Karl Marx_ A Biography ( PDFDrive )

much richer content in terms of economic history means that the Grundrisse, while continuing the themes central to the '1844 Manuscripts', treats them in a much more sophisticated way than was possible before Marx had achieved a synthesis of his ideas on philosophy and economics. Thus to take the '1844 Manuscripts' as his central work - as many interpreters have done - is to exaggerate their significance.

As regards economics, the Grundrisse contains the first elaboration of Marx's mature theory. There are two key changes of emphasis. Firsdy, instead of analysing the market mechanisms of exchange (as he had done in 1844), he now started from a consideration of production. Secondly, he now said that what the worker sold is not his labour, but his labour-power. It was a combination of these two views that gave rise to the doctrine of surplus-value. For, according to Marx, surplus-value was not created by exchange but by the fact that the development of the means of production under capitalism enabled the capitalist to enjoy the use-value of the worker's labour-power and with it to make products that far exceeded the mere exchange-value of labour-power which amounted to no more than what was minimal for the worker's subsistence. In fact, virtually all the elements of Marx's economic theory were elaborated in the Grundrisse. Since, however, these elements were to be dealt with at greater length in Capital, the Grundrisse is more interesting for the discussions that were not taken up again in the completed fragments of his vast enterprise.

These discussions took place around the central theme of man's alienation in capitalist society and the possibilities of creating an unalienated - communist - society. What was new in Marx's picture of alienation in the Grundrisse was that it attempted to be firmly rooted in history. Capital, as well as being obviously an 'alienating' force, had fulfilled a very positive function. Within a short space of time it had developed the productive forces enormously, had replaced natural needs by ones historically created and had given birth to a world market. After the limitations of the past, capital was the turning point to untold riches in the future:

The universal nature of this production with its generality creates an estrangement of the individual from himself and others, but also for the first time the general and universal nature of his relationships and capacities. At early stages of development the single individual appears to be more complete, since he has not yet elaborated the wealth of his relationships, and has not established them as powers and autonomous social relationships, that are opposed to himself. It is as ridiculous to wish to return to that primitive abundance as it is to believe in the necessity of its complete depletion. The bourgeois view has never got beyond opposition to this romantic outlook and thus will be

accompanied by it, as a legitimate antithesis, right up to its blessed end.23

The ideas produced by capitalism were as transitory as capitalism itself: here Marx formulated his most succinct critique of 'classical' liberal principles. Pointing out that free competition was bound eventually to hamper the development of capitalism - however necessary it might have been at the outset, Marx alluded to

the absurdity of considering free competition as being the final development of human liberty.... The development of what free competition is, is the only rational answer to the deification of it by the middleclass prophets, or its bedevilment by the socialists. If it is said that, within the limits of free competition, individuals by following their pure self-interest realise their social or rather their general interest, this means merely that they exert pressure upon one another under the conditions of capitalist production and that collision between them can only again give rise to the conditions under which their interaction took place. Moreover, once the illusion that competition is the ostensible absolute form of free individuality disappears, this proves that the conditions of competition, i.e. production founded on capital, are already felt and thought of as a barrier, as indeed they already are and will increasingly become so. The assertion that free competition is the final form of the development of productive forces, and thus of human freedom, means only that the domination of the middle class is the end of the world's history - of course quite a pleasant thought for yesterday's parvenus!24

The key to the understanding of this ambivalent nature of capitalism - and the possibilities it contained for an unalienated society - was the notion of time. 'All economics', said Marx, 'can be reduced in the last analysis to the economics of time.'" The profits of capitalism were built on the creation of surplus work-time, yet on the other hand the wealth of capitalism emancipated man from manual labour and gave him increasing access to free time. Capital was itself a 'permanent revolution':

Pursuing this tendency, capital has pushed beyond national boundaries and prejudices, beyond deification of nature and the inherited, selfsufficient satisfaction of existing needs confined within well-defined bounds, and the reproduction of the traditional way of life.

