transforming individual products or activities into exchange value, into money, so that they obtain and demonstrate their social power in this objective [sachlichen] form, proves two things: (1) That individuals now produce only for society and in society; (2) that production is not directly social, is not ‘the offspring of association,’ which distributes labour internally. Individuals are subsumed under social production; social production exists outside them as their fate; but social production is not subsumed under individuals, manageable by them as their common wealth. There can therefore be nothing more erroneous and absurd than to postulate the control by the united individuals of their total production, on the basis of exchange value, of money, as was done above in the case of the time-chit bank...
Those who want to make the labour of the individual directly into money... want therefore to determine that labour directly as general labour, i.e. to negate precisely the conditions under which it must be made into money and exchange values, and under which it depends on private exchange. This demand can be satisfied only under conditions where it can no longer be raised. Labour on the basis of exchange values presupposes, precisely, that neither the labour of the individual nor his product are directly general; that the product attains this form only by passing through an objective mediation by means of a form of money distinct from itself...
The dissolution of all products and activities into exchange values presupposes the dissolution of all fixed personal (historic) relations of dependence in production, as well as the all-sided dependence of the producers on one another. Each individual’s production is dependent on the production of all others; and the transformation of his product into the necessaries of his own life is [similarly] dependent on the consumption of all others. Prices are old; exchange also; but the increasing determination of the former by costs of production, as well as the increasing dominance of the latter over all relations of production, only develop fully, and continue to develop ever more completely, in bourgeois society...
The individual carries his social power, as well as his bond with society, in his pocket...
The social character of activity, as well as the social form of the product, and the share of individuals in production here appear as something alien and objective, confronting the individuals... their mutual interconnection here appears as something alien to them, autonomous, as a thing. In exchange value, the social connection between persons is transformed into a social relation between things...
The less social power the medium of exchange possesses... the greater must be the power of the community which binds the individuals together, the patriarchal relation, the community of antiquity, feudalism and the guild system... Each individual possesses social power in the form of a thing. Rob the thing of this social power and you must give it to persons to exercise over persons.
Relations of personal dependence (entirely spontaneous at the outset) are the first social forms... Personal independence founded on objective [sachlicher] dependence is the second great form, in which a system of general social metabolism, of universal relations, of all-round needs and universal capacities is formed for the first time. Free individuality, based on the universal development of individuals and on their subordination of their communal, social productivity as their social wealth, is the third stage. The second stage creates the conditions for the third...
[This third stage] presupposes the development of material and cultural conditions... If we did not find concealed in society as it is the material conditions of production and the corresponding relations of exchange prerequisite for a classless society, then all attempts to explode it would be quixotic...
Since... the autonomization of the world market (in which the activity of each individual is included), increases with the development of monetary relations (exchange value) and vice versa... together with the development of this alienation, and on the same basis, efforts are made to overcome it: institutions emerge whereby each individual can acquire information about the activity of all others and attempt to adjust his own accordingly, e.g. lists of current prices, rates of exchange, interconnections between those active in commerce through the mails, telegraphs etc. (the means of communication of course grow at the same time). This means that, although the total supply and demand are independent of the actions of each individual, everyone attempts to inform himself about them, and this knowledge then reacts back in practice on the total supply and demand. Although on the given standpoint, alienation is not overcome by these means, nevertheless relations and connections are introduced thereby which include the possibility of suspending the old standpoint. The possibility of general statistics, etc...
Individuals are now ruled by abstractions, whereas earlier they depended on one another. The abstraction, or idea, however, is nothing more than the theoretical expression of those material relations which are their lord and master. Relations can be expressed, of course, only in ideas, and thus philosophers have determined the reign of ideas to be the peculiarity of the new age, and have identified the creation of free individuality with the overthrow of this reign...
Read more!
Key passages for section 1 (pp.83-111): "the method of political economy"
You may also find it useful to look at Andy Blunden's study-guide notes to these pages.
Individuals producing in Society—hence socially determined individual production—is, of course, the point of departure. [To start social analysis with the atomised individual is to rest on an illusion]. The individual and isolated hunter and fisherman, with whom Smith and Ricardo begin, belongs among the unimaginative conceits of the eighteenth-century Robinsonades, which in no way express merely a reaction against over-sophistication and a return to a misunderstood natural life, as cultural historians imagine. As little as Rousseau's contrat social, which brings naturally independent, autonomous subjects into relation and connection by contract, rests on such naturalism. [Rather, it rests on] 'civil society', in preparation since the sixteenth century and making giant strides towards maturity in the eighteenth. In this society of free competition, the individual appears detached from the natural bonds etc. which in earlier historical periods make him the accessory of a definite and limited human conglomerate. [In] eighteenth-century... imaginations this eighteenth-century individual—the product on one side of the dissolution of the feudal forms of society, on the other side of the new forces of production developed since the sixteenth century—appears as an ideal, whose existence they project into the past...
[In fact] the more deeply we go back into history, the more does the individual, and hence also the producing individual, appear as dependent, as belonging to a greater whole: in a still quite natural way in the family and in the family expanded into the clan [Stamm]; then later in the various forms of communal society arising out of the antitheses and fusions of the clan. Only in the eighteenth century, in 'civil society', do the various forms of social connectedness confront the individual as a mere means towards his private purposes, as external necessity. But the epoch which produces this standpoint, that of the isolated individual, is also precisely that of the hitherto most developed social (from this standpoint, general) relations...
[Economists characteristically begin their works with a section on production. But this serves] to present production—see e.g. Mill—as distinct from distribution etc., as encased in eternal natural laws independent of history, at which opportunity bourgeois relations are then quietly smuggled in as the inviolable natural laws on which society in the abstract is founded. This is the more or less conscious purpose of the whole proceeding. In distribution, by contrast, humanity has allegedly permitted itself to be considerably more arbitrary...
