Saturday, March 27, 2021

 

Pasquinelli; Negri; Postone-Reinicke; Bellofiore and others; and Arthur, on the Grundrisse and on translations into English

Thanks to Bruce for these readings on the Grundrisse:

On the Origins of Marx's "General Intellect", by Matteo Pasqinelli 

Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse, by Toni Negri

On Martin Nicolaus's Introduction to the English translation of the Grundrisse, by Moishe Postone and Helmut Reinicke

In Marx's Laboratory: Critical Interpretations of the Grundrisse, a collection of contributions edited by Ricardo Bellofiore, Peter Thomas, and Guido Starosta

A guide to English translations of the Grundrisse, by Chris Arthur


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Friday, March 26, 2021

 

Notes on discussion of section 13, pages 534-690

Difficult?

We had a lot of reading for this session, and some of it is obscure because it's scrappy and jumps from topic to topic. There is even a section where, unusually for Marx, he goes into quite a lot of algebra, instead of arithmetical examples. (It's about turnover. In my view, he hadn't fixed the fundamental error of his arithmetical examples on turnover, so the algebra is largely beside the point).

These are, after all, rough notes, and these pages are rougher than others in the Grundrisse. I think it is better not to puzzle too much about the "rougher" passages. Better to focus on those where Marx gives "first drafts" of thoughts later developed in Capital (sometimes the "first drafts" are more vivid than Marx's final writing-up, or give extra insight), or where he develops substantial threads of argument (not unfinished scraps, as on turnover) not redeveloped in Capital.

"Middle-class"

Lev asked about Marx's comment: "The assertion that free competition = the ultimate form of the development of the forces of production and hence of human freedom means nothing other than that middle-class rule is the culmination of world history – certainly an agreeable thought for the parvenus of the day before yesterday." Middle-class rule? Isn't the Marxist view that the petty bourgeoisie or middle classes can't become the ruling class: it's either the bourgeoisie or the working class?

By "middle class" in that passage of the Grundrisse, Marx means the bourgeoisie. Apparently it was common usage in England then to refer to the bourgeoisie as the "middle class", the class midway between the working class on the one hand and the landed aristocracy (who then still held a very large part of wealth) on the other. In that passage of the Grundrisse, written in German, Marx nevertheless uses the English term "middle-class", indicating that he is adopting that English usage of the time. (The translator notes the use of the English term in an earlier sentence on that same page of the Grundrisse, but not this second use).

In the USA, confusingly, "middle class" is often used as a term for the working class, presumably the class midway between the bourgeoisie and the lumpenproletariat. In Europe, anyway, it usually denotes the social miscellany between the bourgeoisie and the working class: tiny-scale business-people and self-employed, farmers, lawyers, dentists, accountants, middle managers, and so on.

Marx writes about that social miscellany in Theories of Surplus Value, there using the German term "Mittelklassen". He writes of:

"… the constantly growing number of the middle classes, those who stand between the workman on the one hand and the capitalist and landlord on the other. The middle classes maintain themselves to an ever increasing extent directly out of revenue, they are a burden weighing heavily on the working base and increase the social security and power of the upper ten thousand" - Theories of Surplus Value vol.2 p.573.

"The analysis of free competition"

"The analysis of what free competition really is, is the only rational reply to the middle-class prophets who laud it to the skies or to the socialists who damn it to hell".

One thought about this was that the mere abolition of free competition, without abolishing capitalist relations in the workplace, leads only to state capitalism and the worsening of the oppression of the working class through the unification of political oppression and economic exploitation in a single hand. That, I think, is a valid thought, one developed by the German Social Democrats in the late 19th century against so-called "state socialism"; but I don't think it is what Marx has in mind here.

Marx had pointed out earlier in The Poverty of Philosophy that under capitalist conditions, competition breeds monopoly, and also monopoly breeds competition. But I think in this passage of the Grundrisse he is referring to capitalism as a society overall characterised by a greater degree of free competition (even in its more monopolised and statised forms) than societies where the individual's economic life is set by tributary and clan relations, often fixed hereditarily.

So I think the sentence really means more like: "The analysis of what capitalism really is, is the only rational reply to the middle-class prophets who laud it to the skies or to the socialists who damn it to hell".

What is wrong with the socialists "who damn it to hell" is that they neglect the analysis which shows the contradictions and struggles incubated by capitalism and which point beyond it to a new society. Instead they deal with capitalism by just counterposing their own ideal social blueprint.

I think Marx's thought here is similar to what he had written in The Poverty of Philosophy:

"The [bourgeois] economists want the workers to remain in society as it is constituted and as it has been signed and seal by them in their manuals.

