Matt.+Grundrisse+Intro


 * Marx, Karl. 1939. “Introduction.” In Grundrisse. London: Penguin Books.

Introduction (written in 1857) 1. Production, Consumption, Distribution, Exchange (Circulation)** //1.1. Production. Independent Individuals. Eighteenth-century Ideas//

Individuals producing in society is point of departure. Smith and Ricardo begin with isolated hunter and fisherman, thus belonging to the unimaginative conceits of the eighteenth-century Robinsonades, which in no way express merely a reaction against over-sophistication and a return to a misunderstood natural life, as cultural historians imagine” (83).

“The human being is in the most literal sense a political animal, not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society” (84).

Ethernalization of historic relations of production. Production and distribution in general. – Property “Whenever we speak of production, then, what is meant is always production at a definite stage of social development – production by social individuals. It might seem, therefore, that in order to talk about production at all we must either pursue the process of historic development through its different phases, or declare beforehand that we are dealing with a specific historic epoch such as e.g. modern bourgeois production, which is indeed our particular theme” (85).

“However, all ephochs of production have certain common traits, common characteristics. Production in general is an abstraction, but a rational abstraction in so far as it really brings out and fixes the common element and thus saves us repetition” (85). This common element is itself split into several determinations, with some belonging to several epochs, while others belong only to a few. But “no production will be thinkable without them.” - No production is possible without an instrument of production, even if it’s simply hands; - No production without stored-up, past labour;

In this introduction, particularly appealing to me were indications of Marx’s scientific or historical materialist method in development. For example, he cites Adam Smith, who suggests that production can be promoted to a greater or lesser degree in progressive or stagnant states of society. Marx notes that “while this is of value in his work as an insight, to elevate it to scientific significant would require investigations into the periodization of degrees of productivity in the development of individual peoples – an investigation which lies outside the prober boundaries of the theme...” (88).

What other indications of Marx’s method emerge in the introduction?

Ecomomists’ concern is to “present production – see e.g. Mill – as distinct from distribution etc., as encased in eternal natural laws independent of history, at which opportunity bourgeois relations are then quietly smuggled in as the inviolable natural laws on which society in the abstract is founded” (87).

This concern for the historical context of production is a reoccurring theme in the introduction, and serves as one of the novel insights developed by Marx. His other, perhaps novel, contribution is to view distribution, production, consumption and so on as fundamentally interrelated. Thus,

“Quite apart from this crude tearing-apart of production and distribution and of their real relationship, it must be apparent from the outset that, no matter how differently distribution may have been arranged in different stages of social development, it must be possible here also, just as with production, to single out common characteristics, and just as possible to confound or to extinguish all historic differences under general human laws” (87).

Here, we see both Marx’s desire to view production and distribution as fundamentally interconnected, and his desire to establish the general conditions of production and distribution in all historical epochs. Thus,

(1) “All production is appropriation of nature on the part of an individual within and through a specific form of society. In this sense it is a tautology to say that property (appropriation) is a precondition of production. But it is altogether ridiculous to leap from that to a specific form of property, e.g. private property. (Which further and equally presupposes an antithetical form, non-property ” (87).

This notion of an “antithetical form” to property (ie. “non-property”) is a clear result of Marx’s dialectical method. But what precisely is non-property? Is it common property? More importantly, why is this even important for Marx’s argument?

(2) “...every form of production creates its own legal relations, form of government, etc. [...] Bourgeois economists are aware that production can be carried on better under modern police than e.g. on the principle of might makes right. They forget only that this principle is also a legal relation, and that the right of the stronger prevails in their ‘constitutional republics’ as well, only in another form” (88).

“To summarize: There are characteristics which all stages of production have in common, and which are established as general ones by the mind; but the so-called general preconditions of all production are nothing more than these abstract moments with which no real historical stage of production can be grasped” (88).

2. The General Relation of Production to Distribution, Exchange, Consumption Before furthering analysis of production “it is necessary to focus on the various categories which the economists line up next to it” (88).