Economists such as Ricardo, who are the most frequently accused of focusing on production alone, have defined distribution as the exclusive object of economics, because they instinctively conceived the forms of distribution as the most specific expression into which the agents of production of a given society are cast.
To the single individual, of course, distribution appears as a social law which determines his position within the system of production within which he produces, and which therefore precedes production. The individual comes into the world possessing neither capital nor land. Social distribution assigns him at birth to wage labour. But this situation of being assigned is itself a consequence of the existence of capital and landed property as independent agents of production...
An individual who participates in production in the form of wage labour shares in the products, in the results of production, in the form of wages. The structure [Gliederung] of distribution is completely determined by the structure of production. Distribution is itself a product of production, not only in its object, in that only the results of production can be distributed, but also in its form, in that the specific kind of participation in production determines the specific forms of distribution, i.e. the pattern of participation in distribution...
[Production and consumption are interdependent. But...] Hunger is hunger, but the hunger gratified by cooked meat eaten with a knife and fork is a different hunger from that which bolts down raw meat with the aid of hand, nail and tooth. Production thus produces not only the object but also the manner of consumption, not only objectively but also subjectively. Production thus creates the consumer. Production not only supplies a material for the need, but it also supplies a need for the material. As soon as consumption emerges from its initial state of natural crudity and immediacy—and, if it remained at that stage, this would be because production itself had been arrested there—it becomes itself mediated as a drive by the object. The need which consumption feels for the object is created by the perception of it. The object of art—like every other product—creates a public which is sensitive to art and enjoys beauty. Production thus not only creates an object for the subject, but also a subject for the object. Thus production produces consumption (1) by creating the material for it; (2) by determining the manner of consumption; and (3) by creating the products, initially posited by it as objects, in the form of a need felt by the consumer...
[In summary] production, distribution, exchange and consumption... form the members of a totality, distinctions within a unity. Production predominates... over the other moments... The process always returns to production to begin anew... A definite production thus determines a definite consumption, distribution and exchange as well as definite relations between these different moments. Admittedly, however, in its one-sided form, production is itself determined by the other moments. For example if the market, i.e. the sphere of exchange, expands, then production grows in quantity and the divisions between its different branches become deeper. A change in distribution changes production, e.g. concentration of capital, different distribution of the population between town and country, etc. Finally, the needs of consumption determine production. Mutual interaction takes place between the different moments. This the case with every organic whole...
[Abstract and concrete...:] begin with the living whole, with population, nation, state, several states, etc.; but... conclude by discovering through analysis a small number of determinant, abstract, general relations such as division of labour, money, value, etc. As soon as these individual moments [have] been more or less firmly established and abstracted... ascend... from the simple relations, such as labour, division of labour, need, exchange value, to the level of the state, exchange between nations and the world market. [This] is obviously the scientifically correct method. The concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse...
[But the simple, abstract categories also evolve]. Labour seems a quite simple category. The conception of labour in this general form—as labour as such—is also immeasurably old. Nevertheless, when it is economically conceived in this simplicity, 'labour' is as modern a category as are the relations which create this simple abstraction...
It was an immense step forward for Adam Smith to throw out every limiting specification of wealth-creating activity—not only manufacturing, or commercial or agricultural labour, but one as well as the others, labour in general. With the abstract universality of wealth-creating activity we now have the universality of the object defined as wealth, the product as such or again labour as such, but labour as past, objectified labour...
Indifference towards any specific kind of labour presupposes a very developed totality of real kinds of labour, of which no single one is any longer predominant. As a rule, the most general abstractions arise only in the midst of the richest possible concrete development, where one thing appears as common to many, to all. Then it ceases to be thinkable in a particular form alone. On the other side, this abstraction of labour as such is not merely the mental product of a concrete totality of labours. Indifference towards specific labours corresponds to a form of society in which individuals can with ease transfer from one labour to another, and where the specific kind is a matter of chance for them, hence of indifference. Not only the category, labour, but labour in reality has here become the means of creating wealth in general, and has ceased to be organically linked with particular individuals in any specific form.
Such a state of affairs is at its most developed in the most modern form of existence of bourgeois society—in the United States. Here, then, for the first time, the point of departure of modern economics, namely the abstraction of the category 'labour', 'labour as such', labour pure and simple, becomes true in practice. The simplest abstraction, then, which modern economics places at the head of its discussions, and which expresses an immeasurably ancient relation valid in all forms of society, nevertheless achieves practical truth as an abstraction only as a category of the most modern society...
Bourgeois society is the most developed and the most complex historic organization of production. The categories which express its relations, the comprehension of its structure, thereby also allows insights into the structure and the relations of production of all the vanished social formations out of whose ruins and elements it built itself up, whose partly still unconquered remnants are carried along within it, whose mere nuances have developed explicit significance within it, etc. Human anatomy contains a key to the anatomy of the ape.
[Also, the categories have different meanings in different societies]. In all forms of society there is one specific kind of production which predominates over the rest, whose relations thus assign rank and influence to the others. It is a general illumination which bathes all the other colours and modifies their particularity. It is a particular ether which determines the specific gravity of every being which has materialized within it... Among peoples with a settled agriculture... where this predominates, as in antiquity and in the feudal order, even industry, together with its organization and the forms of property corresponding to it, has a more or less landed-proprietary character; is either completely dependent on it, as among the earlier Romans, or, as in the Middle Ages, imitates, within the city and its relations, the organization of the land. In the Middle Ages, capital itself—apart from pure money-capital—in the form of the traditional artisans' tools etc., has this landed-proprietary character. In bourgeois society it is the opposite. Agriculture more and more becomes merely a branch of industry, and is entirely dominated by capital... Capital is the all-dominating economic power of bourgeois society. It must form the starting-point as well as the finishing-point, and must be dealt with before landed property. After both have been examined in particular, their interrelation must be examined...