"The socialists want the workers to leave the old society alone, the better to be able to enter the new society which they have prepared for them with so much foresight.

"In spite of both of them, in spite of manuals and utopias, combination [i.e. workers' organisation] has not ceased for an instant to go forward and grow with the development and growth of modern industry…

"The last word of social science will always be: 'Battle or death; bloody struggle or extinction. Thus the question is inexorably posed'."

Work and life

In a socialist society, work will be directed towards human need, not towards profit. Marx is also saying more than that, I think.

He is saying that capitalism creates the foundation for a flourishing of diverse needs and for work to be creative, innovative, and relatively (though never absolutely) free of drudgery.

A hunting-and-gathering society, or a society dominated by small peasant landholding with light state taxes, will both have work directed towards needs. But towards only very basic needs, and work which is repetitious and little-changing, with a high quota of drudgery.

In fact, the alienated labour of capitalist society is a step forward from that production for need, a stage of development with greater potentialities for emancipation.


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Saturday, March 20, 2021

 

Notes on discussion of section 12, pages 514-533

Advance of capitalism promotes privatisation? Or statism?

In Capital Marx would develop an argument about the concentration and centralisation of capital (not sketched at all in the Grundrisse) and conclude:

"The relative extension and energy of the movement towards centralisation is determined, to a certain degree, by the magnitude of capitalist wealth…

"In any given branch of industry centralisation would reach its extreme limit if all the individual capitals invested there were fused into a single capital. In a given society this limit wouild be reached only when the entire social capital was united in the hands of either a single capitalist or a single capitalist company".

Engels, in Anti-Dühring (which Marx read before publication and contributed a chapter to) extended this argument, writing that the "rebellion of the productive forces… forces the capitalist class itself to treat them more and more as social productive forces, so far as this is possible under capitalist conditions". Thus joint-stock companies, "trusts", and then "conversion into state property".

In the Grundrisse, we find Marx sketching the opposite tendency: public utilities being more and more undertaken by private capital as capital flowers and grows. Marx must have had in mind the great expansion of private railway-building in Britain especially in the 1840s. (In fact the "canal mania" which had preceded the "railway mania" had also been in the hands of private capital).

From Anti-Dühring on, Marxists took it as solid fact that the dominant tendency was to more statisation. The flood of privatisations world-wide since the 1980s tells us that it is not so simple.

In the discussion we came up with these thoughts on the conundrums.

• There is an element of false dichotomy here. The privatised industries under neo-liberalism are run under heavy state regulation, while in the 1950s and 60s the nationalised industries were pushed to operate as profitable enterprises in the market.

Both trends operate. Which is most salient depends on other factors.

In an epoch of protectionism and relatively high transport and communication costs, capitalist states are concerned to build up relatively integrated national industrial complexes (their own steel industry, their own machine-tools industry, their own airline, etc.) which compete on the world market on the basis of each having a safe space in its "own" home market.

In an epoch of reduced transport and communication costs (containerisation, internet), capitalist states guide policy by the aim of making their countries attractive perches for mobile global capital.

Reduced transaction costs due to microelectronics make such things possible as the British electricity market, where prices and contracts are renegotiated every half-hour.

There is also a political dimension. Privatisation and outsourcing are policies to divide workforces and break up union organisation.

Is transport labour productive?

Marx argues yes. Some of us were doubtful. But Marx's argument seems convincing if you think of an industry like sand-mining. In that industry, all the labour is "transport" labour, moving the sand from somewhere like North Stradbroke Island, off the coast of Queensland, where it is not a commodity, to a site where it is a commodity.

"Annihilation of space through time"

We didn't have much time to discuss Marx's phrase, made famous by David Harvey taking it up - "annihilation of space through time". (Or "by time", as Nicolaus translates it: the German is Die Vernichtung des Raums durch die Zeit, and durch is a pretty exact equivalent of "through" in English).

I'm still not convinced that there's anything very profound or enlightening about. Doesn't it just mean "moving" or "transport"? You reduce the space separating items by moving them in time? Perhaps the more startling development is the "annihilation of space" in timespans too short to register, as where my flatmate can do her job being the director of an art foundation in Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA, from a flat in London...

"Posit"

These pages include patches where Marx frequently adopts the Hegelian usage "posit" (in German, the very everyday word setzen, set, put, sit). As far as I can see, there is no special warping of the argument here.

The twist to Hegel's use of setzen, "posit", is that for him cause posits effect and equally effect posits cause. Cause and effect are identical; they are parts of a circular logic. Hegel rules it out on principle that small causes can produce big effects. (Science of Logic vol.1 §3 ch.3; shorter Logic, §153, §154).

