Grundrisse: Foundations of the critique of political economy 0394720016, 9780394720012 [PDF]

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Foreword by Martin Nicolaus Note on the Translation GRUNDRISSE

FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION Translation and Foreword copyright © Martin Nicolaus, 1 973 Notes copyright © Ben Fowkes, 1973 All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in the United States by Random House, Inc., in 1 97 3 , and in England b y Penguin Books Ltd., in 1 973 . Originally published in Germany as Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Okonomie (Rohentwurf) in 1939. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Marx, Karl, 1 8 1 8-1883. Grundrisse. (The Marx library ) Translation of Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Okonomie. 1. Marxian economics. I. Title. II. Title: Foundations of the critique of political economy. 3 3 5 .4 73-1 6340 [HB97.5.M3 3 1 3 1 973b] ISBN 0-394-72001-6 Manufactured in the United States of America

Analytical Contents List Introduction

81

The Chapter on Money The Chapter on Capital Bastiat and Carey

883

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65

69 115

239

Note on the Previo s Editions of the Works of Marx and Engels 894

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Chronology of the Works of Marx and Engels 895

Foreword

This is a series of seven notebooks rough-drafted by Marx, chiefly for purposes of self:cIari:lfcation, during the winter .of 1 857-8. The manuscript became lost in circumstances still unknown and was first effectively published, in the German original, in 1953.1 Among the many of Marx's works which first appeared in print in the twentieth century, the Grundrisse represents unquestionably ce the most significant new development, comparable in i only to the Theories of Surplus Value and the Economic-Philo­ sophical Manuscripts of 1844 ('Paris Manuscripts'). Marx con­ sidered these workbooks to contain the first scientific elaboration of the theoretical foundations of communism. Besides their great biographical and historical value, they add much new material, and stand as the only outline of Marx's full political-economic project. The manuscripts display the key elements in Marx's development and overthrow of the Hegelian philosophy. They cast a fresh light on the inner logic of Capital, and are a sourcebook of inestimable value for the study oCMarx's method of inquiry. The Grundrisse challenges and puts to the test every serious interpretation of Marx yet conceived.

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1. A limited edition was published by Foreign Language Publishers in Moscow in two volumes, 1939 and 1941 respectively, under the editorship of the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute, Moscow. The first volume contained the Introduction and the seven notebooks (hereafter M E L I) translated here. The second added fragments from Marx's 1851 notebooks of excerpts from Ricardo, the fragment 'Bastiat and Carey' (also included in this translation), and miscellaneous related material ; also extensive annotations and sources. A photo-offset reprint of the two volumes bound in one, minus illustrations and facsimiles, was issued by Dietz Verlag, Berlin (E.), in 1953, and is the basis of the present translation. It is referred to hereafter as Grundrisse (MELI). Rosdolsky states that only three or four copies of the 1939-41 edition ever reached 'the western world '. (R. Rosdolsky, Zur Entstehungsgeschichte des Marxschen Kapital. Der Rohentwurf des Kapital, 1857-8, 2 vols., Frankfurt and Vienna, 1968, p. 7n.)

8 Foreword 1

In Marx's life, the Gnmdrisse stands midway between the Mani­ festo of the Communist Party (1848) and the pUblication of the first volume of Capital in 1 867. It was the onset of the economic crisis of 1 857 which stimulated Marx to s�d�e