It would be unfeasible and wrong to let the economic categories follow one another in the same sequence as that in which they were historically decisive. Their sequence is determined, rather, by their relation to one another in modern bourgeois society, which is precisely the opposite of that which seems to be their natural order or which corresponds to historical development. The point is not the historic position of the economic relations in the succession of different forms of society... Rather, their order within modern bourgeois society...
In the case of the arts, it is well known that certain periods of their flowering are out of all proportion to the general development of society, hence also to the material foundation, the skeletal structure as it were, of its organization. For example, the Greeks compared to the moderns...
Greek mythology is not only the arsenal of Greek art but also its foundation. Is the view of nature and of social relations on which the Greek imagination and hence Greek [mythology] is based possible with self-acting mule spindles and railways and locomotives and electrical telegraphs? What chance has Vulcan against Roberts and Co., Jupiter against the lightning-rod and Hermes against the Credit Mobilier? All mythology overcomes and dominates and shapes the forces of nature in the imagination and by the imagination; it therefore vanishes with the advent of real mastery over them. What becomes of Fama alongside Printing House Square? Greek art presupposes Greek mythology, i.e. nature and the social forms already reworked in an unconsciously artistic way by the popular imagination. This is its material. Not any mythology whatever, i.e. not an arbitrarily chosen unconsciously artistic reworking of nature (here meaning everything objective, hence including society). Egyptian mythology could never have been the foundation or the womb of Greek art. But, in any case, a mythology. Hence, in no way a social development which excludes all mythological, all mythologizing relations to nature; which therefore demands of the artist an imagination not dependent on mythology.
From another side: is Achilles possible with powder and lead? Or the Iliad with the printing press, not to mention the printing machine? Do not the song and the saga and the muse necessarily come to an end with the printer's bar, hence do not the necessary conditions of epic poetry vanish?
But the difficulty lies not in understanding that the Greek arts and epic are bound up with certain forms of social development. The difficulty is that they still afford us artistic pleasure and that in a certain respect they count as a norm and as an unattainable model.
A man cannot become a child again, or he becomes childish. But does he not find joy in the child's naïvité, and must he himself not strive to reproduce its truth at a higher stage? Does not the true character of each epoch come alive in the nature of its children? Why should not the historic childhood of humanity, its most beautiful unfolding, as a stage never to return, exercise an eternal charm? There are unruly children and precocious children. Many of the old peoples belong in this category. The Greeks were normal children. The charm of their art for us is not in contradiction to the undeveloped stage of society on which it grew. [It] is its result, rather, and is inextricably bound up, rather, with the fact that the unripe social conditions under which it arose, and could alone arise, can never return.
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Individuals producing in Society—hence socially determined individual production—is, of course, the point of departure. [To start social analysis with the atomised individual is to rest on an illusion]. The individual and isolated hunter and fisherman, with whom Smith and Ricardo begin, belongs among the unimaginative conceits of the eighteenth-century Robinsonades, which in no way express merely a reaction against over-sophistication and a return to a misunderstood natural life, as cultural historians imagine. As little as Rousseau's contrat social, which brings naturally independent, autonomous subjects into relation and connection by contract, rests on such naturalism. [Rather, it rests on] 'civil society', in preparation since the sixteenth century and making giant strides towards maturity in the eighteenth. In this society of free competition, the individual appears detached from the natural bonds etc. which in earlier historical periods make him the accessory of a definite and limited human conglomerate. [In] eighteenth-century... imaginations this eighteenth-century individual—the product on one side of the dissolution of the feudal forms of society, on the other side of the new forces of production developed since the sixteenth century—appears as an ideal, whose existence they project into the past...
[In fact] the more deeply we go back into history, the more does the individual, and hence also the producing individual, appear as dependent, as belonging to a greater whole: in a still quite natural way in the family and in the family expanded into the clan [Stamm]; then later in the various forms of communal society arising out of the antitheses and fusions of the clan. Only in the eighteenth century, in 'civil society', do the various forms of social connectedness confront the individual as a mere means towards his private purposes, as external necessity. But the epoch which produces this standpoint, that of the isolated individual, is also precisely that of the hitherto most developed social (from this standpoint, general) relations...
[Economists characteristically begin their works with a section on production. But this serves] to present production—see e.g. Mill—as distinct from distribution etc., as encased in eternal natural laws independent of history, at which opportunity bourgeois relations are then quietly smuggled in as the inviolable natural laws on which society in the abstract is founded. This is the more or less conscious purpose of the whole proceeding. In distribution, by contrast, humanity has allegedly permitted itself to be considerably more arbitrary...
Economists such as Ricardo, who are the most frequently accused of focusing on production alone, have defined distribution as the exclusive object of economics, because they instinctively conceived the forms of distribution as the most specific expression into which the agents of production of a given society are cast.
To the single individual, of course, distribution appears as a social law which determines his position within the system of production within which he produces, and which therefore precedes production. The individual comes into the world possessing neither capital nor land. Social distribution assigns him at birth to wage labour. But this situation of being assigned is itself a consequence of the existence of capital and landed property as independent agents of production...
An individual who participates in production in the form of wage labour shares in the products, in the results of production, in the form of wages. The structure [Gliederung] of distribution is completely determined by the structure of production. Distribution is itself a product of production, not only in its object, in that only the results of production can be distributed, but also in its form, in that the specific kind of participation in production determines the specific forms of distribution, i.e. the pattern of participation in distribution...
