Karl Marx_ A Biography ( PDFDrive )

$5. Ibid., 247. On Marx's sources here, see B. Mazlish, 'The tragic Farce of Marx, Hegel and Engels', History and Theory (1972).

•;(,. MESW 1 252. 57. Ibid., 318.

^8. Ibid., 319.

59.Ibid., 324.

60.Ibid., 332.

61.Ibid.

62.Ibid., 333.

63.Ibid.

64.Ibid., 339.

65.Ibid., 340.

6 6 . MEW XXVII 5 0 2 .

67.Jenny Marx, Kurze Umrisse eines bewegten Lebens, Mohr und General, p. 212.

68.Marx to Weydemeyer, MEW XXVII 560.

69.W. Liebknecht, Karl Marx. Biographical Memoirs, pp. 106 ff.

70.Quoted in B. Nicolaievsky, 'Toward a History of the Communist League 1847-1852', International Review of Social History, 1 (1956) p. 249.

71.B. Nicolaievsky, op. cit., p. 251.

72.Ibid., pp. 251 ff.

73.On the background, see further, R. Livingstone, Introduction to K. Marx,

The Cologne Communist Trial (London and New York, 1971).

74.The Times, 13 October 1852, p. 6.

7 5 . MEW XXVIII 6 4 0 f f .

76.Varnhagen von Ense, Tagebucher, 411 quoted in K. Obermann, Zur Geschichte des Bundes der Kommunisten 1849-52, p. 125.

7 7 . MEW VIII 4 6 1 .

78. Ibid., 437.

79. F. Freiligrath, Briefwechsel mit Marx und Engels, ed. M. Hackel (Berlin, 1968)

81.Die kommunistischen Verschworungen der neunzehnten Jahrhunderts, ed. Wermuth and Stieber (Berlin, 1853) 1 276.

8 2 . MEW XXVII 1 6 9 .

83.Ibid., 184.

84.Ibid., 548.

8 5 . MEW XXVIII 4 7 8 .

86.See further, G. Becker, 'Der neue Arbeiter-Verein in London 1852', Zeitschrift fur Geisteswissenschaft (1966).

87.MEW xxvm 527.

88.Bangya, however, was not put off by the discovery of his activities: even in 1853 he was used by Kossuth to negotiate with the French Government. He

then went to Constantinople, became a Muslim and an officer in the Turkish army, was condemned to death for treason with the Russians, but was freed and returned to Constantinople. There he became press officer to the Grand Vizier Kiprisli Pascha and died in 1868 as a Turkish police lieutenant. The manuscript, entitled Heroes of the Exile, is translated in K. Marx, The Cologne Communist Trial, ed. R. Livingstone.

8 9 . MEW XXVII 1 1 0 0 .

90. Ibid.

91. Ibid., 101.

92.Ibid.

93.Ibid., 576.

94.MEW vni 575. Further on Willich, see L. Easton, 'August Willich, Marx and Left Hegelian Socialism', Etudes de Marxologie (1965).

95.MEW xxvin 30.

96.Ibid., 43.

97.Quoted in F. Mehring, Karl Marx, p. 242.

9 8 . MEW XXVII 3 7 7 .

99.Ibid., 184.

100.Ibid., 193.

101. Ibid., 195 f.

102.Ibid., 561.

103.Marx's feelings were not reciprocated by Harney, who towards the end of his life still considered Marx 'one of the most warm-hearted, genial and attractive of men'.

104. Engels to Marx, MEW xxxn 253.

1 0 5 . M E W XXVII 1 5 3 .

106.Ibid., 591.

107.MEW xxvm 523.

108.Ibid., 125.

120.Cf. M. Kovalevsky, 'Meetings with Marx', Reminiscences, p. 298; H. M. Hyndman, Record of an Adventurous Life (London, 1911) pp. 277 ff.

194.Ibid., 592.

195.Ibid., 226.

1 9 6 . MEW XXVII 2 9 6 .

