Jim.+Grundrisse+Forward

Grundrisse Foreword by Martin Nicolaus

Seven notebooks written in the Winter of 1857-58, six months.

Marx and Engels participated in the revolutions of 1848. After the bloody defeat of those revolutions throughout Europe, they concluded that revolution was not imminent and that more theoretical work needed to be done.

Grundrisse is a response to Ricardo, Proudhon and Hegel.

11: Marx: “Never has anyone written about money in general amidst such total lack of money in particular.”

Ricardo had a labor theory of value, but didn’t resolve the question of surplus value. Why wasn’t labor paid for the value of what it produced?

Proudhon: most famous socialist of the time, but really seeking to reform capitalism

Chapters: Introduction, Money, Capital, “Bastiat and Carey. Money and Capital are the core chapters. The introduction doesn’t quite fit.

16: “The determination of value is the major question to which the owrk as a whole addresses itself.”

The world Marx portrays is not based on any historical period, but most resembles early capitalism. It is a mental construct meant to hold certain aspects constant.

labor vs labor power: Marx first makes the distinction in Grundrisse

24: “...the aim of this work was to prepare, to educate the next generation of leaders of the working class in the objective preconditions, possibility and necessity of the historic task.”

Marx didn’t have a clear title for Grundrisse. Sometimes he called it “Critique of the economic categories.” Grundrisse was a title chosen by the Marx Engels Lenin Institute in Moscow for the first 1939 edition. For Marx was a rough draft. “groundplan” as in of a building. Marx is inconsistent with his use of words and with his argument, throughout the text.

Marx read Hegel’s Logic while he was writing Grundrisse. He owes much to Hegel, but develops/changes Hegel’s dialectic, to make it materialist rather than idealist.

27: “...Hegel drew the false conclusion that only the logical concepts worked up by the mind have any reality.”

<span style="font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Times; letter-spacing: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Dialects goes back to ancient Greek philosophers. “dia” split in two. “logos” reason. Concept (“Begriff”) meant to grasp something with the mind, but that also meant to hold it still. How to theorize motion, change, process.

<span style="font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Times; letter-spacing: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">29: “Everything that has a fixed form, ushc as the product etc., appears as merely a moment, a vanishing moment, in this movement.”

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

<span style="font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Times; letter-spacing: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">M - C - M’, each is a different state of capital, a different moment in a process

<span style="font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Times; letter-spacing: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">30: “This surface of calm over unceasing restlessness Hegel called Dasein, or presence; and when the senses are brought into the relation, it becomes the appearance of things. Hegel wittily defined this presence as ‘having the form of the one-sided, immediate unity’ of the opposites beneath it’s surface.”

<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 market is an example. It is the surface world of capitalism, where buyer and seller form a unity. But below the surface is contradiction, process.

<span style="font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Times; letter-spacing: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">32-33: “...before Capital found its way into print Marx discarded most of this [Hegel’s] lexicon as baggage which had served for its journey but outlasted its day. The usefulness of Hegel lay in providing buide-lines for what to do in order to grasp a moving, developing totality with the mind.”

<span style="font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Times; letter-spacing: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">“This method, whose essence is to grasp wholes as contradictions, is the greatest of the lessons Marx learned from Hegel.”

<span style="font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Times; letter-spacing: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">34: “...standing Hegel on his feet again.”

<span style="font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Times; letter-spacing: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Grounding Hegel in the material world, rather than starting from an ideal Mind.

<span style="font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Times; letter-spacing: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">“”... stripping off the mystical shell fromt he rational core.”

<span style="font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Times; letter-spacing: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Where to start in the presentation of the argument? Hegel starts with “being”. Marx writes at the end of Grundrisse that “value” is the right starting place and writes, “The first category in which bourgeois wealth presents itself is that of 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;">38: “Its is a beginning which is at once concrete, material, almost tangible, as well as historically specific (to capitalist production); and it contains within it (is the unity of) a key antithesis (use value v. exchange value) whose development involves all the other contradictions of this mode 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;">immediacy of identities

<span style="font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Times; letter-spacing: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">39: “Is the unity of production and consumption (realization) an immediate one?”

<span style="font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Times; letter-spacing: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">process, conditions

<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 explicitly attacks the notion that ‘production is immediately identical with consumption...”

<span style="font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Times; letter-spacing: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">40: “This is the materialist formulation of the identity of opposites, which denies the immediacy and absoluteness, the inevitability of this identity, and affirms in its place that this identity is a process taking place in space an dime, requiring a materiel means, inherently limited and conditional in nature.”

<span style="font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Times; letter-spacing: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">41: “For Marx, the identity of opposites is conditional; but their non-identity, their struggle, antagonism and break-up are inevitabilities. Just the opposite in Hegel. It is the difference between a conciliatory, harmonizing ‘dialectic’ (ultimately no dialectic at all), and a revolutionary, subversive 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;">Labor theory of value, Marx v. Ricardo et. al.

<span style="font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Times; letter-spacing: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">46: “...Marx turned the old theory into its opposite; from a legitimation of bourgeois rule into the theory of communist parties explaining how the capitalist class grows wealthy form the workers’ labor, and showing how this system must lead to ruin; and leading the struggles to overthrow it.”

<span style="font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Times; letter-spacing: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">A more nuanced understanding of the impoverishment of workers under capitalism, reserve army of the unemployed. Are workers paid above, at or below subsistence? Relevance of labor unions. Surplus wages.

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

<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 planned six books, under the collective title, Critique of Political Economy

I. Capital A. capital in general 1. value 2. money 3. capital B. competition C. credit D. share capital II. Landed Property III. Wage Labor IV. The State V. International Trade VI. World Trade

<span style="font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Times; letter-spacing: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Grundrisse was the outline of the whole work.

<span style="font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Times; letter-spacing: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Grundrisse is mostly this “capital in general” section, with “value” and “money” combined as “money”. Marx reworks all this material repeatedly and ends up with 3 volumes of Capital plus v.4 Theories of Surplus Value. Competition, credit and share capital end up as chapters in Capital. Some of the other themes were picked up in other publications.

<span style="font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Times; letter-spacing: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Grundrisse v. Capital: In Grundrisse Marx’s thought/working process and method are very visible. In Capital the argument is the same, except more refined and presented differently. Grundrisse is more revolutionary. Capital is toned down politically.