Matt.+Grundrisse+Forward


 * Nicolaus, Martin. 1993. “Forward.” In Grundrisse. London: Penguin Books.**

Seven notebooks drafted by Marx for the purpose of self-clarification. Stands midway between the Manifesto and Capital

“Marx considered these workbooks to contain the first scientific elaboration of the theoretical foundations of communism” (8).

The manuscripts contain key elements on Marx’s development and overthrow of Hegelian philosophy (8). How does Marx's philosophy differ from Hegel's?

After defeat of workers’ insurrection in Paris in 1850, Marx and Engels advanced thesis that revolution had become impossible in the immediately foreseeable future, thus the League of Communists should give first priority to work of education, study and development of revolutionary theory (8).
 * I**

Marx and Engels’s summary of the 1848 revolutions were summed up as follows: two major classes were revolutionary camp were working class and lower-middle class. Political inexperience of former required reliance on later, and this caused defeat. A new politics arose calling itself “Social Democracy,” in which “the social demands of the proletariat had their revolutionary point broken off and were given a democratic bent...” (9, quoting Engels). Welfare, more secure existence, to break their revolutionary power. Social democrats would be defeated next time, with elevation of working class to the position of leadership of the revolutionary camp.

Marx positioned Grundrisse against Ricardo, British political economist, and Proudhon, the French socialist (10).

**II** Money and capital are distinct entities requiring separate treatment. It becomes apparent to Marx that these two categories play role of arch-antagonists. Money represents an entire system of social relationships, rules laws, politics and culture to which ‘capital’ has opposite system of laws, social relations etc. Antithetical relation to the point that “capitalist economy as a whole may be seen to be both impelled onwards and undermined by the inner tensions between these, its joint constituent forces” (14).


 * - Distinction between price and value? (see notes on Money, pt 2).**

Marx began his analysis of money with a critique of a leading French radical, Darimon. The drain of gold from France was producing a scarcity of ‘money’ domestically, causing interest rates to go up and effectively crippling industry. Darimon suggested the banks supply credit as demanded, bringing interest rates to zero. This is the content of the Proudhonist slogan ‘Free Credit’ (14).

Marx agrees with labour-money proponents that value of any commodity is determined by labour time it cost to produce, but some forgot that this was true only on the average (p. 137) and not, necessarily, and only rarely, in the particular (15).

In taking a ‘detour’ to expose this labour-money argument, Marx’s detour “becomes the main road” as the determination of value becomes the major question to which the work as a whole addresses itself (16).

- Fixed v. circulating capital?**
 * - Constant v. variable capital?

Marx does not ‘discover’ any new functions of money. His contribution is “to uncover the social, political, legal and other presuppositions of the stock definitions of money carried in political economy texts, that is, to treat value and money as social relations; it is, secondly, to treat the different functions of money in interconnection, exposing the contradictions between them and within them; and, finally, to treat this set of social relations in historical perspective, as having hand an origin and implying an end” (17). NOTE: That was certainly revelatory at the time, but these particular contributions do not hint toward any systemic appraisal of the conditions of capital accumulation, nor do they point toward any revolutionary goals.

Relations among individuals in sphere of circulation are those of liberty and equality. “Equality, because the exchange of commodities is based, on the average, on the law of equivalence; the products exchanged are the embodiment of equal amounts of labour time. Liberty, because the partners in exchange presume and recognize each other as proprietors, and none takes from the other by force. Entry and exit into exchange are freely chosen” (17-18).

But, “what is the reality of this sphere?”

“The sphere of circulation is, firstly, one side of capitalist production relations as a whole, in their developed form. It has a real existence as that part of the whole system within which equivalents are exchanged for equivalents, equals are equals, and persons are free proprietors. This is the parket-place, the realm – let us assume – of free competition. Here lies ‘the productive, real basis of all equality and freedom’ for individual proprietors. ‘As pure ideas,’ equality and liberty ‘are merely idealized expressions’ of the relations prevailing in the sphere of exchange. The legal, political, social relations which frame the liberty and equality of individual proprietors are merely a superstructure upon the market-place (p. 245)” (18). Class difference is extinguished beneath single common role of buyer and consumer.

But “where is the historical reference point of this sphere, when conceived as a whole society” (19)? They never truly existed as a whole, yet the Proudhonists seek to perfect this bourgeois liberty and equality more fully. Political economists generally erred fundamentally in assuming that individuals are set free in and by the marketplace. “It is not the individuals who are set free by free competition; it is, rather, capital which is set free” (p. 650).

Beneath surface appearances of this sphere, “entirely different processes go on, in which this apparent individual equality and liberty disappear” (p. 247). Thus Marx begins his strategic method of decent from the surface to the depths, from the exchange process in the money form, where everything is equal, to the world of capital, where opposite laws hold sway (20).

The question is no longer of what happens when commodities in general are being exchanged, but rather when labour itself is being exchanged. Two processes become visible here. First, ordinary exchange process taking place. Worker sells labour to capitalist, and capitalist gives him price in exchange—sum of money, wage. What buyer does with commodity is now for him/her to decide, as commodity is now a private affair of no economic relevance.

But the rule with labour is different in Marx’s eyes. The use value of the commodity ‘labour’ is precisely its ability to create exchange values, products to be sold.

The second process is the consumption of the labour purchased by the capitalist, and this is “qualitatively different from exchange, and only by misuse could it have been called any sort of exchange at all. It stands directly opposite exchange; essentially different category” (p. 275). This is the process of exploitation, or extraction of surplus product from worker’s labour time. This is the source of capitalist accumulation (20). NOTE: Brilliant!

This leads Marx to make an important distinction. Initially, commodity whic worker soled was called ‘labour.’ But this is inadequate as it is “not materialized in a product, does not exist apart from him [the worker] at all, thus exist not really, but only in potentiality, as his capacity’” and ought therefore be called “labour power” (p. 281, 82, 93, 359) (21).

If worker soled capitalist inanimate object, there could be no surplus value. Worker cannot become rich, and efforts at doing so and subsequent progress of civilization only magnify power of domination over labour. Capital as antithesis of worker, effectively increasing objective power standing over labour (21). NOTE: Dialectic at work here.

**- Profit vs. surplus value?**

“Hence the highest development of productive power together with the greatest expansion of existing wealth will coincide with depreciation of capital, degredation of the labourer, and a most straitened exhaustion of his vital powers. These contradictions lead to explosions, cataclysims, crises, in which by momentaneious suspension of labour and annihilation of a great portion of capital the latter is violently reduced to the point where it can go on...Yet, these regularly recurring catastrophes lead to their repletion on a higher scale, and finally to its violent overthrow” (p. 750) (23-24).

“These passages are, for us, a reminder that Marx’s theoretical labours were not concerned with economics for the sake of economics, philosophy for the sake of philosophy, or criticism for its own sake; but rather that 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” (24).


 * III**

[NOTES INCOMPLETE]