[Production and consumption are interdependent. But...] Hunger is hunger, but the hunger gratified by cooked meat eaten with a knife and fork is a different hunger from that which bolts down raw meat with the aid of hand, nail and tooth. Production thus produces not only the object but also the manner of consumption, not only objectively but also subjectively. Production thus creates the consumer. Production not only supplies a material for the need, but it also supplies a need for the material. As soon as consumption emerges from its initial state of natural crudity and immediacy—and, if it remained at that stage, this would be because production itself had been arrested there—it becomes itself mediated as a drive by the object. The need which consumption feels for the object is created by the perception of it. The object of art—like every other product—creates a public which is sensitive to art and enjoys beauty. Production thus not only creates an object for the subject, but also a subject for the object. Thus production produces consumption (1) by creating the material for it; (2) by determining the manner of consumption; and (3) by creating the products, initially posited by it as objects, in the form of a need felt by the consumer...
[In summary] production, distribution, exchange and consumption... form the members of a totality, distinctions within a unity. Production predominates... over the other moments... The process always returns to production to begin anew... A definite production thus determines a definite consumption, distribution and exchange as well as definite relations between these different moments. Admittedly, however, in its one-sided form, production is itself determined by the other moments. For example if the market, i.e. the sphere of exchange, expands, then production grows in quantity and the divisions between its different branches become deeper. A change in distribution changes production, e.g. concentration of capital, different distribution of the population between town and country, etc. Finally, the needs of consumption determine production. Mutual interaction takes place between the different moments. This the case with every organic whole...
[Abstract and concrete...:] begin with the living whole, with population, nation, state, several states, etc.; but... conclude by discovering through analysis a small number of determinant, abstract, general relations such as division of labour, money, value, etc. As soon as these individual moments [have] been more or less firmly established and abstracted... ascend... from the simple relations, such as labour, division of labour, need, exchange value, to the level of the state, exchange between nations and the world market. [This] is obviously the scientifically correct method. The concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse...
[But the simple, abstract categories also evolve]. Labour seems a quite simple category. The conception of labour in this general form—as labour as such—is also immeasurably old. Nevertheless, when it is economically conceived in this simplicity, 'labour' is as modern a category as are the relations which create this simple abstraction...
It was an immense step forward for Adam Smith to throw out every limiting specification of wealth-creating activity—not only manufacturing, or commercial or agricultural labour, but one as well as the others, labour in general. With the abstract universality of wealth-creating activity we now have the universality of the object defined as wealth, the product as such or again labour as such, but labour as past, objectified labour...
Indifference towards any specific kind of labour presupposes a very developed totality of real kinds of labour, of which no single one is any longer predominant. As a rule, the most general abstractions arise only in the midst of the richest possible concrete development, where one thing appears as common to many, to all. Then it ceases to be thinkable in a particular form alone. On the other side, this abstraction of labour as such is not merely the mental product of a concrete totality of labours. Indifference towards specific labours corresponds to a form of society in which individuals can with ease transfer from one labour to another, and where the specific kind is a matter of chance for them, hence of indifference. Not only the category, labour, but labour in reality has here become the means of creating wealth in general, and has ceased to be organically linked with particular individuals in any specific form.
Such a state of affairs is at its most developed in the most modern form of existence of bourgeois society—in the United States. Here, then, for the first time, the point of departure of modern economics, namely the abstraction of the category 'labour', 'labour as such', labour pure and simple, becomes true in practice. The simplest abstraction, then, which modern economics places at the head of its discussions, and which expresses an immeasurably ancient relation valid in all forms of society, nevertheless achieves practical truth as an abstraction only as a category of the most modern society...
Bourgeois society is the most developed and the most complex historic organization of production. The categories which express its relations, the comprehension of its structure, thereby also allows insights into the structure and the relations of production of all the vanished social formations out of whose ruins and elements it built itself up, whose partly still unconquered remnants are carried along within it, whose mere nuances have developed explicit significance within it, etc. Human anatomy contains a key to the anatomy of the ape.
[Also, the categories have different meanings in different societies]. In all forms of society there is one specific kind of production which predominates over the rest, whose relations thus assign rank and influence to the others. It is a general illumination which bathes all the other colours and modifies their particularity. It is a particular ether which determines the specific gravity of every being which has materialized within it... Among peoples with a settled agriculture... where this predominates, as in antiquity and in the feudal order, even industry, together with its organization and the forms of property corresponding to it, has a more or less landed-proprietary character; is either completely dependent on it, as among the earlier Romans, or, as in the Middle Ages, imitates, within the city and its relations, the organization of the land. In the Middle Ages, capital itself—apart from pure money-capital—in the form of the traditional artisans' tools etc., has this landed-proprietary character. In bourgeois society it is the opposite. Agriculture more and more becomes merely a branch of industry, and is entirely dominated by capital... Capital is the all-dominating economic power of bourgeois society. It must form the starting-point as well as the finishing-point, and must be dealt with before landed property. After both have been examined in particular, their interrelation must be examined...
It would be unfeasible and wrong to let the economic categories follow one another in the same sequence as that in which they were historically decisive. Their sequence is determined, rather, by their relation to one another in modern bourgeois society, which is precisely the opposite of that which seems to be their natural order or which corresponds to historical development. The point is not the historic position of the economic relations in the succession of different forms of society... Rather, their order within modern bourgeois society...
In the case of the arts, it is well known that certain periods of their flowering are out of all proportion to the general development of society, hence also to the material foundation, the skeletal structure as it were, of its organization. For example, the Greeks compared to the moderns...
