The step from the Grundrisse to A Contribution will be a central theme in this chapter. The comparison between the remarkable introduction to the Grundrisse and the influential preface in A Contribution will also be important. But the large manuscript also contains other things requiring attention. The dominant chapter in the Grundrisse, which deals with capital, never had a counterpart in A Contribution. But the chapter deserves its own treatment, especially because it contains themes that are never developed in Marx’s later production. A section on what Marx called the Asiatic mode of production has aroused both interest and lively disputes over the last sixty years. In another section, Marx wrestled with the question of how labour can be shaped in a more advanced society than capitalism. Both these themes will conclude this chapter.
A Flow Teeming with Ideas
The Grundrisse bears traces of the furious working pace Marx kept during the work. The outline suffers from haste. The presentation is often interrupted by statements saying this or that theme does not belong in this context, or that it must be developed further on. The order bears witness to how quickly and promptly the notes were made, but also to the enormous flow of ideas and knowledge that characterize them. Despite illness, poverty, and the bread-and-butter writing, the period from the summer of 1857 to March 1858 was a time of unremitting innovation. The style may be heavy and clumsy – an immense ordeal for a translator – but this often halting, awkward language supports an enormous load of ideas, and not infrequently the dark forest of words is illuminated by some beautiful aphorism.
The text now reproduced in complete editions – such as in the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe and the Collected Works – consists of three different parts. First is a brief commentary on two economic theoreticians in the generation after Ricardo: the Frenchman Frédéric Bastiat and the American Henry Charles Carey. The text was written back in July 1857 and its lasting contribution is the term ‘vulgar economist’. Carey and Bastiat differed from Smith and Ricardo in that they did not depict capitalist society as riven by conflicts, but on the contrary as a harmonious arena. In Marx’s opinion, they thereby avoid any deeper analysis of society and are satisfied with a glossy façade. Marx did not mention the Manchester liberals in the text, but they are kindred spirits who argued that the factory-owning middle class could represent the working class in the conflict-free society of free trade.
An introduction, which in its incomplete form encompasses some twenty pages, also falls outside the text Marx himself named Grundrisse. But this introduction, which was written at a breakneck pace at the end of August 1857, sets the tone for much of what follows in the larger manuscript – or, more correctly, the seven notebooks Marx filled with his scrawls – and is naturally always printed together with it.11
What follows the introduction is difficult to grasp, it is true, but it still has a basic structure that can be found in a more cultivated form in both A Contribution and Capital. First is a chapter on money, and then another on capital. They are numbered II and III. The introduction was probably intended as an initial part.
The order within the chapter has the freedom of spontaneity. The chapter on money starts with detailed excerpts from a book on banks by Alfred Darimon, a disciple of Proudhon, and the manuscript concludes with a number of supplements to both chapters. Many digressions occur between them as well, often extremely fascinating but hardly easy to incorporate into the totality for which Marx had been striving.
The ‘Introduction’ is worth particular attention. It is not only the part of the work that has had the greatest influence on posterity. It is also the closest Marx came to a presentation of his basic method. A few months after he had written the draft for the introduction, in January 1858, he wrote to Engels that he had ‘by mere accident’ got Hegel’s Logic in hand. His friend Ferdinand Freiligrath had given it and other works of Hegel’s to him as a gift. The books had originally belonged to Bakunin.
There are several volumes of Hegel in the library that Marx left, including the 1841 edition of The Science of Logic. It was a work that had been under discussion much earlier in Marx’s writings, particularly in the Manuscripts but also in The Poverty of Philosophy. The copy he had access to around the New Year in 1858, he had probably got two years earlier. It was only in connection with his work on the Grundrisse that its contents were brought to the fore for him, when he ‘had taken another look’ at the book.
In his letter to Engels, Marx wrote: ‘If ever the time comes when such work is again possible, I should very much like to write 2 or 3 sheets making accessible to the common reader the rational aspect of the method which Hegel not only discovered but also mystified.’ Oddly enough, the same idea returned ten years later, in 1868, when he wrote to the German tannery worker and self-taught philosopher Joseph Dietzgen that he intended to write on the dialectic as soon as he had ‘cast off the burden of political economy’. The ‘true laws of the dialectic’ were already in Hegel, and it was only a matter of liberating them from their ‘mystical form’.12
It is of course impossible to judge how this text, which turned up in his thoughts after such a long interval, could have related to the introduction he had already written in the summer of 1857. There, as in an important part of the Grundrisse itself, Hegel is certainly present without being in focus.
Marx never got the time to clarify his relation to the philosophy of Hegel he had developed during the 1850s and 1860s. By and large, we have to be satisfied with the Grundrisse and a few sporadic statements in Capital. But seen more closely, it is quite a lot.
The ‘Introduction’ is, from beginning to end, an attempt to explain the difference between the results the classical political economists arrived at and Marx’s own. The central section deals with the method of political economy. But Marx also drifts onto Hegel and the Hegelians, despite there being no economists among them who he takes a position on. But Marx had to delimit and determine his method in relation to their philosophical one as well.
