Studying Marx's Grundrisse

The core issue for Marx in the pages (135-172) which we looked at on 21 January (session #3) was "labour money" - the idea that exploitation and inequality could be fixed by workers, individually or in small cooperatives, buying up the means of production (using the "free credit" discussed in session #2) and getting "fair exchange" between the individuals or small cooperatives through money directly counting hours of labour-time.

We'd discussed most of the issues with labour money in session #2. (The Grundrisse, being rough notes, is like that: theoretical issues emerge and re-emerge in a jumbled and criss-crossing way). We talked a bit about why the call for labour money has faded. It was in circulation at least as early as 1780 (Matt told us that it was written into Granville Sharp's scheme for colonising Sierra Leone), and was still influential in 1857-8. But it had faded by the end of the 19th century (maybe even by the 1860s? it wasn't a big topic of debate in the First International). Why?

The labour-money demand was attuned to a society dominated by small-scale producers, producing a limited and known range of commodities. If a carpenter came to the "time-chit bank" (universal buyer, seller, and regulator of production, as discussed by Marx) with a table and said it represented three hours of their labour, the bank staff could reasonably judge the claim. (As today it is a standard for carpenters that hanging a door takes half an hour).

But what if the 62,000 workers from Volkswagen Wolfsburg come to a time-chat bank with a car, each one claiming that the car represents x minutes of their labour-time?

Or if the 300,000 workers from Foxconn Shenzen come with a new model smartphone, each one claiming it's y minutes of their labour-time?

Or tens of thousands of staff from a university, cleaners, admin staff, technicians, lecturers, come with a psychology lecture and say each of them should be credited with z minutes of labour-money?

The labour-money "model" breaks down with large-scale collective production of an ever-increasing variety of commodities.

This fact led us into a discussion of Marx's assessment of the trend of capitalism to multiply needs and the variety of commodities. That assessment will be more explicit in the passages of the Grundrisse we'll discuss in session #8, but it's clearly implied in pages 158-162 with the idea that historical societies have three broad forms.

1. Tributary, patriarchal, personal dependence 2. "Personal independence founded on objective dependence" (capitalism) 3. "Free individuality, based on the universal development of individuals and… communal, social productivity" (socialism)

Marx argues that #2 is a great step forward from #1. Yearnings for a return to #1 are inevitably generated within #2, but they are reactionary dead-ends. #3 continues and develops, rather than negates, the rise of personal independence and the making-multifarious of needs and wants which comes with #2.

Here Marx is not making a moral judgement - though plainly he feels more in tune with the modern worker, with an individualistic outlook and a personal and maybe idiosyncratic scale of needs and wants, than with the pre-capitalist peasant, very submerged into the local collective and with a stereotype short list of needs.

Rather, he is arguing that, whether we like it or not (though he does like it), the way forward from capitalism cannot be a regression to the human relations of pre-capitalist society, but rather a society of ever more varied productive activities, needs, wants, and individual quirks.

He had already expressed this thought in a polemic against "crude communism" in his 1844 Manuscripts:

"Crude communism is only the culmination of this envy and of this levelling-down proceeding from the preconceived minimum. It has a definite, limited standard. How little this annulment of private property is really an appropriation is in fact proved by the abstract negation of the entire world of culture and civilisation, the regression to the unnatural simplicity of the poor and crude man who has few needs and who has not only failed to go beyond private property, but has not yet even reached it.

"The community is only a community of labour, and equality of wages paid out by communal capital – by the community as the universal capitalist. Both sides of the relationship are raised to an imagined universality – labour as the category in which every person is placed, and capital as the acknowledged universality and power of the community".

And then again in the Communist Manifesto:

"The revolutionary literature that accompanied [the] first movements of the proletariat [like Babeuf's] had necessarily a reactionary character. It inculcated universal asceticism and social levelling in its crudest form".

More on this when we get to session #8?

Session #5, on Thursday 28 January, is on pages 172-250. Marx has already argued (in pages 135-172) that money is not a convention but organically developed out of any comprehensive social system of commodity-exchange - that system must separate out commodities into two groups, one group including only one commodity, money. Now he argues that in that social system money becomes more than a commodity. "Money becomes the real community".

Much of our discussion in the 14 January session was about "labour money" rather than "free credit". That's reasonable enough, because "free credit" was a smaller, subsidiary, and more ephemeral part of the Proudhonist-socialist program, a transitional proposal towards labour-money rather than itself being the big deal.

It may well be just an accident of the fact that Darimon's book was recent and Marx had it before him that Marx started the Grundrisse with his comments on Darimon and free credit.

Marx does also, in the pages on Darimon, start to develop his argument later summed up in Capital chapter 1 section 3 about a generalised commodity economy inevitably and organically separating out one particular commodity to be money and different from the rest.

