Studying Marx's Grundrisse

The "Loi Agraire"

Marx in these pages frequently asserts that the exploitative relations of capital and labour-power are an inescapable consequence of commodity relations dominating in society. To end exploitation we must make those commodity relations wither away, rather than seeking to purify them and make them correspond more to an ideal abstracted from one side of how they appear.

The argument is all put in quite abstract terms, but can I think be equated with the argument made by communists in the French Revolution that a common idea of the left then, the "Agrarian Law", was insufficient.

The idea of the "Agrarian Law" was derived from the Lex Agraria of the Gracchi in Rome in 133 BC. It meant dividing up the land (in Rome, some of the land; in France at the height of the French Revolution, I think, all of the land) so that each household would have an equal patch of land.

Jacques Granus declared in 1793: that he wanted a republic which "would be the culmination of equality and freedom. I cannot conceive of the republic in any other way. It is not the agrarian law, which will not last twenty-four hours from the moment you permit the free play of individual ambitions. Communism, that is the fundamental and guiding principle of the republic".

I believe that a similar argument was made by Babeuf in his trial.

Why would the equality "not last 24 hours"? The "un-labour theory of value", as we discussed it a couple of weeks ago - the inescapable divergence of prices from individual labour times - would ensure that.

A is more energetic, healthy, deft, lucky, or whatever than B. So A, in a day, produces more monetary wealth than B. The inequality is self-reinforcing. Soon B will be able to get a better deal from selling their labour-power to A, who in the meantime will have acquired better equipment, more productive techniques, etc. Then A acquires the advantages given by cooperation against C, D, etc…

"The depths"

On page 247 Marx has developed a first version of the argument which he will spell out in more precise terms at the end of chapter 6 of Capital volume 1, and which will lead him to give the core of Capital (chapters 7 to 15) to studying how labour is shaped and reshaped in the workplace (a theme not really studied at all in the Grundrisse.

"In present bourgeois society as a whole, this positing of prices and their circulation etc. appears as the surface process, beneath which, however, in the depths, entirely different processes go on, in which this apparent individual equality and liberty disappear…" ["The depths" are… the production process].

The "surface" contains a real measure of "liberty and equality", but also the cramping domination of what in Capital chapter 6 Marx will call "property and Bentham", the pointers to the "depths".

"It is forgotten, on one side, that the presupposition of exchange value, as the objective basis of the whole of the system of production, already in itself implies compulsion over the individual, since his immediate product is not a product for him, but only becomes such in the social process, and since it must take on this general but nevertheless external form; and that the individual has an existence only as a producer of exchange value, hence that the whole negation of his natural existence is already implied; that he is therefore entirely determined by society; that this further presupposes a division of labour etc., in which the individual is already posited in relations other than that of mere exchanger, etc...."

Capital: not a thing but a relation; and not just a relation, but also a process

On page 257 Marx refers to Adam Smith saying that capital "is accumulated labour… which serves as the means for new labour".

That is true in the sense that all capital is embodied, at various stages in its circuit, in products of past (dead) labour. But then all products are products of past labour! And all production, whether capitalist or not, depends on using products of past labour to help with present labour. (Even for hunting and gathering you need a strong arm developed through past labour…)

Defining capital that way means that "the specific form of capital is abstracted away".

So far Marx is reworking a comment he had already made in Wage Labour and Capital in 1849.

"What is a Negro slave? A man of the black race. The one explanation is worthy of the other. A Negro is a Negro. Only under certain conditions does he become a slave. A cotton-spinning machine is a machine for spinning cotton. Only under certain conditions does it become capital…"

Capital, he argues, is not a thing, but "a social relation of production".

In the Grundrisse Marx goes further:

"Capital is not a simple relation, but a process, in whose various moments it is always capital" (p.258).

We cannot understand capital from looking at the individual things and people in a snapshot of bourgeois society, nor even from looking at the individual things and people and the relations between at that snapshot time. We can understand only by looking at what Marx calls "value in movement".

The Walrasian auctioneer

Adam Smith, in The Wealth of Nations, famously developed the idea of the "invisible hand".

Book IV ch.2: "By directing [his] industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, [the individual] intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part of it. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good. It is an affectation, indeed, not very common among merchants, and very few words need be employed in dissuading them from it".

Book I ch.2: "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages".

These days Smith is often presented as an unconditional free-marketer. But he wasn't. He also wrote:

"People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices".

And the passages above say only that it is not always the worse for society that the individual seeks maximum individual gain, and it frequently turns out that this search of individual gain has promoted a common good. That's true. Up to a point market relations do allow efficient coordination. Marx argued that capitalist market economies would have recurrent crises of "overproduction", but also that they had mechanisms for recovering from crises, and the crises weren't permanent.

Much later than Smith was the argument that market relations (if smooth-flowing, not tampered with by governments, etc.) would always and comprehensively bring a harmonious and optimal outcome.

A "general equilibrium" theory on those lines was first developed by Léon Walras at the end of the 19th century. Oddly, Walras himself was a sort of socialist (although a market socialist), but ideas about free-market capitalism being the best possible society were quickly spun out of his ideas. Walras's approach was further developed and made more rigorous by Kenneth Arrow and Gerard Debreu in 1954. (Again, Arrow himself was a sort of socialist).

The "Walrasian auctioneer" was a theoretical fiction developed by Walras, of an auctioneer simultaneously "auctioning" all commodities across society to set exactly the prices that would balance supplies and demands. His argument was that the actual process approximated what that "auctioneer" would do.

He knew very well that it was a fiction. The essential point about all these theoretical constructions is that they apply only to economic life as seen in a snapshot, on an idealised market day for example.

Thus they miss out what we can only see by studying the economic processes in movement.

There have been attempts to develop Walrasian theory further beyond snapshots. I studied a university course in 1969 delivered by one of the most determined and clever theorists to make such an attempt, Christopher Bliss, then writing his book Capital Theory and the Distribution of Income. But I don't think the attempts hold up.

The emergence of capitalism from limited commodity exchange

In the Grundrisse Marx is still unclear about the decisive steps which make the movement from limited commodity exchange (very old) to general commodity exchange and capitalism.

He would sum up a more developed view in Capital chapter 6.

"We know by experience that a circulation of commodities relatively primitive, suffices for the production of all these forms [of money]. Otherwise with capital. The historical conditions of its existence are by no means given with the mere circulation of money and commodities. It can spring into life, only when the owner of the means of production and subsistence meets in the market with the free labourer selling his labour-power. And this one historical condition comprises a world’s history. Capital, therefore, announces from its first appearance a new epoch in the process of social production".

He adds in a footnote: "The capitalist epoch is therefore characterised by this, that labour-power takes in the eyes of the labourer himself the form of a commodity which is his property; his labour consequently becomes wage-labour. On the other hand, it is only from this moment that the produce of labour universally becomes a commodity" (emphasis added).