Greek mythology is not only the arsenal of Greek art but also its foundation. Is the view of nature and of social relations on which the Greek imagination and hence Greek [mythology] is based possible with self-acting mule spindles and railways and locomotives and electrical telegraphs? What chance has Vulcan against Roberts and Co., Jupiter against the lightning-rod and Hermes against the Credit Mobilier? All mythology overcomes and dominates and shapes the forces of nature in the imagination and by the imagination; it therefore vanishes with the advent of real mastery over them. What becomes of Fama alongside Printing House Square? Greek art presupposes Greek mythology, i.e. nature and the social forms already reworked in an unconsciously artistic way by the popular imagination. This is its material. Not any mythology whatever, i.e. not an arbitrarily chosen unconsciously artistic reworking of nature (here meaning everything objective, hence including society). Egyptian mythology could never have been the foundation or the womb of Greek art. But, in any case, a mythology. Hence, in no way a social development which excludes all mythological, all mythologizing relations to nature; which therefore demands of the artist an imagination not dependent on mythology.
From another side: is Achilles possible with powder and lead? Or the Iliad with the printing press, not to mention the printing machine? Do not the song and the saga and the muse necessarily come to an end with the printer's bar, hence do not the necessary conditions of epic poetry vanish?
But the difficulty lies not in understanding that the Greek arts and epic are bound up with certain forms of social development. The difficulty is that they still afford us artistic pleasure and that in a certain respect they count as a norm and as an unattainable model.
A man cannot become a child again, or he becomes childish. But does he not find joy in the child's naïvité, and must he himself not strive to reproduce its truth at a higher stage? Does not the true character of each epoch come alive in the nature of its children? Why should not the historic childhood of humanity, its most beautiful unfolding, as a stage never to return, exercise an eternal charm? There are unruly children and precocious children. Many of the old peoples belong in this category. The Greeks were normal children. The charm of their art for us is not in contradiction to the undeveloped stage of society on which it grew. [It] is its result, rather, and is inextricably bound up, rather, with the fact that the unripe social conditions under which it arose, and could alone arise, can never return.
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Key passages for section 3 (pp.115-134/ 161-2/ 248-9): "bourgeois socialism"
Alfred Darimon [a French Proudhonist writer] argues that: 'The root of the evil is the predominance which opinion obstinately assigns to the role of the precious metals in circulation and exchange... the privilege held by gold and silver, that of being the only authentic instrument of circulation and exchange, is responsible not only for the present crisis, but for the periodic commercial crises as well.'
In order to control all the undesirable features of crises 'it would be enough that gold and silver were made commodities like any other, or, precisely expressed, that all commodities were made instruments of exchange on an equal footing (au meme titre) with gold and silver; that products were truly exchanged for products'.
[Then there would not be the shortages of credit characteristic of crises. All exchanges would be fair.]
'A bank', says Darimon, 'organized on present principles, i.e. on the rule of gold and silver, withdraws its services from the public precisely at the moment when the public most needs them.' Did Mr Darimon require his figures to prove that supply increases the cost of its services to the same degree as demand makes claims upon them (and exceeds them)? And do not the gentlemen who represent the 'public' vis-à-vis the bank follow the same 'agreeable customs of life'? The philanthropic grain merchants who present their bills to the bank in order to receive notes, in order to exchange the notes for the bank's gold, in order to exchange the bank's gold for another country's grain, in order to exchange the grain of another country for the money of the French public -- were they perhaps motivated by the idea that, since the public then had the greatest need of grain, it was therefore their duty to let them have grain on easier terms, or did they not rather rush to the bank in order to exploit the increase of grain prices, the misery of the public and the disproportion between its supply and its demand? And the bank should be made an exception to these general economic laws? Quelle idee!...
The fundamental question... would be this: Can the existing relations of production and the relations of distribution which correspond to them be revolutionized by a change in the instrument of circulation, in the organization of circulation? Further question: Can such a transformation of circulation be undertaken without touching the existing relations of production and the social relations which rest on them? If every such transformation of circulation presupposes changes in other conditions of production and social upheavals, there would naturally follow from this the collapse of the doctrine which proposes tricks of circulation as a way of, on the one hand, avoiding the violent character of these social changes...
The notion of credit gratuit [free credit], incidentally, is only a hypocritical, philistine and anxiety-ridden form of the saying: property is theft. Instead of the workers taking the capitalists' capital, the capitalists are supposed to be compelled to give it to them...
[Darimon wants to] abolish the privilege of gold and silver, degrade them to the rank of all other commodities. Then you no longer have the specific evils of gold and silver money, or of notes convertible into gold and silver. You abolish all evils. Or, better, elevate all commodities to the monopoly position now held by gold and silver. Let the pope remain, but make everybody pope. Abolish money by making every commodity money and by equipping it with the specific attributes of money. The question here arises whether this problem does not already pronounce its own nonsensicality...
Darimon and consorts see only the one aspect which surfaces during crises: the appreciation of gold and silver in relation to nearly all other commodities; they do not see the other side, the depreciation of gold and silver or of money in relation to all other commodities (labour perhaps, not always, excluded) in periods of so-called prosperity, periods of a temporary general rise of prices. Since this depreciation of metallic money (and of all kinds of money which rest on it) always precedes its appreciation, they ought to have formulated the problem the other way round: how to prevent the periodic depreciation of money (in their language, to abolish the privileges of commodities in relation to money). In this last formulation the problem would have reduced itself to: how to overcome the rise and fall of prices. The way to do this: abolish prices. And how? By doing away with exchange value. But this problem arises: exchange corresponds to the bourgeois organization of society. Hence one last problem: to revolutionize bourgeois society economically. It would then have been self-evident from the outset that the evil of bourgeois society is not to be remedied by 'transforming' the banks or by founding a rational 'money system'.