197.Ibid., 314.

198.For the references of Marx's correspondence with Dana, see H. Draper, 'Marx, Engels and the New American Cyclopaedia', Etudes de Marxologie (1968).

199.The articles have been republished under Marx's name by Allen & Unwin as recendy as 1971. The back of the book has a quotation from a review

which reads: 'Excellent specimens of that marvellous gift of M a r x . . . of apprehending clearly the character, the significance and the necessary consequences of great historical events at a time when these events are actually in the course of taking place.' The author of the quotation is given as Engels.

2 0 0 . MEW, XXVIII 2 0 9 .

201. MEW xxvm 323.

J02. Ibid.

203.MEW xix 126.

204.C. Dana to Marx, MEW xiv 679.

205.See, in general, H. Christman, The American Journalism of Marx and Engels

(New York, 1966).

106.See K. Marx, Secret Diplomatic History of Eighteenth Century, ed. L. Hutchison (London, 1970).

J07. Marx to Lassalle, MEW xxx 547.

208.C. Dana to Marx, MEW xiv 679. See further K. Marx and F. Engels, The Russian Menace to Europe, ed. Blackstock and Hoselitz (London, 1953); K. Marx and F. Engels, Die Russische Kommune, ed. M. Rubel (Munich, 1972).

209.K. Marx, 'The Future of British Rule in India', MESW 1 352.

210.For Marx's views on this 'Asiatic' mode of production, see G. Lichtheim, 'Marx and the Asiatic Mode of Production', St Anthony's Papers (1963), and the literature there referred to.

211. See further, Karl Marx on Colonialism and Modernization, ed. S. Avineri (New York, 1968). The excellent edition, K. Marx and F. Engels, The Collected Writings in the New York Daily Tribune, ed. Ferguson and O'Neil (New York 1973), contains a wealth of detail on the publishing history.

S I X

The 'Economics'

You can believe me that seldom has a book been written under more difficult circumstances, and I could write a secret history that would uncover an infinite amount of worry, trouble and anxiety.

Jenny Marx to Kugelmann, Andreas, Briefe, p. 193

I . T H E ' G R U N D R I S S E ' A N D ' C R I T I Q U E O F P O L I T I C A L

E C O N O M Y '

In 1857 the economic crisis that Marx had so often predicted did in fact occur and moved him to a frantic attempt to bring his economic studies to some sort of conclusion. T h e first mention of this in his correspondence is in a letter to Engels of December 1857 where he says: 'I am working madly through the nights on a synthesis of my economic studies so that,

had overdone my night-time labours, which were accompanied on the one side only by a glass of lemonade but on the other by an immense amount of tobacco.'2

He was also composing an extremely detailed day-to-day diary on events during the crisis. In fact the 'synthesis' that Marx speaks of had already been begun in August 1857 with the composition of a General Introduction. This Introduction, some thirty pages in length, tentative in tone and incomplete, discussed the problem of method in the study of

because, as Marx said two years later, 'on closer reflection any anticipation of results still to be proved appears to me to be disturbing, and the reader who on the whole desires to follow me must be resolved to ascend from the particular to the general.3

In the first of its three sections - entitled 'Production in General' - Marx defined the subject of his inquiry as 'the socially-determined production of individuals'.4 He rejected the starting point of Smith, Ricardo

and Rousseau, who began with isolated individuals outside society: 'production by isolated individuals outside s o c i e t y . . . is as great an absurdity as the idea of the development of language without individuals living together and talking to one another'.5 Marx then pointed out that it was important to try to isolate the general factors common to all production in order not to ignore the essential differences between epochs. Modern economists - like J. S. Mill - were guilty of such ignorance when they tried to depict modern bourgeois relations of production as immutable laws of society. Marx cited two examples: thinkers such as Mill tended to jump from the tautology that there was no such thing as production without property to the presupposition that a particular form of property - private property - was basic; whereas history showed that it was common property that was basic. Secondly, there was a tendency to suppose that the legal system under which contemporary production took place was based on eternal principles without realising that 'every form of production creates its own legal relations'.6 Marx summed up his first section with the words: 'All the stages of production have certain characteristics in common which we generalise in thought; but the so-called general conditions of production are nothing but abstract conceptions which do not go to make up any real stage in the history of production.'7