It is destructive of all this, and permanendy revolutionary, tearing down all obstacles that impede the development of productive forces, the expansion of needs, the diversity of production and the exploitation and exchange of natural and intellectual forces.26

But in Marx's eyes, these very characteristics of capitalism entailed its dissolution. Its wealth was based on the introduction of machinery fol-

lowed by that of automation (Marx's foresight here is extraordinary); and this in turn led to an ever-growing contradiction between the decreasing role played by labour in the production of social wealth and the necessity for capital to appropriate surplus labour. Capital was thus both hugely creative and hugely wasteful:

On the one hand it calls into life all the forces of science and nature, as well as those of social co-operation and commerce, in order to create wealth which is relatively independent of the labour time utilised. On the other hand, it attempts to measure the vast social forces thus created in terms of labour time, and imprisons them within the narrow limits that are required in order to retain the value already created as value. Productive forces and social relationships - the two different sides of the development of social individuality - appear only as a means for capital, and are for it only a means to enable it to produce from its own cramped foundation. But in fact they are the material conditions that will shatter this foundation.27

Passages like this show clearly enough that what seem to be purely economic doctrines (such as the labour theory of value) are not economic doctrines in the sense that, say, Keynes or Schumpeter would understand them. Inevitably, then, to regard Marx as just one among several economists is somewhat to falsify and misunderstand his intentions. For, as Marx himself proclaimed as early as 1844, economics and ethics were inextricably linked. The Grundrisse shows that this is as true of his later writings as it is of the earlier work.

With the immense growth in the productive forces created by capitalism, there was, according to Marx, a danger that the forces guiding human development would be taken over entirely by machines to the exclusion of human beings: 'Science thus appears, in the machine, as something alien and exterior to the worker; and living labour is subsumed under objectified labour which acts independendy. The worker appears to be superfluous insofar as his action is not determined by the needs of capital.'28 In the age of automation, science itself could become the biggest factor making for alienation:

The worker's activity, limited to a mere abstraction, is determined and regulated on all sides by the movement of the machinery, not the other way round. The knowledge that obliges the inanimate parts of the machine, through their construction, to work appropriately as an automaton, does not exist in the consciousness of the worker, but acts through the machine upon him as an alien force, as the power of the machine itself.29

Yet this enormous expansion of the productive forces did not neces-

sarily bring with it the alienation of the individual: it afforded the opportunity for society to become composed of 'social' or 'universal' individuals - beings very similar to the 'all-round' individuals referred to in the '1844 Manuscripts'. This is how Marx describes the transition from individual to social production:

Production based on exchange value therefore falls apart, and the immediate material productive process finds itself stripped of its impoverished, antagonistic form. Individuals are then in a position to develop freely. It is no longer a question of reducing the necessary labour time of society to a minimum. The counterpart of this reduction is that all members of society can develop their artistic, scientific, etc., education, thanks to the free time now available to all. . ..

Bourgeois economists are so bogged down in their traditional ideas of the historical development of society in a single stage, that the necessity of the objectification of the social forces of labour seems to them inseparable from the necessity of its alienation in relation to living labour.30

It is noteworthy that here (as throughout the Grundrisse) there is no allusion to the agent of this transformation - namely, the revolutionary activity of the proletariat.

The 'universal' individual - a notion that Marx returns to almost ad nauseam in the Grundrisse - is at the centre of his vision of Utopia; the millennial strain is no less clear here than in the passage in the '1844 Manuscripts' describing communism as 'the solution to the riddle of history'. The universal tendency inherent in capital, said Marx, created

as a basis, a development of productive forces - of wealth in general - whose powers and tendencies are of a general nature, and at the same time a universal commerce, and thus world trade as a basis. The basis as the possibility of the universal development of individuals; the real development of individuals from this basis as the constant abolition of each limitation conceived of as a limitation and not as a sacred boundary. The universality of the individual not as thought or imagined, but as the universality of his real and ideal relationships. Man therefore becomes able to understand his own history as a process, and to conceive of nature (involving also practical control over it) as his own real body. The process of development is itself established and understood as a prerequisite. But it is necessary also and above all that full development of the productive forces should have become a condition of production, not that determined conditions of production should be set up as a boundary beyond which productive forces cannot develop.31

Marx very rarely discussed the form of the future communist society: in his own terms this was reasonable enough - for he would thereby have

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laid himself open to the charge of 'idealism', the spinning of ideas that had no foundation in reality. But certain passages in the Grundrisse give an even better idea than the well-known accounts in the Communist Manifesto and the Critique of the Gotha Programme of what lay at the heart of Marx's vision. One of the central factors was, of course, time - since the development of the 'universal' individual depended above all on the free time he had at his disposal. Time was of the essence in Marx's ideal of future society:

If we suppose communal production, the determination of time remains, of course, essential. The less time society requires in order to produce wheat, catde, etc., the more time it gains for other forms of production, material or intellectual. As with a single individual, the universality of its development, its enjoyment and its activity depends on saving time... ,32

Only by the extensive use of machinery was this free time possible. Whereas in the past machinery had been a factor hostile to the worker in the future its function could be radically altered:

No special sagacity is required in order to understand that, beginning with free labour or wage-labour for example, which arose after the abolition of slavery, machines can only develop in opposition to living labour, as a hostile power and alien property, i.e. they must, as capital, oppose the worker.

