To mark PPE@10 this post continues a series of posts to celebrate ten years of Progress in Political Economy (PPE) as a blog that has addressed the worldliness of critical political economy issues since 2014.
From the beginning of February to the end of July this year the Past & Present Reading Group undertook a reading of Grundrisse. Meaning ‘rough plan’ or ‘draft’, Grundrisse is a series of seven notebooks written by Karl Marx between 1857-8. Unpublished in Marx’s lifetime, a defining feature of the work is its unfinished quality. Sprawling in nature at over 900 pages, any attempt to provide a precis of such a work would be a fool’s errand. So, given the acknowledged roughness of the text and, given also that the work formed the materials written in preparation for the more polished outcome of Capital, what is the value of reading this work? Why not just proceed directly to the finished product? In this short blog post I will provide a number of reasons why I think Grundrisse makes for compelling reading and should be read as part of a broader understanding of Marx’s work.
Before Capital and before Capital
For those interested in the evolution of Marx’s thought Grundrisse is an essential point of reference. In this respect Grundrisse can be situated between The German Ideology and Capital Vol.1. The former text, whilst setting out important postulates of Historical Materialist thought, was undoubtedly too crudely linear and neat in its stadial unfolding. Capital, meanwhile is where more sophisticated notions of tendencies and concrete struggles were brought into the picture in order to understand capitalism as a distinct mode of production. Grundrisse offers a window into the development of Marx’s thinking on these issues. As Martin Nicolaus states in his introduction, ‘The Grundrisse is the record of Marx’s mind at work, grappling with fundamental problems of theory.’ In terms of the method of Marx, a reader can gain a clear appreciation of his mode of holding one thing constant then adding more determinations to the picture to reveal its proper complexity and inner contradictions: As Marx states to himself at one point, ‘All these statements correct only in this abstraction for the relation from the present standpoint. Additional relations will enter which modify them significantly.’ This leads to his broader conceptualisation of totality and ‘the concrete’ as ‘the concentration of many determinations.’ A truly unique perspective on the social world is thereby developed. This is derived from rational abstractions (or concrete abstractions) that piece together the general and specific parts that make up the social whole. As Marx summarises, ‘The conclusion we reach is not that production, distribution, exchange and consumption are identical, but that they all form the members of a totality, distinctions within a unity.’
This method of forming concrete abstractions is a defining feature of Historical Materialism as an approach to the Social Sciences and contrasts with those theories that instead rely on idealistic forms of abstraction. In the opening pages, Marx chides the notion of an isolated individual favoured by liberal discourse in favour of ‘socially determined individual production’. To provide a further example of concrete abstractions, Marx asks us to consider the dynamics of intra-class conflict. His statement on this is worth quoting at length as it is revealing of his broader methodology:
‘To examine capital in general is not a mere abstraction. If I regard the total capital of e.g. a nation as distinct from total wage labour (or, as distinct from landed property), or if I regard capital as the general economic basis of a class as distinct from another class, then I regard it in general. Just as if I regard man e.g. as physiologically distinct from the animals. The real difference between profit and interest exists as the difference between a moneyed class of capitalists and an industrial class of capitalists. But in order that two such classes may come to confront one another, their double existence presupposes a divergence within the surplus value posited by capital.’
This is demonstrative of a wider set of themes within Grundrisse which relates to presuppositions, positing and political struggle.
Nowhere provides better evidence of Grundrisse as Marx’s means of working through a preliminary set of notions than when, almost at the end of the text (p881) he abruptly notes to himself, ‘This section to be brought forward. The first category in which bourgeois wealth presents itself is that of the commodity. The commodity itself appears as unity of two aspects.’ Low and behold, the ending of Grundrisse becomes the opening salvo of chapter 1 of Capital. Vol.1. Nevertheless, whilst I think Grundrisse can be used to help understand the evolution of Marx’s thought I would also argue that it serves as a refutation of an alleged ‘epistemological break’ from his earlier writing. Rather one can see references in this text to notions such as ‘species being’ and the theme of alienation is a constant refrain of this work. In this sense the text serves to complement and reinforce themes found in earlier work such as the 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (rather than transcend these ideas).
