Studying Marx's Grundrisse

Someone asked: do we find in the Grundrisse ideas which Marx later revised or corrected?

There are places within the Grundrisse where Marx notes that he has gone wrong. (For example: "the devil take this wrong arithmetic", p.377, though in fact the error there is of calculation in an illustrative example, not of the substantive idea, which is that the same profit rate can tally with different rates of surplus value).

There are places, as we shall see, where he records a conceptual shift. He starts, as he had done in Wage Labour and Capital in 1847, with the conventional idea that the worker sells and the capitalist buys labour, and moves in the course of writing the notes to the idea that what is sold and bought is labour-power.

It is harder to identify a point where he says A but will later say B. Marx, like many other thinkers, developed his ideas mainly through critique of others. In Capital he partly hid that by expounding the ideas "straight" and relegating to (numerous) footnotes his references to other authors. In the Grundrisse, we get ideas-through-critique. But maybe sometimes there was a significant correction between idea-through-critique and straight-exposition ideas. Let's look out for that.

A related question: Marx here describes capitalism as a developing process. How has capitalism changed since Marx's time?

To answer that would be to summarise (critically and analytically) the whole of Marxist economic research since Marx!

In the Grundrisse, however, we can see Marx taking up a telescope, so to speak, and looking at how capitalism might develop in a much longer term than he considers in Capital, with automation, for example.

We talked about the "base-superstructure" metaphor for analysis of society which Marx expounds in the brief Preface which he would eventually write for the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy of 1859, which was the only offshoot of the Grundrisse completed for publication at the time. "The totality of [the] relations of production 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. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life".

In the Introduction which is part of the Grundrisse, Marx does talk of production as primary. But actually he makes no sustained argument about it, there or in the Preface. He makes no argument to show that the primacy of production is more than a heuristic rule-of-thumb in investigation, or a comment on the general picture that emerges from many detailed analyses.

Engels would later remonstrate: "If somebody twists this into saying that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms [the] proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase… Marx and I are ourselves partly to blame for the fact that the younger people sometimes lay more stress on the economic side than is due to it. We had to emphasise the main principle vis-à-vis our adversaries, who denied it, and we had not always the time, the place or the opportunity to give their due to the other elements involved in the interaction".

In the Introduction, Marx's main substantive argument is that production, distribution, and consumption all interact closely and condition each other. Thus it is faulty to proceed for example as John Stuart Mill did, by analysing general conditions of production, and then looking at how distribution can affect the outcome.

In Capital, really, Marx doesn't start with production. He starts with circulation, i.e. with commodity-exchange, and with circulation in a particular form of society ("bourgeois society", or "societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails") which he has not yet defined and will define only in the course of the later analysis. He doesn't get on to production ("the labour process") until chapter 7.

The idea of starting social analysis with attention to material life, rather than seeing material life as being shaped primarily by the ideas which (somehow) got into the head of a ruler, or by a Zeitgeist, or by the evolution of an Absolute Idea, is another matter. On that Marx's approach has won tacit assent from most historians.

At the end of the Introduction, Marx discusses (rather inconclusively) why art from a different era (ancient Greece) can still be of interest in modern capitalist society

That observation certainly tells against all mechanical interpretations of the primacy of production.

Marx's comment is that while adulthood is different from childhood, still child art may speak strongly to adults.

In this context we could think also of Bruno Bettlelheim's discussion (The Uses of Enchantment) of how fairy stories, old and always in archaic and "unrealistic" settings, can help children work through issues like resistance against the parents, fear of growing up, sibling rivalry, deferred results, etc.

Marx wrote (Theses on Feuerbach) that "the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations". That doesn't mean that there is nothing in common between humanity in one era and in another. And a stylised, archaic, "unrealistic" setting may give a more vivid imaginative reconstruction of human issues than a "realistic" and contemporary one, even though the story will be "received" differently in different societies.

Why does Marx refer to the army as a first area where wage-payment developed?

Roman soldiers were regularly paid prescribed wages, and they seem to have been the major group in Roman society paid wages on a regular basis (rather than for occasional day-labour, etc.)

See this article on Roman army pay scales.

Marx wrote to Engels (25 Sep 1857): "More graphically than anything else the history of the army demonstrates the rightness of our views as to the connection between the productive forces and social relations. Altogether, the army is of importance in economic development. E.g. it was in the army of Antiquity that the salaire [wage] was first developed. Likewise... the first legal form according recognition to the movable property of others than fathers of families. Likewise the guild system in the corporation of the fabri [the craft workers who built bridges, constructed defences, made weapons, etc. for the Roman army]. Here too the first use of machinery on a large scale..."

"Simple" concepts are not the same in different societies, and even if very old in some form or another may be fully developed only in very complex societies. One: the individual.

Hegel wrote: "Freedom as the ideal of that which is original and natural, does not exist as original and natural. Rather must it be first sought out and won; and that by an incalculable medial discipline of the intellectual and moral powers. The state of Nature is... predominantly that of injustice and violence, of untamed natural impulses, of inhuman deeds and feelings... Society and the State are the very conditions in which Freedom is realised".

Marx would dissent from Hegel on the state. But he too saw the very idea of individual freedom as generated by the development of bourgeois society, rather the bourgeois society being the outcome of the interplay of already-given individual "preferences" (as in bourgeois economics).

Marx sees that generation of individualism as an advance and as setting the basis for further advance to a less cramped individualism in socialist society. And Trotsky would take up the same theme, writing for example in The History of the Russian Revolution of: "The French revolution, initiating the magnificent triumph of individualism in all spheres of human activity…"

With Stalinism and partly with Fabianism, an idea of socialist collectivism as hostile to all individualism was promoted. That is far from Marx's idea.

"Simple" concepts are not the same in different societies, and even if very old in some form or another may be fully developed only in very complex societies. Two: labour.

All human society depends on productive effort of some sort. But in older societies labour is widely defined not as a common part of everyone's days and years, counterposed to "rest" or "life", but as a specific embedded part of individual duties. To the extent that it was a "general" concept, it was because the majority did a particular stereotype labour with which other sorts of labour could be to some degree approximated.

According to Scott Meikle, anyway, ancient Greek had no word corresponding to our general concept of "labour". There was work that slaves had to do, and there were crafts pursued by free citizens, but there was no concept of a social category, "labour", of which both activities were part. Marx commented in Capital chapter 1 section 3 that "The [idea] that all kinds of labour are equal and equivalent, because, and so far as they are human labour in general, cannot be deciphered, until the notion of human equality has already acquired the fixity of a popular prejudice. This, however, is possible only in a society in which the great mass of the produce of labour takes the form of commodities…"

In capitalist society, "labour" becomes a real and simple reality because there are myriad different specific sorts of labour, and workers move frequently between them. That development was fullest, in Marx's day, in the USA.

"Simple" concepts are not the same in different societies, and even if very old in some form or another may be fully developed only in very complex societies. Three: money.

Money existed long before capitalism, back to maybe 3000 BC. But most things then were not exchanged for money. Only with "a society in which the great mass of the produce of labour takes the form of commodities", i.e. of entities exchanged for money, as Marx describes it above, does money acquire its modern and developed form.