In the beginning, he stresses that he is talking only about material production. With that, he comments on the determinations of the materialist conception of history that he and Engels made back in The German Ideology. There is a similarity in the wording itself, and this is probably not by accident; when writing the preface to A Contribution a few years later, he had the yellowing, decomposing manuscript fresh in his mind, perhaps even in front of him.13
In The German Ideology, the authors claim to start from real conditions – to be precise, ‘definite individuals who are productively active in a definite way enter into these definite social and political relations’. In the Grundrisse, Marx writes: ‘Individuals producing in a society – hence the socially determined production by individuals is of course the point of departure.’14
The essential difference between the statements is that The German Ideology was meant as a reckoning with the idealism of the Left Hegelians. The Grundrisse turned against the individualism, or atomism, of the liberal economists. The mistake of the Young Hegelians, in Marx’s opinion, was that they started from what people imagined about themselves and not from the actual conditions they were living under. The criticism of the liberal economists did not apply to their idealism. It was not their conception of the world that was being attacked, but their economic theory.
The economists started from material circumstances and not, like the idealist philosophers, from ideas. Their mistake lay in the starting point itself. They assumed that the isolated individual – Robinson Crusoe on his island – provided the picture that is easiest to grasp of economic conditions in any society. This recluse, both producer and consumer, obeys the same economic laws as any community, from a tiny village to all of Great Britain.
Marx sees a manifestation of bourgeois individualism in this idea. He admits that the individual in bourgeois society certainly appears as an independent unit, and that the social forms only seem to be the means for the private strivings of the individual. But it is only within a fixed, advanced type
of society that the individual can appear as independent. The bourgeois view of history is thus baseless. But why? What is it in the bourgeois economists’ approach that leads to absurd results?
For Marx, the answer lies in their way of using scientific abstractions. Abstraction is necessary for every type of scientific work. Certain essential features or phenomena must be sifted out from the extravagance of particulars in empirical material. The incidental must be overcome and the features in common – the connecting, the decisive – must be found. But even these do not show how the various abstractions relate to each other or to the concrete material.
The economists assumed that certain abstractions were always valid – and valid at every level. That is why they were able to move from one type of society to all types, and from society in general to the private individual. But, if certain abstractions were always valid, it had to be possible to isolate the various abstractions from one another and treat them as independent agents running through history, applying to all individual people and groups and to all of society. Conversely, if the relationship among abstractions shifts from epoch to epoch, or if they generally can be separated only partially from one another, it will not be possible to draw lines forward or backward in history with their help.
Economic theoreticians have sought to get rid of this manoeuvre in various ways. The great weakness lies in distinguishing material production from distribution of the results of production among various social classes. Ricardo chose to see production as a given, outside of the actual realm of the economy. The great issue for that economic theory is then the shifting distribution among the social classes. Ricardo counted three classes throughout history, precisely those who predominated during the time in which he lived: landowners, capitalists, and workers. John Stuart Mill developed a similar line of thought. Production developed with the necessity of a law of nature, and was thereby not subject to human will and human calculations. Nature provided the frameworks within which humanity could move. Distribution, on the other hand, could be influenced. Production determines the size of the cake, but people can share the cake among themselves in various ways.
Mills’s determination of the relationship between production and distribution forms the starting point for Marx’s criticism. In the context, it would have been worthwhile if he had gone into Mills’s 1843 work System of Logic, in which he developed his views on the scientific method and the formation of theory. The connection with his economic theories is a strong one. But Marx took no closer notice of this British empiricist philosopher. He was setting the concrete emanation of this philosophy against his own scientific theory.
For Marx, Mills’s thesis on production was a way of promoting the capitalist method of production to eternal validity. It had always existed, only in more or less primitive forms, and it would always exist in increasingly advanced form. On a strictly theoretical economic level, Marx differs from Ricardo and Mill through his conception that production, just as much as distribution, is subject to sweeping historical changes. Marx further asserted that in fact it was production that was crucial for these changes.
But the differences could not be reduced to differences in result; there were also differences in scientific approach. For Ricardo and Mill, isolating production and distribution from each other was an obvious condition. In Marx’s opinion, production and distribution were mutually dependent variables.
To demonstrate the advantages of his approach, Marx conducts a longer conceptual drill with the main economic categories of production, distribution, exchange, and consumption. Exchange – itself the direct relation between seller and buyer, plays a rather passive role in the argument. Distribution, or allocation, of products among various social classes is that much more central. The crucial thing for Marx is that these categories are constantly interwoven into each other. They can be made independent only temporarily and in the abstract. Even purely logically, they are already bound up: production, for example, is also always consumption (of raw materials), consumption is also always production (of one’s own body). In these aspects, there is an immediate identity – as Marx says – between them. But there is also a mediated identity, an indirect relationship between them. Production determines consumption: only what is produced can be consumed. But consumption also determines production – what is not consumed will not be produced, either, in the long run.