T h e second section bore the title 'The General Relation of Production to Distribution, Exchange and Consumption'. Here Marx was anxious to refute the view that the four economic activities - production, distribution, exchange and consumption - could be treated in isolation from each other. He began by claiming that production was, in a sense, identical to consumption, in that one talked of productive consumption and consumptive production; that each was in fact a means of bringing the other about; and that each moulded the forms of existence of its counterpart. Marx similarly denied that distribution formed an independent sphere standing alongside, and outside, production. This view could not be maintained since 'distribution, as far as the individual is concerned, naturally appears as a law established by society determining his position in the sphere of production within which he produces, and thus antedating production'.8 External aggression or internal revolution also seemed, by their distribution of property, to antedate and determine production. Similarly with exchange, which seemed to Marx to be a constituent part of production. 'The result we arrive at', Marx concluded, 'is not that production, distribution, exchange and consumption are identical, but that they are all members of one entity, different aspects of one unit.'9

T h e third section, entitled 'The Method of Political Economy', is even more abstract, yet very important for understanding Marx's approach. He wished to establish that the correct method of discussing economics was

to start from simple theoretical concepts like value and labour and then to proceed from them to the more complex but observable entities such as population or classes. The reverse was the characteristic approach of the seventeenth century; but eighteenth-century thinkers had followed 'the method of advancing from the abstract to the concrete' - which was 'manifesdy the scientifically correct method'.10

Marx then took money and labour as examples of the simple, abstract concepts with which he wished to start his analysis. He claimed that both these only attained their full complexity in bourgeois society; and thus only someone thinking in the context of bourgeois society could hope fully to understand pre-capitalist economics, just as 'the anatomy of the human being is the key to the anatomy of the ape'.11 Marx continued: 'It would thus be impracticable and wrong to arrange the economic categories in the order in which they were the determining factors in the course of history. Their order of sequence is rather determined by the relations which they bear to one another in modern bourgeois society.'12 He then oudined in five sections the provisional plan for an extensive work on Economics, and concluded with a fascinating discussion of an apparent difficulty in the materialist approach to history: why was Greek art so much appreciated in the nineteenth century when the socio-economic background which produced it was so different? Marx produced no direct answer. The manuscript breaks off by simply posing the following question: 'Why should the childhood of human society, where it has obtained its most beautiful development, not exert an eternal charm as an age that will never return?'15

The plan of the proposed book was oudined at the end of the Introduction:

1.The general abstract characterisations that can more or less be applied to all types of society.

2.The categories that constitute the internal structure of bourgeois society and which serve as a basis for the fundamental classes. Capital, wage-labour, landed property. Their relationship to each other. Town and country. The three large social classes. The exchange between them. Circulation. Credit (private).

3.Synthesis of bourgeois society in the shape of the state. The state considered in itself. 'Unproductive' classes. Taxes. Public debt. Public credit. Population. Colonies. Emigration.

4.The international relations of production. International division of labour. International exchange. Exports and imports. Exchange rates.

