A World to Win

by Sven-Eric Liedman

  In his introduction, Marx did not mobilize a materialist conception on this point against Hegelian idealism. We know from other texts that he saw the conception, the theory, or the idea as secondary. Here, he was satisfied with pointing out that knowledge and its objects could not be identified with one another. It is thus misleading both to see the relationship in Hegel’s idealistic terms and to believe that knowledge is a reflection of its object.

  In the ‘Introduction’ to the Grundrisse, Marx brought his theory on the basic conditions of society face to face with Hegelian methodology. On the other hand, he gave no answer to the question of whether or not what he saw as the best method of economic theory should apply to all scientific methods. Hegel ascribed universal validity to his statements on theoretical work. Marx spoke about the method of investigating a very complex and specific piece of reality, namely material production. But in his criticism of Hegel, he made use of terms and expressions that in all likelihood apply to all knowledge.

  It seems as though the question of the methodology of other sciences had not yet come into his field of vision. That issue, however, lies implicit in what he wrote. If he was speaking about political economy as if it applied to all knowledge, this problem would gradually have to confront him. This took place above all in the encounter with the new, revolutionary chemistry and with Darwin’s theory of natural selection. But when he wrote the introduction, it was still an unknown field to him.

  At that point in time, it was at least a question of the relationship between two areas of knowledge, the one narrower and the other wider, and both naturally of equal topical interest to Marx. The one was material production (political economy in its narrower sense) and the other was society and history in general. Unfortunately, Marx did not finish his thoughts. He only wrote down a few points that provide important suggestions, but nothing more.

  In one of the points, Marx spoke about ‘the unequal relationship’ (das unegale Verhältnis) between the development of material production and, for example, art.26 At first, it seems like a rather banal problem that Marx took up only to protect himself against various vulgar conceptions that progress in one area – material production, for example – always meant progress in all the others. According to such a conception, Greek art would necessarily be inferior to modern art. Marx emphasized that no such baroque idea followed at all from the belief in the primacy of material culture.

  But there is something more in Marx’s assertion than simply the repudiation of the idea that the degree of development of material production constitutes the foundation for evaluating all cultural products. Above all, he was speaking about actual unevenness in development. This assertion would be set against the idea of the unique position of material production. It meant that even though material production determined historical development in general, this did not mean that all social phenomena were passively dependent on it.

  Marx’s standpoint is reminiscent of what Engels wrote to some young supporters much later, in the early 1890s. This comparison will be made in a later chapter (page 590 below). Marx’s statements are also closely connected with what he said earlier in the introduction about material production as a totality and about the relationship between knowledge and its object. In both cases, it was a question of ‘unequal relationship’, in which one moment – production in the totality of material production, material production in society in general, or the object of knowledge in the process of knowledge – was ascribed a unique position and identified as dominant, but in no way the only crucial or decisive moment. There would thus be a similarity of structure between all the different areas.

  In the introduction, Marx was very far away from the ambition Engels would later have of creating a coherent view of all the sciences. In one of the points he did not finish developing at the end of the introduction, he spoke about real (in contrast to ideal) historiography. In another point, he announced his intention to take up the accusations that his interpretation could be characterized as materialist. By all appearances, his response would have started out from a sharp distinction between his own type of materialism and what he called ‘naturalist materialism’. By that, he meant the idea that the world of humanity could be investigated with the same fundamental concepts as could the world of nature.

  He could then have gone back with advantage to his and Engels’s reckoning with Feuerbach in the introduction to The German Ideology from 1845 and 1846. But he would not follow up on his intentions. Perhaps he soon forgot them completely. It is striking, for example, that in his reckoning with Karl Vogt in Herr Vogt a few years later (1860), he did not mention a word of the fact that this same Vogt was not only a politician, but also one of the foremost representatives of a naturalist materialism. Vogt got involved in the Materialismusstreit (materialist controversy) that raged in the 1850s primarily through his 1855 pamphlet Köhlerglaube und Wissenschaft (Blind Faith and Science). In it, he granted neither humanity nor art any freedom in relation to the fundamental laws of matter.27 Marx stood far from him, not only politically but also in his scientific conception of the world.

  Internal Discord

  Marx polemicized vigorously with Hegel and the Hegelians in his introduction. He not only wished to clarify his own position in relation to an important predecessor with this clear drawing of boundaries. He also wanted to avoid misunderstandings.