eCoiiOnici studies of a decade and a half, but this was only the trigger. The force originated in the revolutions of 1 848-50, or more precisely in the defeat of these revolutions. In a series of insurrections and civil wars in virtually every nation-state, kingdom and principality of continental Europe, the 'spectre' of communism, to which the Manifesto gave speech, made its first appearance as a cohesive body on the political stage, was everywhere bloodily crushed, and became a ghostly presence again, bottled up in fragile little magazines edited and read by refugees in foreign-speaking ghettoes of London and New York. As the clearest and most determined voices of the 'left wing' of the democratic-radical forces, and as leading spokesmen of the most advanced workers' organization, the League of Communists, Marx and Engels were notorious to the governments of Prussia, France and Belgium. Officially expelled and banished, with arrest warrants out for them, Marx and Engels moved to London and, for the first couple of years, like the whole German exile com­ munity, kept their coats on, awaiting the break that would signal a new revolution. As the forces of reaction began to settle in for a long reign, however, it was the exiles who broke first. After the defeat of the workers' insurrection in Paris, in July 1850 Marx and Engels a,9"'yanced_the thesis that revolution hadbeco� impossible in t'heimmediately fo:teseeabl�e, thiirara�d not be counted on, and that the tasks of the League of Com­ munists must be reset accordingly to give first priority to the work of education, study and development of revolutionary theory. It fell like cold water on the flames of exile fantasy. Although Marx and Engels won the League's London central committee over to their position by a slim majority - and thus' remained its de jure London representatives - the great majority of the exiles stood against them, even the workers. 'I want at most twelve people in our circle, as few as possible,' Marx stated, and, under taunts of being counter-revolutionaries, anti-proletarians and impractical literati - taunts which they later repaid with compound interest Marx and Engels withdrew from organizational and practical

Foreword 9 political activity; Engels to Manchester to earn a living, Marx to the British Museum to begin his economic studies anew from the beginning.2 There they remained for more than a decade. Through­ out the period of reaction which. fastened itself upon Europe in the 1850s, the German public heard next. to nothing from Marx or Engels. The League dissolved in 1 852. It was Marx's second withdrawal from the political stage into /"" his study. But while in the first period (1843-7) Marx's �nC"enf's .-­ had been various - to learn to speak competeq,tly on "questions of material interest, to become familiar with the French theories of socialism and communism, to battle a 'storm of doubts' regarding the Hegelian philosophy - now a single foc,Us is apparent from the beginning;3 Marx's and Engels's summary and analysis of the character of the 1 848 revolutions,. andl1leCa:us-esof1rs-dereaf, bring out the nature of thts aIm. I�c]asSeS composed the revolutionary camp, the working class and t e�o�r-middle class or petite bourgeoisie. Owing to e po tical inexperienreof the'WOrking class and1lle illusions and limitations of its leaders, . the latter class had held the initiative and leadership of the re­ volutionary movement as a whole. This was the outstanding cause of defeat. ' In each of the provisional governtiiemS whlch were formed in all the rebellious regions,' wrote Engels, who had fought in the civil war in southern Germany, 'the majority was repre­ sentative of this part of the people, and its performance may there­ fore rightly be taken as the measure of what the German petty bourgeoisie is capable of - as we shall see, of nothing else. but to ruin every movement which confides itself into its hands.'4 It was a lesson paid for in blood. Worse was the political decay that. flourished after the working-class uprising was crushed by the army. A new politics arose, callingitself'Social-Democracy', in which'... the social demands of the proletariat had their revo­ lutionary point broken off and were given a democratic bent, the. democratic appeals of the petty bourgeoisie [were] stripped of their merely political form, their socialist point brought out'.s The weaker it became, the more did the entire small bourgeoisie take to calling itself'socialist' and 'red', and to stamping its every demand, every measure, speech and banality with this imprint, 2. Marx-Engels Werke (hereafter MEW) VITI, pp. 591, 598-9. 3. See Preface to the Critique of Political Economy. MEW XIII, p. 8. 4. Revolution and Counterrevolution in Germany, MEW VIII, p. 99. 5. Eighteenth Brumaire, MEW vm, p. 141.

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Foreword

whose nub and essence was that the workers '... should remain wage workers as before, only the democratic petty bourgeois wish better wages and a more secure· existence for them, and hope to achieve this by having the state supply jobs for part of them, and through welfare measures ; in short, they hope to bribe the workers with more or less hidden doles and, by making their condition momentarily bearable, to break their revolutionary power. ,6 The defeat of this influence, next time, and the elevation of the working class to the position of leadership of the revo­ lutionary camp as a whole, next time, was the overriding aim of Marx's studies. Marx chose as his principal theoretical antagonists in the Grundrisse two figures who stood as giants in their respective arenas. These were David Ricardo, the British political economist, and Pierre Joseph Proudhon, a Frenchman and self-proclaimed socialist:-Ricardo had been dead for some thirty-five years already, but his repute had risen despite the numerous errors his critics were able tq prove against him. He had been the able teacher and theoretical champion of the British mal!!ifacturers and industrial­ �ts d...reriiigTh ir troubled adolesceticel!Lt . .!ie fii"�deca