5.The world market and crises.14

The same plan, in a simpler form, was reiterated in the Preface (published in 1859) to his Critique of Political Economy. 'Capital, landed property, wage-labour; state, foreign trade, world market'.15

The surviving manuscripts (written in the six months from October 1857 to March 1858) have become known as the Grundrisse from the first word of their German title Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Oekonomie

('Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy').16 They do not cover at all equally the sections of the above table of contents. They are obviously for the most part a draft of the first section of the work. The whole is divided into two parts: the first on money, and the second, much longer, part on capital; the latter is divided into three sections on the production of capital, circulation and conversion of surplus-value into profit. However, these economic discussions are intertwined with wide-ranging digressions on such subjects as the individual and society, the nature of labour, the influence of automation on society, problems of increasing leisure and the abolition of the division of labour, the nature of alienation in the higher stages of capitalist society, the revolutionary nature of capitalism and its inherent universality, and so on. It is these digressions that give the Grundrisse its primary importance by showing that it is a rough draft for a work of enormous proportions; what Marx later presented to the world in his volume Capital covered only a fraction of the ground that had been marked out in the Grundrisse. Sections devoted to such topics as foreign trade and the world market show that Marx was led to sketch out to some extent the fundamental themes of the other five books of his 'Economics'. In Marx's own words: 'In the manuscript (which would make a thick book if printed) everything is topsy-turvy and there is much that is intended for later parts.'17

Like virtually all of Marx's major writings, the Grundrisse begins with a critique of someone else's ideas: he evidendy found it easier to work out his own views by attacking those of others. Thus the first few pages contain a critique of the reformist economists, Carey and Bastiat, brilliantly portrayed as respectively embodying the vices (and virtues) of the mid-nineteenth-century 'Yankees' and the disciples of Proudhon. After ten pages or so there was no further discussion of the theories of Carey and Bastiat - Marx commenting acidly: 'It is impossible to pursue this nonsense further.'18 Having sharpened his critical faculties by these attacks on minor theorists, he then proceeded to carve out his own path. The jumbled nature of these manuscript notes, the variety of subjects discussed and the tremendous compression of style - all make it difficult to give a satisfactory brief account of their contents and virtually impossible to paraphrase them. The Grundrisse is a vast uncharted terrain: as yet the

explorers have been few and even they have only penetrated the periphery. However, some things stand out at first glance.

Firstly, there is in both thought and style a continuity with the 1844 Manuscripts most noticeable in the influence of Hegel on both writings. The concepts of alienation, objectification, appropriation, man's dialectical relationship to nature and his generic or social nature all recur in the Grundrisse. Early in these 1858 manuscripts Marx offered the following comments on the economic ideas of his day, comments entirely reminiscent of his remarks on the 'reification' of money in 1844: 'The economists themselves say that men accord to the object (money) a trust that

possess a social property because individuals have alienated their own social relationships by embodying them in a thing.'19 Or later, and more generally:

But if capital appears as the product of labour, the product of labour also appears as capital - no more as a simple product, not as exchangeable goods, but as capital; objectified labour becomes mastery, has command over living labour. It appears equally to be the result of labour, that its product appears as alien property, an independent mode of existence opposed to living labour, an equally autonomous value; that the product of labour, objectified labour, has acquired its own soul from living labour and has established itself opposite living labour as an alien force. Considered from the standpoint of labour, labour thus appears to be active in the production process in such a way that it seems to reject its realisation in objective contradictions as alien reality, and that it puts itself in the position of an unsubstantial labour capacity endowed only with needs against this reality which is estranged from it and which belongs, not to it, but to others; that it establishes its own reality not as an entity of its own, but merely as an entity for others, and thus also as a mere entity of others, or other entity, against itself.20

In this respect, the most striking passage of the Grundrisse is the draft plan for Marx's projected 'Economics' which is couched in language that might have come straight out of Hegel's Logic.21

Yet, there is also a striking difference. In 1844 Marx had read some classical economists but had not yet integrated this knowledge into his critique of Hegel. As a result, the '1844 Manuscripts' (otherwise known as the 'Paris Manuscripts') fall into two separate halves as illustrated by the tide given them by their first editors: the 'Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts'. By 1857-58 Marx had assimilated both Ricardo and Hegel (there are, interestingly, no references to Feuerbach in the Grundrisse), and he was in a position to make his own synthesis. In Lassalle's words, he was 'a Hegel turned economist, a Ricardo turned socialist'.22 The