[Thus] the foolishness of those socialists (namely the French, who want to depict socialism as the realization of the ideals of bourgeois society articulated by the French revolution) who demonstrate that exchange and exchange value etc. are originally (in time) or essentially (in their adequate form) a system of universal freedom and equality, but that they have been perverted by money, capital, etc... The proper reply to them is: that exchange value or, more precisely, the money system is in fact the system of equality and freedom, and that the disturbances which they encounter in the further development of the system are disturbances inherent in it, are merely the realization of equality and freedom, which prove to be inequality and unfreedom. It is just as pious as it is stupid to wish that exchange value would not develop into capital, nor labour which produces exchange value into wage labour. What divides these gentlemen from the bourgeois apologists is, on one side, their sensitivity to the contradictions included in the system; on the other, the utopian inability to grasp the necessary difference between the real and the ideal form of bourgeois society, which is the cause of their desire to undertake the superfluous business of realizing the ideal expression again...
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In order to control all the undesirable features of crises 'it would be enough that gold and silver were made commodities like any other, or, precisely expressed, that all commodities were made instruments of exchange on an equal footing (au meme titre) with gold and silver; that products were truly exchanged for products'.
[Then there would not be the shortages of credit characteristic of crises. All exchanges would be fair.]
'A bank', says Darimon, 'organized on present principles, i.e. on the rule of gold and silver, withdraws its services from the public precisely at the moment when the public most needs them.' Did Mr Darimon require his figures to prove that supply increases the cost of its services to the same degree as demand makes claims upon them (and exceeds them)? And do not the gentlemen who represent the 'public' vis-à-vis the bank follow the same 'agreeable customs of life'? The philanthropic grain merchants who present their bills to the bank in order to receive notes, in order to exchange the notes for the bank's gold, in order to exchange the bank's gold for another country's grain, in order to exchange the grain of another country for the money of the French public -- were they perhaps motivated by the idea that, since the public then had the greatest need of grain, it was therefore their duty to let them have grain on easier terms, or did they not rather rush to the bank in order to exploit the increase of grain prices, the misery of the public and the disproportion between its supply and its demand? And the bank should be made an exception to these general economic laws? Quelle idee!...
The fundamental question... would be this: Can the existing relations of production and the relations of distribution which correspond to them be revolutionized by a change in the instrument of circulation, in the organization of circulation? Further question: Can such a transformation of circulation be undertaken without touching the existing relations of production and the social relations which rest on them? If every such transformation of circulation presupposes changes in other conditions of production and social upheavals, there would naturally follow from this the collapse of the doctrine which proposes tricks of circulation as a way of, on the one hand, avoiding the violent character of these social changes...
The notion of credit gratuit [free credit], incidentally, is only a hypocritical, philistine and anxiety-ridden form of the saying: property is theft. Instead of the workers taking the capitalists' capital, the capitalists are supposed to be compelled to give it to them...
[Darimon wants to] abolish the privilege of gold and silver, degrade them to the rank of all other commodities. Then you no longer have the specific evils of gold and silver money, or of notes convertible into gold and silver. You abolish all evils. Or, better, elevate all commodities to the monopoly position now held by gold and silver. Let the pope remain, but make everybody pope. Abolish money by making every commodity money and by equipping it with the specific attributes of money. The question here arises whether this problem does not already pronounce its own nonsensicality...
Darimon and consorts see only the one aspect which surfaces during crises: the appreciation of gold and silver in relation to nearly all other commodities; they do not see the other side, the depreciation of gold and silver or of money in relation to all other commodities (labour perhaps, not always, excluded) in periods of so-called prosperity, periods of a temporary general rise of prices. Since this depreciation of metallic money (and of all kinds of money which rest on it) always precedes its appreciation, they ought to have formulated the problem the other way round: how to prevent the periodic depreciation of money (in their language, to abolish the privileges of commodities in relation to money). In this last formulation the problem would have reduced itself to: how to overcome the rise and fall of prices. The way to do this: abolish prices. And how? By doing away with exchange value. But this problem arises: exchange corresponds to the bourgeois organization of society. Hence one last problem: to revolutionize bourgeois society economically. It would then have been self-evident from the outset that the evil of bourgeois society is not to be remedied by 'transforming' the banks or by founding a rational 'money system'.
[Thus] the foolishness of those socialists (namely the French, who want to depict socialism as the realization of the ideals of bourgeois society articulated by the French revolution) who demonstrate that exchange and exchange value etc. are originally (in time) or essentially (in their adequate form) a system of universal freedom and equality, but that they have been perverted by money, capital, etc... The proper reply to them is: that exchange value or, more precisely, the money system is in fact the system of equality and freedom, and that the disturbances which they encounter in the further development of the system are disturbances inherent in it, are merely the realization of equality and freedom, which prove to be inequality and unfreedom. It is just as pious as it is stupid to wish that exchange value would not develop into capital, nor labour which produces exchange value into wage labour. What divides these gentlemen from the bourgeois apologists is, on one side, their sensitivity to the contradictions included in the system; on the other, the utopian inability to grasp the necessary difference between the real and the ideal form of bourgeois society, which is the cause of their desire to undertake the superfluous business of realizing the ideal expression again...
Read more!
Sunday, August 20, 2006
Reading group in Brisbane
We will be running a reading group in Brisbane on Marx's Grundrisse.
The plan is to meet weekly, probably on Sundays, probably in Woollongabba (these details are open to amendment according to what's convenient for those interested in taking part).
Given the nature of the Grundrisse, the plan is not to plod through a detailed discussion of every sentence or every page in the text. Some of us will study the full text in detail; others can take part, very usefully, while reading only short excerpts.
To get in touch, phone Martin on 3278 4282 or 0416 238840.
Read more!
The plan is to meet weekly, probably on Sundays, probably in Woollongabba (these details are open to amendment according to what's convenient for those interested in taking part).
Given the nature of the Grundrisse, the plan is not to plod through a detailed discussion of every sentence or every page in the text. Some of us will study the full text in detail; others can take part, very usefully, while reading only short excerpts.