It is equally easy to see that machines do not cease to be agents of social production, once they become, for example, the property of associated workers. But in the first case, their means of distribution (the fact that they do not belong to the workers) is itself a condition of the means of production that is founded on wage-labour. In the second case, an altered means of distribution will derive from an altered new basis of production emerging from the historical process.33

Marx rejected Adam Smith's view of work as necessarily an imposition. Nor did he subscribe to Fourier's idea that work could become a sort of game. According to Marx, Smith's view was valid for the labour

which has not yet created the subjective and objective conditions (which it lost when it abandoned pastoral conditions) which make of it attractive labour and individual self-realisation. This does not mean that labour can be made merely a joke, or amusement, as Fourier naively expressed it in shop-girl terms. Really free labour, the composing of music for example, is at the same time damned serious and demands the greatest effort. The labour concerned with material production can only have this character if (1) it is of a social nature, (2) it has a scientific character and at the same time is general work, i.e. if it

becomes the activity of a subject controlling all the forces of nature in the production process.34

Marx envisaged a time when production would depend not on the amount of labour employed but on the general level of science and technology, when wealth would be measured by an increase in production quite disproportionate to the labour-time employed, and when 'man behaves as the supervisor and regulator of the process of production'. Then the true emancipation of mankind would take place:

In this re-orientation what appears as the mainstay of production and wealth is neither the immediate labour performed by the worker nor the time that he works - but the appropriation of his general productive force, his understanding of nature and the mastery of it as a special force; in a word, the development of the social individual.

The theft of others' labour-time upon which wealth depends today seems to be a miserable basis compared with the newly-developed foundation that has been created by heavy industry itself.

As soon as labour, in its direct form, has ceased to be the main source of wealth, then labour-time ceases, and must cease, to be its standard of measurement, and thus exchange-value must cease to be the measurement of use-value. The surplus labour of the masses has ceased to be a condition for the development of wealth in general; in the same way that the non-labour of the few has ceased to be a condition for the development of the powers of the human mind in general.35

These extracts obviously cannot give a full picture of the contents of the Grundrisse; but they do give a clear impression of Marx's thought at its richest. The nature of the vision that inspired Marx is at least adumbrated: communal production in which the quality of work determined its value; the disappearance of money along with that of exchange value; and an increase in free time affording opportunities for the universal development of the individual. The Grundrisse is important not only as a vital element for the understanding and interpretation of Marx's thought. The contemporary relevance of Marx's views on the ambivalent nature of technology is sufficiendy obvious.

Thus Marx's thought is best viewed as a continuing meditation on central themes first explored in 1844 ~ this process culminating in his writings of 1857-58. The continuity between the Manuscripts and the Grundrisse is evident. In correspondence Marx himself wrote of the Grundrisse as the result of fifteen years of research, 'the best period of my life'.36 (This particular letter was written in November 1858, exacdy fifteen years after Marx's arrival in Paris in November 1843.) He also said in the Preface in 1859: 'the total material lies before me in the form of monographs, which were written at widely separated periods, for self-clarifi-

cation, not for publication, and whose coherent elaboration according to the plan indicated will be dependent on external circumstances'.37 This can only refer to the 'Paris Manuscripts' of 1844 and the London notebooks of 1850-52. Marx constandy used, and at the same time revised, material from an earlier date (Capital, for instance, was written with the aid of his 1843-45 notebooks).