“The obvious, trite notion: in production the members of society appropriate (create, shape) the products of nature in accord with human needs; distribution determines the proportion in which the individual shares in the product; exchange delivers the particular products into wihch the individual desires to convert the portion which distirubtion has assigned to him; and finally, in consumption, the products become object of gratification, of individual appropriation. Production creates the objects which correspond to the given needs; distribution divides them up according to social laws; exchange further parcels out the already divided shares in accord with individual needs; and finally, in consumption, the product steps outside this social movement and becomes a direct object and servant of individual need, and satisfieds it in being consumed. Thus production appears as the point of departure, consumtion as the conclusion, distribution and exchange as the middle, which is however itself twofold, since distribution is determined by society and exchange by individuals” (89).

Here again we see Marx’s desire to collapse these conventional linear and isolated concepts of production, distribution, etc. and to instead regard them as deeply interconnected and contradictory “moments” in the circuit of capital accumulation.

Marx notes that in this linear model there is “admittedly a coherent, but a shallow one. Production is determined by general natural laws, distribution by social accident, and the latter may therefore promote production to a greater or lesser extent; exchange stands up between the two as formal social movement; and the concluding act, consumption, which is conceived not only as a terminal point but also as an end-in-itself, actually belongs outside economics except in so far as it react in turn upon the point of departure and initiates the whole process anew” (89).

But Marx also criticizes political economists who accuse others of “barbarically tearing apart things which belong together,” “as if the task were the dialectic balancing of concepts, and not the grasping of real relations!” (90, my italics).

This point seems a fundamental one to stress, as it emphasises Marx’s concern for “real” (ie. concrete) relations rather than ideal types that emerge in the Hegelian dialectic. We still, however, have no understanding of how Marx goes about distancing himself from those who merely go about with an idealistic “dialectic balancing of concepts.”

[Consumption and Production] “Production is also immediately consumption” (90). That is, “the individual not only develops his abilities in production, but also expends them, uses them up in the act of production...” (90). Similarly, “consumption of the means of production, which become worn out through use, and are partially (e.g. in combustion) dissolved into their elements again” (90).

“The act of production is therefore in all its moments also an act of consumption” (90).

This is, therefore, productive consumption (i.e. consuming the means of production in order to produce).

Conversely, consumption is also immediately production. For example, eating food is a process of consumption, but it is necessary for humans to (re)produce their own body. This is consumptive production. Marx states that, to economists, this form of consumptive production is secondary and essentially different from “production proper” (91).

There is also a vital “mediating movement” between production and consumption. This is a rather complex argument which he elaborates on p. 91. To cite one example of his argument, “a garment becomes a real garment only in the act of being worn; a house where no one lives is in fact not a real house; thus the product, unlike a mere natural object, proves itself to be, becomes, a product only through consumption” (91). The important thing here is to note the process of becoming.

“No production without a need. But consumption reproduces the need” (92).

Production: (1) “furnishes the material and the object for consumption;” (2) “But the object is not the only thing which production creates for consumption. Production also gives consumption its specificist, its character, its finish.” That is to say, production creates a specific object which must be consumed in a specific manner; (3) “Production not only supplies a material for the need, ubt it also supplies a need for the material” (92).

“Thus production produces consumption (1) by creating the material for it; (2) by determining the manner of consumption; and (3) by creating the products, initially posed by it as objects, in the form of a need felt by the consumer” (92). “...one appears as a means for the other, is mediated by the other: this is expressed as their mutual dependence; a movement which relates them to one another, makes them appear indispensable to one another, but still leaves them external to each other” (93).

“...production produces consumption by creating the specific manner of consumption and, further, by creating the stimulus of consumption, the ability to consume, as a need. This last identity, as determined under (3), is frequently cited in economics in the relation of demand and supply, of objects and needs, of socially created and natural needs. “Thereupon, nothing simpler for a Hegelian than to posit production and consumption as identical. And this has been done not only by socialist belletrists but by prosaic economists themselves, e.g. Say; in the form that when one looks at an entire people, its production is consumption. Or, indeed, at humanity in the abstract. Storch demonstrated Say’s error, namely, that e.g. a people does not consume its entire product, but also creates means of production, etc., fixed capital, etc.” (93-94).

