It is easy to see the many articles of the third period as bread-and-butter writing, and they have often been treated as such in the literature. But this is ill-advised indifference. In a different way than the letters – and the highly private letters to Engels in particular – the articles are carefully prepared and intended to influence a larger readership. Studied carefully, they also turn out to form a necessary background to Marx’s printed or incomplete larger works from the period after the revolutions of 1848–49. A number of patterns that would otherwise remain obscure, for example Marx’s views on imperialism, emerge in full clarity.80
With a solid background in the articles, it is easier to go further on to Marx’s great social theoretical project, which would gradually be given the name Capital. This is exactly what we shall now do. But first we shall review the great preparatory work that goes by the name Grundrisse.
Karl Marx as a student, c. 1840
© Berthold Werner
The house in Trier where Marx was born
An anonymous lithograph from 1851 depicts the women workers of a cotton factory while capturing none of the noise and dirt of the environment.
A. Carse, Berlin University featuring equestrian statue of Frederick the Great, 1850, lithograph
Jakob Schlesinger, portrait of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), 1831, oil on canvas, Alte Nationalgalerie
August Weger, portrait of Ludwig Andreas von Feuerbach (1804–72), c. 1860–70, lithograph
Portrait of Bruno Bauer (1809–82), photo by Philip Graff, 1860
© Paul Fearn / Alamy Stock Photo
Cartoon of Max Stirner (1806–56) by Friedrich Engels, c. 1841, ink on paper
© Historical image collection by Bildagentur-online / Alamy Stock Photo
Arnold Ruge (1802–80), 1880, wood engraving
A young Jenny von Westphalen (later Marx, 1814–81), 1830
Karl Marx and Jenny Longuet (née Marx, 1844–83), c. 1864
Paul Lafargue (1842–1911), Laura Marx’s husband, 1871
© Alamy
Jenny and Laura Marx, c. 1840–50
Eleanor Marx, youngest daughter of Karl and Jenny Marx (1855–98), c. 1875
Helene Demuth (1820–90), who kept house for the Marx family for many years, 1870
© INTERFOTO / Alamy Stock Photo
E. Capiro, Karl Marx and Engels in the Printing House of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, 1849, oil on canvas
Barricade at the corner of boulevards Voltaire and Richard-Lenoir during the Paris Commune, photo by Bruno Braquehais, 1871, City of Paris Historical Library
Karl Marx as editor of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, c. 1848
Political cartoon by Jean Jaurès showing Karl Marx as Prometheus chained to a printing press while the eagle of Prussian censorship rips out his liver; created after the forced closure of the Rheinische Zeitung, 1843, lithograph
Gustav A. Köttgen, portrait of Moses Hess (1812–75), 1846, oil on canvas, Cologne City Museum
A photograph of Friedrich Engels in his twenties, date unknown
Adolph von Menzel, Public Funeral of the Victims of the March Revolution in Berlin, 1848, oil on canvas
Edward Walford Cassell, The South Front of the British Museum, c. 1880, lithograph
© World History Archive / Alamy Stock Photo
Title page from a French edition of Capital, c. 1920
Mikhail Bakunin (1814–76), photo by Nadar, c. 1860
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–65), photo by Nadar, 1862
Friedrich Engels, 1891
© Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo
Last known photograph of Karl Marx, 1882
Karl Marx’s grave at Highgate Cemetery, photo by Jon Bennett, 2007
10
The Most Intensive Effort
The Grundrisse
Ever since the Grundrisse became generally known among readers of Marx in the 1950s, the text has been the subject of contradictory interpretations and assessments. It was written in the late 1850s, first in a kind of euphoria of revolutionary expectations, and as time went on, under increasing discouragement and sickness.
Thematically, the Grundrisse is broader than anything else Marx left behind. He opens with both a distant past and an imagined future. Complex philosophical concepts share space with pure arithmetical exercises. In a sense, the text is a bridge between the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of the 1840s and Volume I of Capital from the 1860s.
Arguments about the place of the Grundrisse in Marx’s works diverge widely. Those who wish to fish out a fixed and clearly outlined theory, either in the name of orthodoxy or for present-day scientific development, tend to underestimate the Grundrisse. Those who would rather seek inspiration for a free, radical illumination of capitalist society up through the early twenty-first century often tie together the loose threads in the Grundrisse.
A New Joy and a Sick Liver
On 8 December 1857 Jenny wrote a letter to their close friend Conrad Schramm. In it, she touches upon the current economic crisis, noting with satisfaction that ‘the rotten old structure is crashing and tumbling down’. A similar precariousness was also noticeable in the Marx family’s own finances. Karl could not write more than one article a week, against two previously, for the New York Daily Tribune. But Karl was nevertheless in the best of moods. ‘He has recovered all his wonted facility and capacity for work, as well as his liveliness and buoyancy of a spirit long since blighted by great sorrow, the loss of our beloved child’.1
That same day, Karl informed his friend Engels: ‘I am working like mad all night and every night collating my economic studies so that I at least get the outlines (Grundrisse) clear before the déluge’. In a letter to Ferdinand Lassalle a few weeks later, he used the word Grundzüge in German (which also translates to ‘outlines’ in English), and somewhat later he wrote to Engels about his ‘principles’. But the content was the same; he was finally going to present the essentials of his great social theory.
