Jim.+Grundrisse+Intro

Grundrisse: Introduction

(1) Production in General

Marx is engaging with bourgeois political economists and others, more directly than he does in Capital: Smith, Ricardo, Proudhon. He seems to be using their theories, categories and modifying them. It gets confusing because it’s not always clear what is Marx and what is Ricardo, for example.

His basic argument here is that Ricardo et al posit a universal economic man, for all times and places. They typically start with Robinson Crusoe. He argues that you can find a common denominator for economic life, production in all times and places, but that the exercise is meaningless. All production takes place in a particular society. “Individuals produce in society”. He sees the bourgeois argument as ideology, making capitalist production seem natural and good, because it has always been that way.

Again, here is the term “civil society”. The German is probably “burgerliche Gesellschaft”, which could also be translated as bourgeois society. What does Marx mean by this? Economic society under capitalism?

(2) General relation between production, distribution, exchange and consumption

90: “...the economic notion that the spheres of distribution and of production are independent, autonomous neighbors.”

I’m glad I read the forward. This is Marx’s reinterpretation of Hegel’s dialectic. In this section he explores the dialectical relationship between each of these “moments’ of production, arguing that one cannot exist without the others, showing causality from different directions, co-dependence, each moment defining the other, unity without direct identity.

He goes step by step examining each relationship from the perspective of one “moment” and then from the other.

The relation between production and consumption. Marx explores the dialectic between the two, the co-dependence, co-production. But he criticizes those who see an immediate identity, like Say (of Say’s Law, from Capital).

He then speaks of distribution as mediating the relationship, but he seems to be getting at a lack of power in the bourgeois model. Say talks about society’s production without recognizing the division of society, classes.

Distribution and Production

Which comes first? It sounds like they both cause each other and neither comes first. Production leads to distribution (of surplus value). But relations of distribution precede production. Distribution of land, class relations precede production, are represented by production.

to ‘subsume’ to relations of production

97: production transforms natural conditions into historical conditions /Harvey, uneven geographical development

98: “A stock-jobbing nation, for example, cannot be pillaged in the same manner as a nation of cow-herds.”

People don’t live from pillage alone. The mode of production determines what kind of pillage.

<span style="font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Times; letter-spacing: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Exchange and Production

<span style="font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Times; letter-spacing: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Exchange is part of production.

<span style="font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Times; letter-spacing: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">99: “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.”

<span style="font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Times; letter-spacing: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">moments, organic whole, mutual causality

(3) The Method of Political Economy

<span style="font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Times; letter-spacing: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Again, the Forward is helpful. Here Marx is talking about where to start in an analysis of political economy, criticizing the bourgeois approach. Bourgeois political economists traditionally started with a complex whole like “a country” and worked their way toward an abstraction. So Country -> population -> class -> wage labor, capital -> prices -> value. But then they end up with “the thinnest abstractions”. Once they agree among themselves what the basic abstractions are, then they can work their way back to the complex whole. This is the “scientifically correct method.”

<span style="font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Times; letter-spacing: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">He addresses Hegel’s basic abstractions, which were idealist, “thought”, “being” and removed from the material world.

<span style="font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Times; letter-spacing: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">101: “The real subject retains its autonomous existence outside the head just as before...”

<span style="font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Times; letter-spacing: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">We can discuss the relation between thought, representation and the real world.

<span style="font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Times; letter-spacing: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Marx goes on to criticize the bourgeois political economists’ use of basic abstractions, because they remove them from their social context in particular social formations, modes of production.

<span style="font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Times; letter-spacing: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Money has existed long before capital, in antiquity. But it was not central to those societies the way it is in bourgeois society.

<span style="font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Times; letter-spacing: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Labor is an old category as well, but it only makes sense to talk about labor in a particular society, not for all times and all places.

<span style="font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Times; letter-spacing: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Marx uses the term “social formation” and has a couple of interesting paragraphs where he talks about remnants of past “structures and relations of production” which persist under capitalism, but are dominated and ordered by the dominant set of relations.

<span style="font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Times; letter-spacing: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">107: “Capital is the all-dominant economic power of bourgeois society. It must form the starting point as well as the finishing point.”

<span style="font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Times; letter-spacing: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Here he has arrived at his tentative starting point. I guess later he decides on a concrete form of capital: the commodity.

<span style="font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Times; letter-spacing: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">He talks about capital also as having existed in other societies. I guess it only becomes dominant/defining in “bourgeois society”.

<span style="font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Times; letter-spacing: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">108: an initial outline of the larger project

(4) Scattered notes to self that I didn’t get too much out of

<span style="font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Times; letter-spacing: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">110: Is the view of nature and of social relations on which the Greek imagination and hence greek [mythology] is based possible with self-acting mule spindles and railways and locomotives and electrical telegraphs?”

<span style="font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Times; letter-spacing: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">/The forces of production are the economic base, on which a superstructure of culture is based.