  Marx’s language – and especially his method of argument – are strikingly reminiscent of Hegel in certain parts of the Grundrisse. Hegel’s texts were constructed around more or less hidden syllogisms. The trisections of both thinking and reality he devoted himself to rather thoroughly, particularly in The Science of Logic, reverberate in several places in the Grundrisse. Syllogisms still constituted the framework of the logic taught in schools and at university. They had a homogeneous form, and a history that reached all the way back to Aristotle. From two premises, a conclusion of the following type was drawn: All men are mortal – Socrates is a man – Socrates is mortal.28

  Such logic was purely formal, and thereby valid regardless of the content of the concrete examples. Hegel questioned this strict boundary between form and content. The form also had its content, he maintained. So it was in thought, and so it also was in the reality that at heart was also a world of ideas. New content was added in every conclusion, and the new stood in a relationship full of tension to the original. The processes of thought are like the innovations of reality. The new emerges through contradictions. What was recently achieved is broken down, but not annihilated; it returns on the next level – through the next syllogism – more complicated, with richer content.

  The key concept that captures this process is Aufhebung, which in German signifies abolition as well as preservation and raising up – the multiplicity of meanings that Hegel was the first to emphasize and recognize. We have encountered this word several times; it also turns up infrequently in Marx, but he sometimes seems to take fright at it.

  When he includes the form of the syllogism in the text in the Grundrisse, noticeable only to those who are well acquainted with ordinary Hegelian prose, it is both to point out the proximity to – but above all the distance from – Hegel.29 Marx spoke about the path from production to consumption as a conclusion in which distribution and exchange formed the middle – that is, the mediating link. But Marx’s intent was rather to show that it was not enough to see it as ‘a proper syllogism’; the relationship between the various links is far more complex: production, as we have seen, is also consumption, consumption is also production, and so on.30 With this demonstration, he objected at the same time to the economists’ rigid use of the same concept.

  Even after the introduction, Hegelian vocabulary turns up again and again. It gets most interesting when Marx makes use of it without accounting for its philosophical origins in more detail or taking a position on it. This was what happened with the concepts of form, substance, and content. They are certainly much older than Hegel – form and substance were alread
y fully fledged in the philosophy of Aristotle, and the concept of content dates from the Renaissance. But Hegel added something that echoed in the Grundrisse. He subtly develops a double concept of form that agrees with an everyday use of the word. We do not need to reproduce this analysis in detail, but an important result is that a form can be set against both substance and content. Substance is determined as the formless which is formed and is thereby given unique character, its defined property – that is, it becomes a birch, a daisy, a cat, or a person. The unity of substance and form is called content. But if we think more closely about content, we discover that we are also imagining a form, but another kind of form, something superficial, perhaps something ‘purely formal’ or something that the eye or the ear can pick up without the help of the intellect. For the sake of simplicity, we can talk about form1 or form2, in which form1 provides clarity about what an object is while form2 signifies the façade.

  Marx uses the terms form, substance, and content numerous times in the Grundrisse, as he does in many other of his works. Most often, it is to emphasize that the economic analysis ignores what is being produced, distributed, or sold. It does not matter which commodities are being produced; the only essential thing is what value they represent. Marx can also compare the work to a form that forms the raw material with the help of working equipment.

  In a section that is rather difficult to get through, he differentiates between substance (Stoff) and content. The chapter erases the specific form of the work – that is, its concrete character – and becomes any labour process ‘that takes place within its substance and forms its content’. Or, in other words: the particular work processes its typical raw materials and produces its particular products, however meaningless this specificity may be in the narrow economic analysis.

  What is most interesting, however, is another section in which he talks about the role of labour in creating value. Boards do not become a table and iron does not become a cylinder in the same way that an acorn becomes an oak. But through labour, the boards and the iron are still given life. The labour that has already been put into them (both boards and iron have been produced) ceases to be ‘a dead, external, in different form’ and becomes ‘an element of living labour’. Labour thus forms its products, and thereby corresponds to the power of growth in the acorn.

  This line of argument constitutes an example of the Hegelian distinction between form1 and form2. But Marx is not satisfied with this dry distinction, and the next moment becomes lyrical: ‘Labour is the living, form-giving fire; it is the transience of things, their temporality, as the process of their formation by living time.’ The boards, which were once sawn, and the iron, which was once cast, come to an end in the new labour process that transforms them into the table and the cylinder.31 This is how Marx could write when, alone in the night and in a great hurry, he tried to summarize his enormous project.