Over the months that followed, the tone in his letters became less and less triumphant. He wrote to Lassalle at the end of February that it was a great deal of drudgery to summarize many years’ study, particularly if one was not master over one’s own time. Only his nights were free, and then he suffered from constant recurrences of liver disease.
Marx’s liver was a recurring theme in his letters. It is certainly impossible to establish what his suffering was actually due to, based only on scattered statements in letters. In Marx’s time, pains in the abdominal region were almost automatically blamed on the liver. Perhaps the cause of his poor health was significantly more trivial. The enormous tension and the unreasonable working hours scarcely aided his health.2
He was, in short, not feeling well, and the mass of text his night work resulted in became too much for him. One theme quickly led to another, which in turn opened the way to a further problem that immediately demanded a solution. In the same breath as he asked the big questions about the dynamic of society, he grappled with a number of calculations in which certain connections would be evident with mathematical exactness.
He grasped at everything, sensing that he risked losing the thread. In a way, it came to pass. He would never be finished with the Grundrisse. He regarded the endlessly growing pile of notebooks with increasing dissatisfaction. He could not even find his way in his own notes, he complained to Engels at the end of May 1858. ‘The damnable part of it is that my manuscript (which in print would amount to a hefty volume) is a real hotchpotch, much of it intended for much later sections.’
Ultimately, he was seized by aversion to what he had written. In November 1858, he wrote to Lassalle that the task was exceptionally important – ‘an important view of social relations is scientifically expounded for the first time’. The content was ready, but not the form. And the results so far had been ruined by a style marked by a sick liver.
By that time, Marx had already decided to narrow down his project. He was occupied with
an initial instalment of a planned series in which the form would be as austere as it had been undisciplined in the Grundrisse. The result was his 1859 work, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. There, most of what was allowed to take up space in the larger manuscript was kept out. The instalment was at least the beginning of what eight years later would become the first volume of Capital.
Independent Work or Preparatory?
It would be a long time before Marx’s great manuscript – which went not only by the name Grundrisse but sometimes was also called Rohentwurf (rough draft) – became known to the world. Not even Engels had paid it any regard; it was chiefly the still incomplete portions of Capital that he devoted himself to trying to get ready for print after Marx had died. Karl Kautsky – who wanted very much to finish Engels’s work – had the introduction that belonged to the Grundrisse project printed only in 1903, in the German Social Democratic theoretical journal Die Neue Zeit. The editing was not particularly careful, but the text roused great interest among those who wanted to delve deeper into Marx’s thinking. The Austrian Max Adler, the foremost theoretician of what was called ‘Austro-Marxism’, attached great importance to the introduction, as did the Hungarian philosopher Georg Lukács in his epoch-making 1923 work, History and Class Consciousness.3 It continued like this throughout the twentieth century up to today. A more reliable edition of the entire manuscript was published between 1939 and 1941. But, in the shadow of the war, it was little read. Only the new edition of 1953, with the title Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie (Outline of a Critique of Political Economy), published in Berlin and soon also in Frankfurt and Vienna, attracted greater attention, becoming part of the renaissance of the ‘young Marx’ – the Marx of the Manuscripts – that played a big role in the oppositional Marxism aimed at party orthodoxy and oppression within the Soviet Empire. Marx spoke about alienation in the Grundrisse as well. Moreover, he opened up broader prospects than in the more focused Capital.4
Antonio Negri, the Italian philosopher and activist, published the book Marx oltre Marx (Marx Beyond Marx) in 1979; in it, he maintained that the Grundrisse was marked by the fact that it had come into existence in a revolutionary situation. Marx wrote it at the same time as he was following the current crisis, step by step, with endless excitement. Theory and practice came closer to each other there than in any other of Marx’s works, Negri argued. The Grundrisse was thus not primarily a stage on the road towards Capital, but rather a deed in words.5
A particular Grundrisse line, in which the openness and freedom in the great work tempts readers to audacious present-day applications, can perhaps be distinguished in the modern reception of Marx. In the 2000s, Negri and the American Michael Hardt published a trilogy that attracted a great deal of attention – a bold attempt at finding the keys to unlocking the present: Empire, Multitude and Commonwealth, with a concluding Declaration. Despite all his differences, the Slovenian intellectual Slavoj Žižek also belongs to the same tendency. It is the open spirit of the Grundrisse, rather than the strict logic of Capital, that characterizes his work, as it does Hardt’s and Negri’s.