“Consumption as urgency, as need, is itself an intrinsic moment of productive activity. But the latter is the point of departure for realization and hence also its predominant moment; it is the act through which the whole process again runs its course” (94).

Does distribution stand outside this process of production as an autonomous sphere?

(b1) Marx here looks at Ricardo’s conception of distribution. Economists like Ricardo have defined distribution “as the exclusive object of economics, because they instinctively conceived the forms of distribution as the most specific expression into which the agents of production of a given society are cast” (96). Marx goes about inverting this view.
 * Distribution and production**

“As regards whole societies, distribution seems to precede production and to determine it in yet another respect, almost as if it were a pre-economic fact. A conquering people divides the land among the conquerors, thus imposes a certain distribution and form of property in land, and thus determines production. [Gives other examples.] In all these cases, and they are all historical, it seems that distribution is not structured and determined by production, but rather the opposite, production by distribution” (96).

“In the shallowest conception, distribution appears as the distribution of products, and hence as further removed from and quasi-independent of production. But before distribution can be the distribution of products, it is: (1) the distribution of the instruments of production, and (2), which is a further specification of the same relation, the distribution of the members of the society among the different kinds of production” (96).

“This again shows the ineptitude of those economists who portray production as an eternal truth while banishing history to the realm of distribution” (97).

Exchange and production “Circulation itself [is] merely a specific moment of exchange, or [it is] also exchange regarded in its totality” (98).
 * (c1) Exchange, Finally, and Circulation**

“...the so-called exchange between dealers and dealers is by its very organization entirely determined by production, as well as being itself a producing activity. Exchange appears as independed of and indifferent to production only in the final phase where the product is exchanged directly for consumption. But (1) there is no exchange without division of labour, whether the latter is spontaneous, natural, or already a product of historic development; (2) private exchange presupposes private production; (3) the intensity of exchange, as well as its extension and its manner, are determined by the development and structure of production” (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” (99).

“Production predominates not only over itself, in the antithetical definition of production, but over the other moments as well. The process always returns to production to begin anew” (99). I’m not quite sure what this means.

**(3) The method of political economy** Marx notes that many begin their analysis of a country by looking at its population.

“Thus, if I were to begin with the population, this would be a chaotic conception of the whole, and I would then, by means of further determination, move analytically towards ever more simple concepts, from the imagines concrete towards ever thinner abstractions until I had arrived at the simplest determinations. From there the journey would have to be retraced until I had finally arrived at the population again, but this time not as the chaotic conception of a whole, but as a rich totality of many determinations and relations. The former is the path historically followed by economics at the time of its origins. The economists of the seventeenth century, e.g., always begin with the living whole, with population, nation, state, several states, etc.; but they always conclude by discovering through analysis a small number of determinant, abstract, general relations such as division of labour, money, value, etc.” (100).

The above quote offers rich insight into Marx’s method. In Capital, he does, in many respects, follow this method of moving from the abstract to the concrete, but he then reorders his mode of thought to begin with the concrete (commodity) and move to the abstract (capital). In this respect, he inverts the traditional mode of analysis:

“As soon as these individual moments had been more or less firmly establish and abstracted, there began the economic systems, which ascended from the simple relations, such as labour, division of labour, need, exchange value, to the level of the state, exchange between nations and the world market. The latter is obviously the scientifically correct method” (101). This is also the method Marx adopts in Capital (Vol. 1).

“The concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse. It appears in the process of thinking, therefore, as a process of concentration, as a result, not as a point of departure, even though it is the point of departure in reality and hence also the point of departure for observation and conception” (101).

This is a very clear insight into why Marx begins his analysis with the commodity, which is a “concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse.”

I don’t understand this:

“Along the first path the full conception was evaporated to yield an abstract determination; along the second, the abstract determinations lead towards a reproduction of the concrete way of thought. In this way Hegel fell into the illusion of conceiving the real as the product of thought concentrating itself, probing its own depths, and unfolding itself out of itself, by itself, whereas the method of rising from the abstract to the concrete is only the way in which thought appropriates the concrete, reproduces it as the concrete in mind” (101). Huh?