But we come back to "labour money" in the 21 January session, and to the separation-off of money as organic to commodity economy in other weeks soon.

The other main discussion came with Mohamed taking up the reference in my PowerPoint back to Marx's comment in The Poverty of Philosophy about history progressing "by the bad side".

The passage from The Poverty of Philosophy is:

"It is the bad side that produces the movement which makes history, by providing a struggle.

"If, during the epoch of the domination of feudalism, the economists, enthusiastic over the knightly virtues, the beautiful harmony between rights and duties, the patriarchal life of the towns, the prosperous condition of domestic industry in the countryside, the development of industry organised into corporations, guilds and fraternities, in short, everything that constitutes the good side of feudalism, had set themselves the problem of eliminating everything that cast a shadow on the picture – serfdom, privileges, anarchy – what would have happened?

"All the elements which called forth the struggle would have been destroyed, and the development of the bourgeoisie nipped in the bud. One would have set oneself the absurd problem of eliminating history."

Marx's argument here is that progress is made not by clever people, from above, abating the "bad sides" of a social formation and boosting its "good sides", but by the human victims of the "bad side" rebelling.

He pursues that in the concluding section of The Poverty of Philosophy, on "strikes and combinations of workers". There, he goes beyond the abstract philosophical affirmations in earlier writings that the working class must be the revolutionary force because it is the negation of capitalism, to expound the revolutionary implications of the actual organisations and struggles of the workers.

He rebukes the Proudhon-type socialists because "when it is a question of making a precise study of strikes, combinations and other forms in which the proletarians carry out before our eyes their organisation as a class, some are seized with real fear and others display a transcendental disdain".

The emphasis on conscious human action (will) as the agency of change is common in Marx's writings of that period, 1845-7.

"History does nothing, it 'possesses no immense wealth', it 'wages no battles'. It is man, real, living man who does all that, who possesses and fights; 'history' is not, as it were, a person apart, using man as a means to achieve its own aims; history is nothing but the activity of man pursuing his aims". (The Holy Family, 1846. Obviously by "man" Marx means "woman and man").

"The materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and upbringing forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that it is essential to educate the educator himself. This doctrine must, therefore, divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society. The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice". (Theses on Feuerbach, 1845)

Matt also mentioned the very "voluntarist" March 1850 Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League.

Marx continued those views to the end, and they can be found, for example, in the Circular Letter of 1879, actually drafted by Engels but co-signed by him and Marx, which was probably Marx's last substantial political statement.

Now along the way in Marx's writings we find some passages which read a lot more "deterministic", as if it is all a matter of laws of history and of economic development which produce the future inexorably, with exercise of conscious will being only a reflection of those laws.

Various "stories" are current about these different emphases.

One is that in his youth Marx was more "Hegelian" and because of that more likely to emphasise conscious human action. In old age he became more deterministic, and Engels after Marx's death was even more so.

A second is that Marx was more "deterministic" when younger, and came to emphasise conscious human action only in his later years, after (some say) the US Civil War or (others say) the Paris Commune.

We can and will discuss this further, particularly in the sections of the Grundrisse which prompt discussion of Hegel because they use special Hegelian terminology so much. But my view is different from the current main stories.

The "deterministic" tilt is probably heaviest in the Preface which Marx wrote soon after the Grundrisse for the only bit of finished writing which he extracted directly from the Grundrisse, the Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy.

It is found, too, in Capital.

I think Marx veered to that "deterministic" tilt when he was taking pains to make his writing "scientific". In his letters to comrades explaining the rather odd choice of contents for the Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy (it has nothing about capital or really about workers, and omits what Marx himself thought his greatest discovery of the Grundrisse period, the distinction and conflict between labour and labour-power), Marx remonstrates that he wants first to publish a "scientific" work, which will win attention by its "scientific" merits, and can then be followed up by more directly revolutionary writing.

Marx was educated in a Hegelian-dominated German university system, where "science" meant something different from what it means to us today. Hegel projected his work as "scientific". He thought that philosophy must be "scientific", and was indeed "the" science. Thus his book titles such as The Science of Logic and The Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences.

As Hegel explained in the Encyclopedia Logic §1.14, for him "science" meant "system". A theory was "scientific" when and only when it was an all-embracing "system", with all its parts locking neatly together - when it depicted, as Hegel's books did, history moving forward through the internal laws of development of history "as a whole".

Marx was polemically very "anti-Hegelian" in writings like The Holy Family and The Poverty of Philosophy. Later, perhaps in part just out of contrarian turn of mind, when Hegelian influence in German universities had been ousted by blander descriptive "historicist" schools of thought, he kicked back. In "kicking-back" moods and when influenced by the idea that he must make a book "scientific" in something like the Hegelian sense, he would write in more "deterministic" style.