The American literary scholar Fredric Jameson is also among those who handle Marx rather freely. Incidentally, one of his students, Thomas M. Kemple, wrote an original book in which the Grundrisse is treated rather as a work of fiction – the work of an innovative author.6
But the Grundrisse is naturally also a preparatory work for Capital. The first person to investigate – and with great accuracy – how Marx’s project of social criticism developed through his work on the Grundrisse was Roman Rosdolsky, a Ukrainian historian and economist, who collected his results in his major 1955 work, Zur Entstehungsgeschichte des Marxschen Kapital (The Making of Marx’s Capital). In it, he showed how in a number of drafts Marx played with the idea of what the intended work would contain, and how much of it was later realized in the three volumes of Capital.
There are two main questions that can then be asked, as well as about other later investigations of the same type. Both: What is there in the Grundrisse that is not found in Capital? And: How far did Marx manage to get in the Grundrisse with the work that gradually resulted in Capital? Which central concepts had already been worked out by the late 1850s, what exists in more rudimentary form, and what is missing entirely?7
The first question is the starting point not only for Negri’s, Hardt’s, and Žižek’s free application of Marxist perspectives to the problems of the age we live in. It has also driven more modest investigators of the incomplete manuscript. The Grundrisse is a work that has often been commented upon, even if it is in the shadow of Capital.
It was the second type of question that dominated Soviet and East German Marx research, as it did interpretations on the topic that were more directly loyal to the Party. The critical edition of the Grundrisse in the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe was introduced with a long preface in which the crucial question was how far along the path to Capital Marx had travelled during 1857 and 1858. It was then that he realized the nature of labour in capitalism, and it was then that he recognized that the commodity is the crucial point in the economy itself, it is said.
Quite simply, a teleological process is depicted in which the goal was the definitive theory Marx developed in Capital. The process had begun with Marx’s and Engels’s earliest writings on the economy from the 1840s, and only reached its goal with Engels’s final edit of the third volume of Capital. It did not stop there, in fact; it continued with Lenin all the way forward in the history of the Soviet Union and actually existing socialism. This continuation, however, is not clearly delineated in the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe, whereas its outlines are that much sharper in the Marx-Engels-Werke from a few decades earlier. There, the introductions are signed by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which carefully impressed Lenin’s interpretation on the reader. It is like reading classic Lutheran theology: the words of the Bible take on the interpretation that the great reformer gave them.8
Even in such an undogmatic account as Michael Heinrich’s Die Wissenschaft vom Wert, the Grundrisse stands out primarily as a stage on the road to Capital. But here it is no longer a question of teleological development. On the contrary, Heinrich emphasizes that it is not at all certain that the changes in Marx’s development always entailed improvements. This does not prevent him from seeing in the Grundrisse primarily a preliminary work for Capital. But he also calls attention to convictions in the Grundrisse that disappear in Capital. It is chiefly a matter of the idea that capitalism must collapse during a sufficiently deep crisis. In Heinrich’s opinion, this fades away in Marx’s world of ideas after the crisis of 1857–58.9
Seeing the differences and similarities between Marx’s great, incomplete work and the text that became the first volume of Capital is obviously important. This will also be a theme in the next chapter. But the main emphasis here lies on what is unique to the Grundrisse – in brief, what makes it a work that, in all its incompleteness, still stands out as so attractive and inspiring. This applies especially to the oddly incomplete introduction. Through it, one comes inevitably into the strongly Hegel-inspired vocabulary that also marks a number of other parts of the Grundrisse. Only a few echoes remain in Capital. In the Grundrisse, the distance to the Manuscripts occasionally seems less than that to Capital. The theme of alienation turns up again – in fact, in one place Marx even uses the word Gattungswesen (species-being), which otherwise belongs to the period before the Theses on Feuerbach and The German Ideology and therefore before the great reckoning with the ideas about the essence of humanity.10
In stark contrast to these philosophical excursions stands the ambition of working out an exact theory in the most natural scientific sense possible. It turns up several times in the Grundrisse and points unambiguously forward, towards Capital. Two philosophical ideals therefore stand side by side in the Grundrisse: one with roots in the philosophy of Hegel, the other where the exact theories of the age, primarily in physics a
nd chemistry, serve as models. The contradiction is not surprising, considering Marx’s intellectual background. What is noteworthy – the thing that requires explanation – is rather how Marx looks back to Hegel during the economic crisis and how he then once again loosens his ties to his old teacher once the crisis has ebbed. This was the same time that he abandoned his magnificent, nearly limitless project. He sets himself a new, significantly more limited task: to write A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (hereafter A Contribution), which we have already encountered. The road from the Grundrisse to A Contribution is usually described in the literature as a brief and almost natural step towards Capital – in fact, just another step. But surely the transition from one project to another is significantly more dramatic? Marx must have fought with himself and decided to feel his way towards a more lucid method of presentation. Now it was to be a series of instalments instead.
A World to Win Page 41