Karl Marx: Grundrisse

Grundrisse contains seven notebooks written by Marx between 1857-8. In these notebooks, Marx makes a relatively condensed first attempt at laying out the ideas that would later be more fully developed in the three volumes of Capital. His concepts and distinctions often seem to develop as he writes them down, allowing the reader a valuable glimpse into Marx’s intellect in action. Grundrisse hits all the main points of Capital—money, value, capital, the labor process, surplus-value, circulation, fixed capital, machinery, the rate of profit, etc. Having covered most of those ideas in my three previous posts, I will stick here to the more original aspects of Grundrisse. Hegel looms large over these notebooks, which resonate in many ways with Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts. As the footnotes reveal, Marx clearly had Hegel’s Logic on his mind, and the argument tends to slip into a dialectical mode that Marx has to make a self-conscious effort to combat. For the contemporary reader, however, these traces of Hegel result in some of the most original and thought provoking passages in the text. The introduction, the most finished part of Grundrisse, exhibits Marx’s debt and resistance to Hegel. Taking up the question of production, or, more specifically, social production, Marx brilliantly and seemingly effortlessly shows how production and consumption, which seem to be opposite poles, are identical, how production is consumption and consumption is production (production requires productive consumption, production is not finished until the moment of consumption, production determines the nature of consumption, etc.). Marx is perfectly aware that his mode of reasoning here resembles his idealist opponents', writing, “Thereupon, nothing simpler for a Hegelian than to posit production and consumption are identical.” Nonetheless, as he adds exchange and distribution into the equation, he only slightly lessens the argument’s Hegelian tendencies. “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. Production predominates not only over itself . . . but over the other moments as well. . . . A definite production thus determines a definite consumption, distribution and exchange as well as definite relations between these different moments.” In the middle of the “Chapter on Money,” the first of the text’s two long sections, Marx again slips into dialectical mode: “[I]t is an inherent property of money to fulfill its purposes by simultaneously negating them; to achieve independence from commodities; to be a means which becomes an end; to realize the exchange value of commodities by separating them from it; to facilitate exchange by splitting it; to overcome the difficulties of the direct exchange of commodities by generalizing them; to make exchange independent of the producers in the same measure as the producers become dependent on exchange.” But Marx then catches himself and leaves a note: “It will be necessary later . . . to correct the idealist manner of the presentation, which makes it seem as if it were merely a matter of conceptual determinations of the dialectic of these concepts.” In the much longer “Chapter on Capital,” the Hegelian tendencies lead to some strikingly unique formulations on the antithesis of labor and capital that Negri and others have made much of. Marx claims that commodities, as exchange values, one form of capital, “are objectified labor. The only thing distinct from objectified labor is non-objectified labor, labor which is still objectifying itself, labor as subjectivity. . . . If it is to be present in time, alive, then it can be present only as the living subject, in which it exists as capacity, as possibility, hence as worker.” He goes on, “Not-objectified labor, not-value, conceived positively, or as a negativity in relation to itself, is the not-objectified, hence non-objective, i.e. subjective existence of labor itself. Labor not as an object, but as activity; not as itself value, but as the living source of value.” Capitalist production brings together the objective and subjective, the objectified and the non-objectified. In fact, capital’s incorporation of subjective living labor brings to life capital’s lifeless objectivity. To use a theological metaphor: “living labor makes instrument and material in the production process into the body of its soul and thereby resurrects them from the dead.” “Through the exchange with the worker, capital has appropriated labor itself; labor has become one of its moments, which now acts as a fructifying vitality upon its merely existent and hence dead objectivity.” Capital only momentarily touches on this idea, developed here with rhetorical flourishes, instead tending to analyze the relation of the living and the (un)dead in capitalism in the more economistic terms of variable and constant capital. Much later, in the famous section on machinery, Marx claims that there has apparently been a historical reversal in the relation of (living) labor to (dead) capital with the creation of automatic systems of machinery. In the case of such machines, “The production process has ceased to be a labor process in the sense of a process dominated by labor as its governing unity. Labor appears, rather, merely as a conscious organ, scattered among the individual living workers at numerous points of the mechanical system; subsumed under the total process of the machinery itself, as itself only a link of the system, whose unity exists not in the living workers, but rather in the living (active) machinery, which confronts his individual, insignificant doings as a mighty organism. In machinery, objectified labor confronts living labor within the labor process itself as the power which rules it.” Such machines not only seem to have a life of their own, which now dominates the life of the worker, but also exhibit a productive power that makes the individual worker’s labor power seem insignificant. Although this productive power appears as an attribute of the machines, or fixed capital, it actually has been appropriated from the “general productive power” created by the growth of the “general productive forces of the social brain.” “The development of fixed capital [i.e., machines] indicates to what degree general social knowledge has become a direct force of production, and to what degree, hence, the conditions of the process of social life itself have come under the control of the general intellect and been transformed in accordance with it.” As Paolo Virno has noted, this leads Marx to a rather un-Marxist conclusion. Embodying the productive power of the general intellect, automatic systems of machinery make the appropriation of surplus-value from the worker no longer important for the generation of “general wealth.” They undermine the law of value and therefore contradict the capitalist mode of production. “As soon as labor in the direct form has ceased to be the great well-spring of wealth, labor time ceases and must cease to be its measure, and hence exchange value must cease to be the measure of use value. The surplus labor of the mass has ceased to be the condition for the development of general wealth, just as the non-labor of the few, for the development of the general powers of the human head. With that, production based on exchange value breaks down, and the direct, material production process is stripped of the form of penury and antithesis.”