there is also at the same time the other side. Firstly, the course of , capi talist , development proceeds in cycles of ' prosperity' alter. nating with crises, during which latter there is ' suspension of labour' (unemployment), 'degradation of the labourer' and a most straitened exhaustion of his vital powers' (p. 750) (Marx's English ; that is, an absolute reduction, in real wages combined with speed-up). Furthermore, quite apart from, but modulated by, crises, there is, with the advance of capitalist accumulation, also:an--increase in the percentage of the working class a,&-a whole which exists as a surplus population, that is, surplus relative to the em­ ployment capital makes available. A portion of this surplus labour power is held to reserve for periods of capit�list accum4lation ; another portion is maintained out of state revenue as perpetual paupers; a fragment becomes lumpen (pp. 608-10). The whole of this surplus popUlation -' surplus relative to the needs of capitalist accumulation - grows larger as capi,tal approaches its inherent limits and barriers (p. 608). Finally, the periodic crises of overproduction repeat themselves 'on a higher scale', with increasing severity (p. 750). Thus, in sum, the long-run historic tendency _lQwards_ relative impQ�ent- is-accom. panied by the long-run historic tendency towards absolute im­ poverishment of an Increasing proportion Oftlie\VOrJGngcIsa_s ; and the experience of the remainder of the working class as a whole is one of periods of absolute improvement accompanied by growing insecurity, and broken by increasingly sharp crises during which absolute' impoverishment is the general fate. Thus the theory emerging from the Grundrisse - and later elaborated, in most points, in Capital - is not a single-element or single-trend formula. It corresponds much more accurately to the real experience of working-class life, in which the level of real wages at any one time makes up only one of the elements of the material condition as a whole. The theory worked out in the Grundrisse is also politically superior to the old one in that the rele�.1l.ce oflabo.1.!.r unions receives a theoretical foundation ; with the previo.!!�g��:e1.eJ!lentJil1��r absolute-impoverish��s, it is difficult to see what .use such organizations would be eco­ nomically. A similar theory, the so-called ' iron law of wages', was employed by Weitling and later Lassalle in Germany to at­ tempt to prevent workers from combining into unions on precisely these grounds ; in England, the Owenite 'Citizen' Weston based himself on such a theory of wages to argue to the same _

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Foreword

effect.44 Marx's overthrow of the Ricardian doctrine of profit in the Grundrisse, and the consequent ramifications for his theory of wages, are the key elements which allowed him later to defeat the WeitIing-Lassalle-Weston tendencies theoretically and organiz­ ationally within the First International. (The difference between surplus value and profit also leads Marx to an elementary formulation of exploitative trade relations (p. 872).) A brief word here only about the theory of alienation ; brief not because it lacks interest, quite the contrary - it is one of the most fascinating portions of the work - but because to comment at all would mean to comment fairly extensively. The earlier writings, notably Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (' Paris Manuscripts ') were less than altogether unambigu­ ous on the question whether ' alienation' was to be conceived as'a universal, eternal human condition, or whether it was rooted in the particular historical mode of capitalist production and hence transitory. This state of less than total consistency and clarity variously ' grounded' itself in, and expressed itself as, identification of the concept ' alienation' with the concept ' objectification'. Since objectificatIOn - maris, maKiilgthings - is inseparable-from any human society more advanced than gathering berries, the identification of the two terms could wilfully be interpreted as Marx's ' vision' of alienation forever. In the Grundrisse the issue is met squarely and altogether consistently. To quote only a brief excerpt from one passage among many : ' The hourgeois econo­ mists are so much cooped up within the notions belonging to a specific historic stage of social development that the necessity of the objectification of the powers of social labour appears to them as inseparable from their alienation vis-a-vis living labour' (p.832 ). Accordingly, alienation is conceived of as fundamentally a particular relation'of ro erty, namely involunta sale (surrender of ownership) to a hostile t er ; see for example p. 455. The term thus re-acquires much of the original juridical and economic meaning ; see for example Steuart's use of it, cited on p. 779. It follows that the historical phase in which alienation is the 44. A good account of these differen t trends, and of Marx's position towards them, may be found in W. Z. Foster, History 0/ the Three Internationals (International Publishers, 1955), pp. 44-72.

