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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