To get in touch, phone Martin on 3278 4282 or 0416 238840.
Read more!
The Grundrisse and Marxism
Most of Marx's notebooks making up the Grundrisse were completely unknown for over 50 years after his death, and little studied until over 80 years after.
The notebooks making up the Grundrisse were first found and published, in their original German, in Russia in 1939 (a first volume) and 1941 (a second volume). Not only did the World War distract people from paying much attention at the time; only three or four copies of the volumes ever reached the West, so most Marxists did not even know they existed.
The Grundrisse was republished, in the original German again, in 1953. But 1953, with Stalin dying only that year and "de-Stalinisation" some years ahead, with the Cold War in full swing, and with the genuine (non-Communist-Party) Marxist left very beleaguered, was not a good time for creative or exploratory Marxist discussion. The Grundrisse began to attract attention only with the revival of the independent Marxist left at the end of the 1960s.
Roman Rosdolsky published his huge study of the Grundrisse, The Making of Marx's Capital, in German in 1968. An English translation of Rosdolsky came out in 1977. Penguin published an English translation of the Grundrisse itself in 1973.
A short book of accessible extracts from the Grundrisse, in English, edited by David McLellan, also came out in the early 70s.
In the 1970s the Grundrisse was often referred to in Marxist discussions. It is still widely enough read that Penguin keeps it in print. But the references have tapered off since the late 1980s, in a period dominated by defeats, setbacks, and retrenchment on the left. Paradoxically, there is a strong case that it is precisely the capitalism of microelectronics, globalisation, and privatisation dominant since the 1980s that makes ideas from the Grundrisse more relevant to us today.
Read more!
The notebooks making up the Grundrisse were first found and published, in their original German, in Russia in 1939 (a first volume) and 1941 (a second volume). Not only did the World War distract people from paying much attention at the time; only three or four copies of the volumes ever reached the West, so most Marxists did not even know they existed.
The Grundrisse was republished, in the original German again, in 1953. But 1953, with Stalin dying only that year and "de-Stalinisation" some years ahead, with the Cold War in full swing, and with the genuine (non-Communist-Party) Marxist left very beleaguered, was not a good time for creative or exploratory Marxist discussion. The Grundrisse began to attract attention only with the revival of the independent Marxist left at the end of the 1960s.
Roman Rosdolsky published his huge study of the Grundrisse, The Making of Marx's Capital, in German in 1968. An English translation of Rosdolsky came out in 1977. Penguin published an English translation of the Grundrisse itself in 1973.
A short book of accessible extracts from the Grundrisse, in English, edited by David McLellan, also came out in the early 70s.
In the 1970s the Grundrisse was often referred to in Marxist discussions. It is still widely enough read that Penguin keeps it in print. But the references have tapered off since the late 1980s, in a period dominated by defeats, setbacks, and retrenchment on the left. Paradoxically, there is a strong case that it is precisely the capitalism of microelectronics, globalisation, and privatisation dominant since the 1980s that makes ideas from the Grundrisse more relevant to us today.
Read more!
The structure of the Grundrisse
Despite its length, the Grundrisse is divided into only four sections:
* The "Introduction to a Critique of Political Economy", which is a discussion of the method of investigation and presentation which Marx thinks he should use. This, though Marx never published it, and though it is only 28 pages, is the longest discussion of the famous issue of "the Marxist method" which Marx ever wrote.
* A "Chapter on Money", which is geared around a critical demolition of the ideas of the school of socialist thought associated with Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. "Proudhonism" was by far the strongest trend of socialism in Europe at the time Marx was writing - much stronger than Marxism. Its idea was to manipulate the economic relations of a society based on money and trade so it would become an ideally equal system of cooperatives, trading with each other, and enjoying free credit.
* A "Chapter on Capital", which includes Marx's discussions of the very long-term tendencies of capitalism (but also much else);
* A section on "Bastiat and Carey". These were economists of Marx's day - Bastiat a free-trader, Carey a protectionist. Marx's demolition of both their views is highly relevant to political debates today about free-trade globalisation and protectionist responses.
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* The "Introduction to a Critique of Political Economy", which is a discussion of the method of investigation and presentation which Marx thinks he should use. This, though Marx never published it, and though it is only 28 pages, is the longest discussion of the famous issue of "the Marxist method" which Marx ever wrote.
* A "Chapter on Money", which is geared around a critical demolition of the ideas of the school of socialist thought associated with Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. "Proudhonism" was by far the strongest trend of socialism in Europe at the time Marx was writing - much stronger than Marxism. Its idea was to manipulate the economic relations of a society based on money and trade so it would become an ideally equal system of cooperatives, trading with each other, and enjoying free credit.
* A "Chapter on Capital", which includes Marx's discussions of the very long-term tendencies of capitalism (but also much else);
* A section on "Bastiat and Carey". These were economists of Marx's day - Bastiat a free-trader, Carey a protectionist. Marx's demolition of both their views is highly relevant to political debates today about free-trade globalisation and protectionist responses.
Read more!
What is the Grundrisse?
The Grundrisse is a rough draft of his economic theories - of much of what was later rewritten and published as Capital, and more - written by Marx at high speed in 1857-8.
Because it's a rough draft, Marx lets his mind roam more freely, and pursues his lines of argument further into a speculative future, than in his finished works. The Grundrisse can give us pointers for a Marxist understanding of the capitalism of microelectronics, globalisation, and privatisation - a capitalism in which some of the inherent tendencies of capitalism are working themselves out further and more thoroughly than even seemed possible in Marx's day.
In the Grundrisse, we also read Marx writing more directly and freshly about some of his basic ideas than in his finished works, giving us a better idea of how he reached his conclusions. The explanation in the Grundrisse of the theory of surplus value (exploitation), for example, is much less polished and systematic than in Capital - but in some ways more vivid and gripping.
