Studying Marx's Grundrisse

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.