Studying Marx's Grundrisse

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.