The beginning of the Grundrisse's chapter on capital reproduces almost word for word the passages in the Manuscripts on human need, man as a species-being, the individual as a social being, the idea of nature as (in a sense) man's body, the parallels between religious alienation and economic alienation, and so on. The two works also have in common a Utopian and almost millennial strain. One point in particular emphasises this continuity: the Grundrisse is as 'Hegelian' as the '1844 Manuscripts'. This is sometimes said to have been a superficial Hegelianism, and a letter from Marx to Engels in January 1858 has often been quoted to justify this: 'In the method it has been of great use to me that by mere accident I have leafed through Hegel's Logic - Freiligrath found some volumes that belonged originally to Bakunin and sent me them as a present.'38 Marx's reading of Hegel may have been accidental; but certainly Hegel's influence on him was profound. Some of the most Hegelian parts of the Grundrisse - and particularly the index of the part on capital - were written before the receipt of Freiligrath's present. In a note in the Grundrisse Marx himself wrote in November 1857, 'later, before going on to another problem, it is necessary to correct the idealist manner of this analysis'.39 Moreover, while finishing the Grundrisse he wrote to Lassalle that Hegel's dialectic was 'without a doubt the last word in all philosophy' but that just because this was so 'it is necessary to free it from the mystical side it has in Hegel'.40 (A justifiable parallel has sometimes been drawn between the renewal of Marx's interest in Hegel and Lenin's reading of Hegel that preceded the writing of his Imperalism and The State and Revolution.) To give a further example of the continuity of Marx's thought, reference may be made to the term 'alienation' (which occurs much more in Capital than some writers appear to think). In the Grundrisse the concept is central to most of the more important passages.

Marx never disowned any of his writings. It is, of course, true that he wrote of his embarrassment when re-reading the Holy Family. But this was characteristic: 'it is self-evident', he commented in 1846, 'that an author, if he pursues his research, cannot publish literally what he has written six months previously'.41 Again in 1862, he remarked: 'I find unsatisfactory a work written four weeks before and rewrite it completely.42 He stated that even the Communist Manifesto was in need of emendation as time went on. Nevertheless he was, for instance, quite

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willing in 1851 to see reprinted his essays from as long ago as the Rheinische Zeitung of 1842. His intellectual development was a process of 'clarifying my own ideas' (to use his own expression),45 which can neither be split into periods nor treated as a monolith.

By the end of February 1858, Marx's burst of creative effort had come to an end, and he was faced with the (for him) more difficult problem of how to get his 800 manuscript pages into publishable form. Lassalle had offered to act as Marx's literary agent in Berlin. Marx hit upon the idea of publishing his work in several short volumes, giving as his reasons that he had neither the time nor the means to work up the whole of his material, that it would thus reach a wider audience, and that it would be easier to find a publisher. At the same time he informed Lassalle of the stage he had reached in his proposed 'Economics' which he described as a 'critique of economic categories or, if you like, a critical description of the system of bourgeois economics'.44 Three weeks later he informed Lassalle that he was ready to forgo a royalty on the first part if that would make it easier to find a publisher. The first part, he went on, would have to be 'a relative whole' and would contain '1. Value, 2. Money, 3. Capital (Productive Process of Capital; Circulation Process of Capital; the unity of both Capital and Profit, Interest)' - material which in fact comprised the whole of the eventual three volumes of Capital. This part would deal in particular with the contradictions between Ricardo's correct treatment of value and his theory of profit, a contradiction which economists would find on closer inspection 'altogether a dirty business'.45

By the end of March 1858 Lassalle had found a publisher, Franz Duncker, who was ready to pay Marx a royalty that was - according to Lassalle - considerably better than that obtained by Berlin professors. But in spite of his promise to have the part ready 'by about the end of May'46 Marx made litde progress: he sent Engels a long synopsis of the sections on value and money, but could not manage to complete the one on capital although it was 'the most important thing in this first part'.47 Marx's liver was again giving him trouble and Jenny wrote to Engels that 'his state is made much worse by mental stress and excitement which, with the signing of the publisher's contract, is naturally daily increasing as it is simply impossible for him to bring his work to a finish'.48 He made no more than a start before retiring to Manchester for the whole of May. On his return he was still looking through his manuscript trying to decide on what to include, but a combination of anxiety and physical illness prevented him doing anything for the next two months.