Between production and consumption lie distribution and exchange. For that reason, the attempt to isolate distribution already seems futile. Marx also showed how the economists who tested this isolation were compelled to make a number of double determinations, for example of capital, which had to be put in relation both to production and to distribution.
The structure of distribution is in fact determined by the structure of production, Marx said. But this does not mean that distribution is entirely dependent on production. It can be observed, for example, that a form of distribution can historically precede the corresponding form of production (as trade capitalism preceded industrial capitalism). Moreover, distribution is not simply distribution of products; it thus does not begin only where production ends. There is also a distribution of the tools of production, as there is a distribution of members of society among the various kinds of production.
Against the classical liberal political economists, Marx maintained that economic categories could not even conceptually or heuristically be kept apart. Every mode of production constitutes a unique combination of the various categories. The classical political economists were able to assume that capitalism was an eternal form of production because they isolated production from the other basic economic categories. They had thereby been unable to see what was new and unique in various modes of production.15 But how would the crucial difference between Ricardo’s and Mills’s approach on the one hand, and Marx’s on the other, now be determined?
The Czech philosopher Jindřich Zelený made a respectable attempt back in the 1960s in his book The Logic of Marx (which was translated to English in 1980). In it, he sets Ricardo against Marx and draws a number of interesting conclusions from the comparison. Ricardo’s analysis of capitalism, in Zelený’s opinion, is distinguished by the fact that it differentiates between empirical phenomena and the essence lying behind them, and that this essence is perceived as unchanging. This essence can thereby not undergo any qualitative changes, nor can qualitatively distinct economies (that is, economies with different ‘essences’) turn up in history. In accordance with this viewpoint, the questions Ricardo could take up strictly are quantitative.
Whereas Ricardo started from ‘the fixed essence’ – that is, from an abstraction that was to apply to all economic conditions, Marx’s starting point was also certainly an abstraction – but as an abstraction perceived as a ‘cell’, that is the smallest changeable unit in a changing organism. The commodity is this unit he starts from, in the theory developed after the Grundrisse and above all in Capital. In Zelený’s opinion, the commodity could thus be perceived as the cell of the capitalist mode of production.16
Zelený’s interpretation has fine details, but his attempt to determine how Marx, broadly speaking, differs from Ricardo seems unsuccessful. The image of the cell is not apposite. No biologist in Marx’s time tried to determine a species of animal or plant by starting from individual cells. Marx himself could sometimes talk about cells in a biological sense, but he did not construct his argument about basic economic categories on that comparison.
More essential than the analogy itself between commodity and cell is the perspective into which Zelený puts Marx’s method. Zelený emphasizes that Ricardo’s idea of the fixed essence belongs in a mechanistic world of ideas. Marx, on the other hand, was working in a more biologically marked tradition – to be precise, in the tradition that sees human, societal, and historical conditions in analogy with biological ones. It is a tradition first of all drawn from Hegel, and from the Romantic natural philosophers with Schelling at their head. In it the organic, the
complex, and the changeable in all human processes and events are set off against the attempt to apply the basic principles of Newton’s theory in all areas.
Let us examine concretely the significance of the organic model for Marx. First, it can be noted that the immediate biological inspiration in the Grundrisse is minimal. Only once does it appear explicitly, when Marx says that pre-capitalist economic systems could only be understood by taking a starting point in the more complex capitalist system, and draws a parallel with comparative anatomy: ‘The anatomy of man is a key to the anatomy of the ape.’ In the literature on Marx, this statement has given rise to a number of learned commentaries. In reality, it testifies to the fact that Marx was still Romantically inspired in his view of comparative anatomy. For a natural philosopher such as the German Lorenz Oken, it was obvious that humanity in its essence summed up the entire biological hierarchy and that this hierarchy could be understood based on its perfection: the human being. Similar ideas occur in Hegel, who called Spirit the truth of all nature. It was also Romantic natural philosophy that guided empirical research in comparative anatomy for several decades. This inspiration only came to an end when Darwin’s theories began to become generally accepted.17
It is obvious that this Romantic inspiration had very little to do with the line of reasoning Marx followed in the Grundrisse. The idealistic world of conceptions hidden in the anatomical research of the Romantics was no source of inspiration for Marx and his comparisons between more advanced and less advanced systems. The analogy he made is a superficial one.
In Capital, the parallels between the natural scientific and social scientific research play a relatively more prominent role; Marx’s field of interest had also changed to some extent. But in general, there is no particularly strong emphasis on the organic. As regards Marx’s views on biology, the major difference between the Grundrisse and Capital is that Darwin’s Origin of Species had been published in 1859. His views on everything living, and in particular their development, had thereby thoroughly changed. But this is a story for later. Let us continue to dwell on the introduction to the Grundrisse.
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