Foreword 5 1 predominant form of objectification must be judged not merely a lamentable disaster, but rather also at the same time a definite forward step, a progressive stage; which creates the presupposi­ tions of its abolition. This progressive side of the relation must be stressed against the romantic critique (see for example pp. 1 62, 5 1 5, 83 1). Finally, ins.!ead of ' species-b�ng', the Grundrisse speaks oftwo very broadly and generally defined types of human individuali!f ..... The first is the ' private individual', meaning the individual as private proprietor, both as owner of the means of production and as ' owner' of the commodity, labour power ; the individual within the exchange-value relation. The abolition of the, relations of private property is the abolition of the conditions which produce and reproduce this kind of individual. The place of this type is taken by the social individual, the individual of classless society, a personality typewhich is not less, but rathet more, developed as an individual because of its direct social nature. As opposed to the empty, impoverished, restricted individuality of capitalist society, the new human being displays an all-sided, full, rich development of needs and capacities, and is universal in character and de­ velopment (pp. 1 6 1-2, 1 72-3, 325, 487-8, 540-42, 6 1 1 , 652, 706, ( 708, 7 12, 749, 831-2). _

A word must also be said here, in passing, about the justly famous passages on machinery and automation (pp. 670-71 1), which have been so often quoted. Marx here points out, among other things (and, incidentally, this insight is already in , Hegel), that with the advance of the division of labour and the , growing scale of capitalist production, the role of the worker in the industrial process has a tendency to be transformed from active to passive, from master to cog, and even from participant to observer, as the system of machinery becomes more automatic. Db these passages imply, as some writers have thought, that manual, industrial work, and hence t�1.ass-W.hich does it, will therefore, under capitalism, dlsappear, to be replaced; perhaps, by a ' new vanguard' or engineers and technicians ?45 Such a reading of these passages would be altogether false. It ' would ignore Marx's unambiguous statements, in many other passages, that there are counter-tendencies which prevent mechanization 45. This, for example, is the misinterpretation projected into the by C. Oglesby, ed., New Le/t Reader (New York, 1969), p. 84.

Grundrisse

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52 Foreword and automation from advancing beyond a certain limited point, .under capitalism ; such a counter-tendency, for example, is the decline in the rate of profit which results from increased invest­ ment in machinery relative to living labour. Even in the very same passage on machinery, Marx adds, significantly, that (under capitalism) ' the most developed machinery thus forces the worker to work longer than the savage does, or than he himself did with the simplest, crudest tools ' (pp. 708-9). Neither here nor anywhere else in Marx's work is there a prediction that manual industrial labour will be abolished in capitalist society ; indeed, the weight of Marx's argument carries in the contrary direction. One could go on. Marx's theory of the sphere of circulation, together with the theory of production, provides, implicitly, the basis for a theory of forms of the state, for example, roughly, the former as basis for-the shell of democracy, the latter the basis of capitalist dictatorship. Marx as much as states that a theory of state forms is implicit in the work, in a . letter to Kugelmann.46 But it would need to be developed. Since Marx's time the theory of value - law of value - has become a question of dispute in countries where a socialist revolution occurred. An enormous amount of material in the Grundrisse bears on this question. The famous 1859 Preface speaks of the contradiction between the forces of production and the relations of production. Relatively little is said in Capital about this question. The Grundrisse is one long extended commentary upon it ; inversely, the 1859 formu­ lation is a summary, in a word, of the Grundrisse. One could go on and on. The Grundrisse is like an anticipation, on paper, of the rich, all-sided individuality Marx was talking about. Each time one returns to it, one finds something new.

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Marx valued highly the material contained in his seven work­ books. As he said in his letter to Engels already quoted, he had ' some nice developments' indeed. His evaluation of the new theory of profit he had worked out - ' in every respect the most im­ portant law of modem political economy, and the most essential for 46. MEW XXX, p. 639.

Foreword 53 understanding the most difficult relations' (p. 748) forms a part of this judgement. In a letter to Lassalle, he terms it ' the result of fifteen years of research, thus of the best period of my life'. Even more strongly (Marx was sparing to the utmost with the adjective ' scientific'), in the same letter : ' . . . the firs1ScientificJJ