The chief difficulty that impeded Marx was once again financial. Engels had supposed that Marx's problems were solved once he was installed in

the Haverstock Hill house, and he was therefore taken by surprise when Marx wrote that the move had actually worsened the situation: 'I am living a precarious existence and am in a house in which I have invested my little ready cash and where it is impossible to piss one's way through from day to day as in Dean Street; I have no prospects and growing family expenses.... In fact I am in a more parlous situation than five years ago. I'd thought I'd already had all the shit that was coming my way. But no. And the worst is, that this crisis is not temporary.'49 Engels guaranteed a minimum contribution of £5 a month and Marx struggled on with the income from the New York Daily Tribune - to which his contributions were in fact declining as he was so occupied with the Grundrisse. He was also contributing regularly to the New American Cyclopaedia but - typically - overcalculated his fees and soon found himself in his publisher's debt. His only recourse was to the pawnshop, with the expectation of a crisis at the end of every quarter and the fear of the approach of winter when the coats and other clothes would have to be redeemed. But by July 1858 his financial crisis erupted in full force. He wrote to Engels: 'The situation is now absolutely unbearable.... I am completely disabled as far as work goes, partly because I lose most of my time in useless running around trying to make money and partly (perhaps a result of my feeble physical condition) because my power of intellectual concentration is undermined by domestic problems. My wife's nerves are quite ruined by the filth... .'so The doctor predicted an inflammation of the brain and recommended that Jenny be sent to the seaside, but even that would not help 'if the spectre of an inevitable and ultimate catastrophe pursues her'.51 Marx had applied to a loan society but all he had got out of it was a bill for £2 in fees. He enclosed a careful list of his debts compiled by Jenny, who was the one who dealt with the pawn-brokers, and including some still owed to Soho tradesmen, and finished: 'I have now made a clean breast of it and I can assure you that it has cost me no little effort. But I must be able to talk at least to one person. I would not wish upon my bitterest enemy to wade through the quagmire in which I have been sitting for the last eight weeks enraged by the additional fact that my intellect has been wrecked by the lousiest of situations and my work capacity completely broken.'52 Engels came to the rescue once again with a £60 advance and by August Marx had got down to work again.

By mid-September he could say to Engels that his manuscript for the two parts would go off 'in two weeks'.55 By the end of October he informed Engels curtly that the manuscript would not be ready 'for weeks'. The 'real reason' for this delay, he explained to Lassalle in November, was that 'the material lay before me; it was only a question of the

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form. But in everything that I wrote I could detect an illness of the liver.'54 It was important for the style to be good for it represented the result of fifteen years' research and 'the first attempts at a scientific presentation of an important view of social relationships'.55 By the end of November, however, Jenny was copying a manuscript to which Marx had added a chapter on commodities which was not in his original draft and expanded the section on money. By mid-December that manuscript would soon be ready but 'devil take me if anyone else could have been ready so early with such a lousy liver'.56 By the end of January the manuscript was in fact ready but could not be sent off 'because I have not even a farthing to buy a stamp and register it'.57 Marx's previous letter to Engels had continued the shocking denouement to the whole affair: 'The manuscript is about 12 printer's sheets long and - take a grip on yourself - in spite of its tide . . . contains N O T H I NG on Capital.'58 In other words, Marx had dropped the idea of publishing the second part on Capital simultaneously in spite of his previous insistence to Lassalle that 'this second part must appear simultaneously. The inner consistency makes it necessary and the whole effect depends on it.'59 Even when the manuscript was despatched, Marx's worries were not at an end: he suspected the authorities in Berlin of having confiscated his parcel and, when Lassalle still had not informed him of its arrival after two weeks, he was 'sick with anxiety'.60 When eventually it did arrive, the printing was much too slow for Marx: it took Duncker six weeks to produce the proofs. Even worse, two weeks after Marx had sent off the last corrected proof sheets, the arrival of an unfranked pamphlet by Lassalle, obviously given priority by Duncker, compelled Marx to pawn his last respectable coat to pay the necessary two shillings excess postal charge.

In the manuscript, which was finally published in early June, by far the most valuable part was the Preface which contained as succinct an account of the materialist conception of history as Marx ever produced. Marx opened the Preface with a statement of the scope of his 'Economics' and his progress to date. There followed a short piece of intellectual autobiography in which Marx stressed the importance of his journalistic work for the Rheinische Zeitung in giving him an insight into the importance of 'material interests' and 'economic questions'. He then withdrew into his study to examine Hegel's political philosophy The conclusion of this retreat was that

legal relations as well as forms of state are to be grasped neither from themselves nor from the so-called general development of the human mind, but rather have their roots in the material conditions of life, the sum total of which Hegel, following the example of the Englishmen and Frenchmen of the eighteenth century, combines under the name