But Marx had not forgotten his critique of Hegel's drive to "harmonise" everything into a perfect circle, and as far as I can see the word "posit", in English translations of the Grundrisse can generally be read as "set" or "establish" with no trouble.


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Tuesday, March 16, 2021

 

Notes on our discussion of section 11, p.459-514

Just three comments from our discussion on pages 459-514, mostly concerned with "precapitalist economic formations".

1. Not a rigid scheme

Marx's off-hand comment in the Preface to the 1859 Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy has sometimes been read as mandating a rigid categorisation of all societies into one or another of only a very few "modes of production".

"In broad outline, the Asiatic, ancient, feudal and modern bourgeois modes of production may be designated as epochs marking progress in the economic development of society".

In fact, in its heyday Stalinist orthodoxy made the scheme even tighter, eliminating the "Asiatic mode" from the sequence.

In the Grundrisse itself Marx discusses yet another ("Germanic") mode. He points to wide differences within the "Asiatic" mode. (Perry Anderson, in Lineages of the Absolutist State, argues in detail that there were in fact several substantially different "Asiatic" modes).

There is no indication in the Grundrisse that Marx considers the rough categorisation discussed there to be exhaustive.

Marx would have been aware of the gaps in his knowledge, as Eric Hobsbawm discussed them in his introduction to the separate translation of this section of the Grundrisse published under the title Pre-capitalist Economic Formations in 1964:

"The general state of Marx and Engels' historical knowledge [at the time]… thin on pre-history, on primitive communal societies and on pre-Colombian America, and virtually non-existent on Africa… not impressive on the ancient or medieval Middle East, but markedly better on certain part of Asia, notably India, but not on Japan… good on classical antiquity and the European middle ages… outstandingly good on the period of rising capitalism…"

2. Contradictions in feudalism

Why did capitalism emerge first in areas why feudalism had come to dominate, in Europe and Japan?

In the Grundrisse Marx attempts no discussion at all of the transition from one mode of production to another. He would give a four-sentence comment in the 1859 Preface, which to my mind confuses as much as it enlightens, but in any case was not a summary of longer or detailed investigation in the Grundrisse itself or anywhere else:

"At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure".

But on page 479 he offers the idea, in tune with his whole approach to history, that the fruitful element in feudalism was the contradictions embedded in it:

"The history of classical antiquity is the history of cities, but of cities founded on landed property and on agriculture; Asiatic history is a kind of indifferent unity of town and countryside (the really large cities must be regarded here merely as royal camps, as works of artifice erected over the economic construction proper); the Middle Ages (Germanic period) begins with the land as the seat of history, whose further development then moves forward in the contradiction between town and countryside…"

3. Alienation as progressive

In line with that comment on the social fertility of contradiction is another passage where Marx says again that the alienated relations of capitalist society also encapsulate its progress relative to pre-capitalist societies.

"The most extreme form of alienation, wherein labour appears in the relation of capital and wage labour, and labour, productive activity appears in relation to its own conditions and its own product, is a necessary point of transition – and therefore already contains in itself, in a still only inverted form, turned on its head, the dissolution of all limited presuppositions of production, and moreover creates and produces the unconditional presuppositions of production, and therewith the full material conditions for the total, universal development of the productive forces of the individual…" (p.515).

I've mentioned before Lucien Goldmann's idea that socialism will be "a synthesis at a higher element of the positive elements of three great preceding forms of society: 1. the classlessness of primitive society; 2. the qualitative relations of man [meaning human] to man, and of man to nature of pre-capitalist society; 3. the rationality of capitalist society and values of universality, equality and freedom".

(The passage is from Socialism and Humanism, a contribution to a book edited by Erich Fromm, Socialist Humanism. It is indeed quoted in Miriam Glucksmann's New Left Review 56 article on Goldmann: thanks to Matt for the pointer).

Marx's idea is certainly not Goldmann's. His idea is that socialism will emerge from the contradictions and conflicts within capitalist society, taking from it emancipatory elements of course, but not as a synthesis of the supposed "good sides" of previous societies. The human-to-human relations of precapitalist societies, enclosing each individual in a web of clan and tributary dependencies, were more cramping, less productive of conditions for fuller development and of fruitful struggles, than the alienated relations of capitalist society.


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Tuesday, March 02, 2021

 

Notes on our discussion of section 9, pages 333-433, and especially on the "Hegelian" usages in the Grundrisse

See https://www.workersliberty.org/story/2021-03-08/hegelian-usages-marxs-grundrisse

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