Precisely as the work serves as a means of Marx’s working out, not only can we trace certain arguments being rehearsed in their infancy, but moreover, Grundrisse also provides a richer account of a variety of issues as a result that are also treated more in depth in this text than in Capital. For me, the most important of these is the relationship of capital to non-capital. One of the strongest elements of Grundrisse is the focus on capital as a process of becoming (or what Marx at one stage refers to as ‘the moving contradiction’). In this sense, a key focus of Grundrisse is the analysis provided of pre-capitalist social relations, what conditions were necessary for the emergence of capitalism and how pre-capitalist societies become intertwined and transformed by capitalism. Grundrisse is essential reading therefore to understanding the ‘before’ of capital(ism) and the before of Capital.
Getting through the hard yards (of linen)
This is not to say that Grundrisse makes for an easy read. Far from it. There are mundane and repetitive sections and countless references to bushels of wheat, numbers of thalers and yards of linen etc that do make for challenging reading at times. As someone who lacks a mathematical brain, I can admit that I found myself at times confused by the algebraic equations and my eyes beginning to glaze over. However, in my view, it is worth wading through the treacle to find the nuggets of gold, which include fine-grained discussions of value theory, the presuppositions of wage labour, the role of struggle etc. I should also add, for the sake of balance, that there were those in the group more competently minded that myself, who would argue that it is essential to engage in the algebra.
Marx was also a man prone to invective (which some have alleged to be linked to his struggle with carbuncles on his posterior which he often detailed in his correspondence with Engels). There are few texts of his that do not contain acerbic attacks on enemies and with scores to be settled. In the German Ideology it is the young Hegelians (Bruno Bauer, Ludwig Feuerbach and Max Stirner) who are the subjects of his ire. In the Manifesto it is the utopian socialists. In the Grundrisse, David Ricardo and Pierre Joseph Proudhon act as the primary fall guys, but along the way a variety of verbal barrages are thrown at figures such as Adam Smith, J.S. Mill, Thomas Malthus and Claude-Frédéric Bastiat. Indeed it is a surprise that no one has yet made a compilation of the greatest insults of Marx.
Reading Grundrisse politically
Reading the Grundrisse for me reveals a number of important points politically speaking. Firstly there is of course the political economy embedded within the text itself (which at the same time serves as a major critique of dominant thought of Marx’s time). As mentioned above this includes theorising the unfolding logic of capital and the level of coercion required to put this system into practice. But this text, perhaps more than many others within Marx’s oeuvre, reveals the messiness and incomplete nature of capitalist transformations. Such transformations in social relations do not take place on a tabula rasa but rather come into struggle with existing social relations, modes of cultural being etc and thus evolve as contradictory formations. To quote Marx directly (emphasis added),
‘Bourgeois society is the most developed and the most complex historic organization of production. The categories which express its relation, the comprehension of its structure, thereby also allows insights into the structure and the relations of production of all the vanished social formations out of whose ruins and elements it built itself up, whose partly still unconquered remnants are carried along within it, whose mere nuances have developed explicit significance within it.’
As I have argued elsewhere, we can see the significance of these ‘unconquered remnants’ in contemporary modes of Indigenous struggles in a variety of countries in Latin America, where communal forms of property and territorialised forms of politics as social relations are both contested by the expansion of commodity frontiers but also asserted as a means of defence against this form of dispossession, and as a means with which to build an alternative political economy. Grundrisse is not merely a text of historical value but contains plenty of themes and ideas germane to understanding our present circumstances.
In a different political sense, reading this text has reminded me of the political importance of reading groups and the solidarity and camaraderie they provide. Attempting to read a text as vast, dense and complex alone would have been possible but challenging. However, the comradeship of a group with which to dialogue, debate and discuss made engaging with this text much more manageable. The power of the collective in getting through this on a weekly basis, of sharing ideas and providing a ground for testing out one’s own understanding is therefore of immense importance and I am highly grateful to participating members of the Past & Present group for this collective undertaking.
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