Studying Marx's Grundrisse

Much of our discussion in session 5 (28 January 2021: pages 172-250) centred around Marx's comment (page 161) that a "social bond" or a "real community" mediated by money "is preferable to the lack of any connections, or to a merely local connection, resting on blood ties, or on primeval, natural, or master-servant relations".

Marx's critique of a society where money becomes "the social bond", "the real community", and "the god among commodities" is very different from the railing against "the money power" from, for example, US president Andrew Jackson (1829-1837), who managed to abolish the USA's central bank.

That sort of agitation against money, or at least against big money, as the evil disrupting an otherwise benign (capitalist) economy, has often been a staple of the populist and antisemitic right.

But it was those whom Marx was arguing against in these pages of the Grundrisse who were closer to such agitation. In the 20th century, a Cercle Proudhon (Proudhon Circle), 1911-25, would become an incubator for fascist groups in France.

Darimon and the other Proudhonists focused on inequities in distribution, abstracting them wrongly (so Marx argued) from relations of production which they left relatively uncriticised. They argued that society could be made fair and equal by reforming the money system, in particular curbing the privileges of big money (free credit), and introducing "labour money".

Marx argued that they were taking ideals generated by a society of generalised commodity exchange - "Liberty, Equality, Property, and Bentham", as he would put it in Capital - noticing that this society also contradicted those ideals, and trying vainly to mend the society by lopping off the non-ideal elements.

Far from the workplace and production and the family household being the "good side" of capitalist society, requiring only to be rid of the "bad side", the sphere of circulation is the "good side", the sphere of at least a relative liberty and equality.

The"bad side", "the depths" as Marx puts it in the Grundrisse, is exploitation, subjugation, and alienation in the workplace. Only, the "good side" and the "bad side" are inseparable. And, as Marx had put it in The Poverty of Philosophy, "it is the bad side that produces the movement which makes history, by providing a struggle". In capitalist society, it is the organisation and struggle of workers in the workplaces that underpins "the movement which makes history".

And when the workers become able to "make history", we will build a society of "from each according to their abilities, to each according to their need", without money, or with only a very limited role for money, rather than a reformed money-society.

So Marx is very "against" money, but in a historical perspective, of looking towards it being superseded, but also seeing it as having been an element in previous progress.

When Marx writes of a "real community" mediated by money being "preferable to the lack of any connections, or to a merely local connection, resting on blood ties, or on primeval, natural, or master-servant relations", he does so in rough notes. The word "preferable" cannot be exact or literal. Marx has already commented that money does not result from a "convention" or some sort of agreed social contract: it develops and confronts societies as a system of relations outside their control.

No individual, no society even, can "prefer" money relations by choosing them off a shelf in preference to tributary relations of different sorts, in the way that one might "prefer" apples to pears, or skirts to shorts.

The inexact use of the word "preferable" provokes fruitful discussion just because it is jarring.

In the early pages of the Communist Manifesto, Marx does not use the word "preferable" to compare bourgeois society to earlier tributary forms. But it is clear that he considers bourgeois society to represent advance, progress, an expansion of emancipatory potentialities, beyond tributary societies.

As Rosa Luxemburg would later put it: "The capitalist victory parade and all its works bear the stamp of progress in the historical sense". That side of Marxist theory, and the consequent recognition of "reactionary anti-capitalism" as a constant real potential and threat, got pushed aside somewhat in the 20th century. I wrote some polemics, under the pen-name Chris Reynolds, in a debate about this in 2000-2: https://www.workersliberty.org/story/2013/05/27/capitalism-our-times.

I think sober reading of the economic history of living conditions for the working majority in older societies compels the conclusion that capitalism today - even with Covid, with shanty-towns and slums, and all the rest of it - is "preferable" in an everyday sense to those older societies. But that is not Marx's point. We cannot, individually or collectively, choose whether to live in the 21st century or the 14th century.

His argument is that bourgeois society - and, even more so, developed bourgeois society - has more potentialities for further development. It has a richer "bad side".

One implication is that Marx (not just as a matter of personal "preference", but as a matter of the material possibilities) sees a future "free association of producers" not as negating bourgeois individualism but as developing it to more individual freedom, variety, and multifariousness.