The fact that it is a rough draft also means that the Grundrisse is full of digressions, repetitions, subjects dropped and then returned to later, false starts, and unfinished arguments. For example, in some sections Marx tries to clarify his theory of profit for himself by numerical examples. He sometimes get mixed up with the arithmetic, and breaks off with comments like "This highly irksome calculation will not delay us further" (p.373) or "The devil take this wrong arithmetic" (p.377). It is possible, and probably desirable, to study the more accessible and less off-course parts of the Grundrisse while skipping all those "irksome calculations".
So our plan is not to plod through a detailed discussion of every sentence or every page in the text. Some of us will study the full text in detail; others can take part, very usefully, while reading only short excerpts.
Read more!
Because it's a rough draft, Marx lets his mind roam more freely, and pursues his lines of argument further into a speculative future, than in his finished works. The Grundrisse can give us pointers for a Marxist understanding of the capitalism of microelectronics, globalisation, and privatisation - a capitalism in which some of the inherent tendencies of capitalism are working themselves out further and more thoroughly than even seemed possible in Marx's day.
In the Grundrisse, we also read Marx writing more directly and freshly about some of his basic ideas than in his finished works, giving us a better idea of how he reached his conclusions. The explanation in the Grundrisse of the theory of surplus value (exploitation), for example, is much less polished and systematic than in Capital - but in some ways more vivid and gripping.
The fact that it is a rough draft also means that the Grundrisse is full of digressions, repetitions, subjects dropped and then returned to later, false starts, and unfinished arguments. For example, in some sections Marx tries to clarify his theory of profit for himself by numerical examples. He sometimes get mixed up with the arithmetic, and breaks off with comments like "This highly irksome calculation will not delay us further" (p.373) or "The devil take this wrong arithmetic" (p.377). It is possible, and probably desirable, to study the more accessible and less off-course parts of the Grundrisse while skipping all those "irksome calculations".
So our plan is not to plod through a detailed discussion of every sentence or every page in the text. Some of us will study the full text in detail; others can take part, very usefully, while reading only short excerpts.
Read more!
Friday, August 18, 2006
Finding Marx's text, and some other useful texts.
This short article by Murray Kane sketches some ideas from the Grundrisse relevant to today, and especially to the problems of the labour movement in recent decades: Marx's Grundrisse and capitalism today.
A longer version of the article can be found in the book The Point of Change, edited by Carole Ferrier and Rebecca Pelan (Australian Studies Centre, University of Queensland, 1998).
The whole text of the Grundrisse itself is available online at the Marx-Engels Internet Archive, so you can easily print off selected passages from the Web.
The English translation of the Grundrisse (published by Penguin) is still in print. The cheapest way to get it is secondhand, for example from Abebooks; but it costs only $20-odd new online from Bookworm or Angus and Robertson.
For those who find the whole book too daunting, a useful resource is a small book of selections from Grundrisse produced in 1973 by David McLellan. It's out of print, I think, but readily and cheaply available secondhand, for example at Abebooks.
There isn't, as far as I know, anything written as an easy introduction to the Grundrisse, of the same sort as the various introductions to Capital. Maybe from this reading group we'll be able to produce notes which will do the job.
The major book discussing the Grundrisse is Roman Rosdolsky's massive work The Making of Marx's Capital (also available online from Dymocks; there are currently no copies available secondhand on Abebooks Australia, but you can easily get a copy cheap from Abebooks international, as long as you're prepared to pay the international postage.
However, Rosdolsky's book is not an introduction, but a big work of theory in its own right, with long discussions of how the Grundrisse relates to Capital; how later Marxists, Rosa Luxemburg for example, have taken up issues indicated in the Grundrisse; and how the Grundrisse helps to answer the criticisms of Marx's theory by such writers as Joan Robinson.
The other well-known book discussing the Grundrisse is Antonio Negri's Marx after Marx. But Negri, whatever the value or otherwise of his ideas, is certainly more obscure than Marx himself: his book is neither designed as, nor suitable as, an introduction.
Read more!
A longer version of the article can be found in the book The Point of Change, edited by Carole Ferrier and Rebecca Pelan (Australian Studies Centre, University of Queensland, 1998).
The whole text of the Grundrisse itself is available online at the Marx-Engels Internet Archive, so you can easily print off selected passages from the Web.
The English translation of the Grundrisse (published by Penguin) is still in print. The cheapest way to get it is secondhand, for example from Abebooks; but it costs only $20-odd new online from Bookworm or Angus and Robertson.
For those who find the whole book too daunting, a useful resource is a small book of selections from Grundrisse produced in 1973 by David McLellan. It's out of print, I think, but readily and cheaply available secondhand, for example at Abebooks.
There isn't, as far as I know, anything written as an easy introduction to the Grundrisse, of the same sort as the various introductions to Capital. Maybe from this reading group we'll be able to produce notes which will do the job.
The major book discussing the Grundrisse is Roman Rosdolsky's massive work The Making of Marx's Capital (also available online from Dymocks; there are currently no copies available secondhand on Abebooks Australia, but you can easily get a copy cheap from Abebooks international, as long as you're prepared to pay the international postage.
However, Rosdolsky's book is not an introduction, but a big work of theory in its own right, with long discussions of how the Grundrisse relates to Capital; how later Marxists, Rosa Luxemburg for example, have taken up issues indicated in the Grundrisse; and how the Grundrisse helps to answer the criticisms of Marx's theory by such writers as Joan Robinson.
The other well-known book discussing the Grundrisse is Antonio Negri's Marx after Marx. But Negri, whatever the value or otherwise of his ideas, is certainly more obscure than Marx himself: his book is neither designed as, nor suitable as, an introduction.
Read more!
