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".