  Even when it concerned what was and would remain a main problem for Marx – the dynamic nature of capital – he sometimes connected with his philosophical teacher in the Grundrisse. Syllogisms are again glimpsed in one place, but this time it is their extremes and not their middle term. The extremes are capital on the one hand, and labour on the other. They meet in the labour process, but as strangers. Something new still arises from the labour process: a greater value. It is thus not a question of an eternal repetition, a circle, in which machinery and raw materials, through labour, restore the production that was consumed through consumption. No; the process leads to increasing results. It is, Marx said, a spiral – an increasing curve.32

  The spiral is one of Hegel’s favourite metaphors for development. But in the Grundrisse, Marx also tries to express the same conviction in a clearer, more formalized fashion. He has not yet reached the simple expression in capital for the increase of commodities: P – V – P’ – V’ – P”, in which P signifies money used for commodity production, V, which can be sold against a greater sum of money, P’, which makes greater commodity production, V’, possible, and so on. But he is already on the way in the Grundrisse, without, however, being able to symbolize the increase; he can only represent the circulation, the repetition as P – V – V – P.33

  Faced with this dilemma, he sought a way out in pure mathematical exactness. He had found the secret behind capitalist production: a surplus value is created as a result. The worker receives only compensation for a part of what was created in the labour process. The rest becomes an increase in value that the capitalist can freely make use of. Marx first tried to clarify this process using arithmetic. He was not satisfied with the result, with some reason. The calculations led nowhere, and in his hurry he not infrequently miscalculated. Further on in the manuscript, he tried to sharpen his implements via simple algebra, and now it concerned such things as the circulation of capital – that is, the phenomenon that would later be the topic of the second volume of Capital.34

  It is without doubt another scientific ideal than the one that marked his attitude towards Hegel that he tried to realize here. He was not satisfied with reasoning, but wanted to show what his theory revealed with the exactness of figures. The striving for exactness, as well as for conceptual simplicity and clarity, soon took the upper hand in the work that followed after the Grundrisse and will also be treated there. One could even speak of an inner conflict in his great project, and it is now high time to examine this conflict closely.

  A More Manageable Project?

  The Grundrisse contains so many subtle arguments that it is easy to get caught in its unique details and forget its great task: to clarify the peculiar nature and the dynamic of capitalism – and its fragility. Marx was writing in a race with an economic crisis that he long believed would result in a total collapse. Only when the crisis subsided did he realize that the great manuscript he had produced was entirely too formless to be presented to a readership, even in edited form.

  It was in this situation that he sought advice from his friend Engels. On 2 April 1858 he wrote a long letter in which he not only complained about his wretched health which made it nearly impossible for him to work. He also talked about the plans for his continued work with his great social theory. The whole would cover six topics, he said, namely 1. Capital, 2. Landed Property, 3. Wage Labour, 4. State, 5. International Trade, and 6. World Market. It is interesting to compare this plan with what he had already sketched out in the introduction to the Grundrisse. His plan there was significantly more abstract. Point one would deal with the general determinations that were common to all societies, and after that he would set about the structure of bourgeois society. The third concerned the very ‘epitome’ of bourgeois society (Zusammenfassung) in the form of the state and also the nonproductive classes, circulation, the credit system, and other things he did not specify in greater detail. After that, international conditions and the international division of labour would be dealt with. The final section would deal with ‘World Market and Crises’, in part the same topic as in the plan of 1858. But there was still one important difference. The crises were set off as a particular topic. They had certainly not lost their role a year later. But the road from crisis to revolution was no longer as short or as obvious.35

  Between the plan from August 1857 and the plan from April 1858 lay the work on the Grundrisse, and also a series of newspaper articles in which the effects of the crisis were illuminated from various aspects. It was important that capital had now gained decisive significance in the plan. Instead of the more or less historical and philosophical topic that was announced in 1857 – perhaps intended as a further development of the discussion about production, distribution, and so on – the specific dynamic of contemporary society now came into focus. The changes can be seen as a result of the intensive work of the intervening months, in which capital had become precisely the crucial topic. But it was also a narrowing and a sharpening of the tremendous task Marx had made up his mind to do.

  One important practical circumstance had also arisen. In March 1858 Marx had
agreed with the publisher Franz Duncker in Berlin to publish his great criticism in instalments. He still believed that it would be child’s play to sort out what he needed for the entire work from the Grundrisse material. But he was mistaken. The freedom that the Grundrisse radiated would now be disciplined – perhaps to excess.

  In the above-mentioned letter to Engels with the new plan, Marx also accounted in greater detail for how he intended to make use of his study. In the first instalment he would deal with ‘Capital in General’, and after that deal with competition, credit, and share capital by turns. Share capital was the consummate form of capital, on the threshold to communism. But it also contained a number of internal contradictions.

  Before grappling with capital, however, he had to deal with its conditions: value and money. Only after that came the main topic of the instalment. But, Marx wrote to Engels, as regards that topic I need your opinion first.

  It is a remarkable letter. It is easy to imagine the background: Marx had awoken from an inspired intoxication. The words had flowed over the paper, sometimes heavy and clumsy, but not infrequently packed with meaning – brilliant, in fact. The crisis had subsided, the hour of uprising had not struck, and Marx, worn out from work and sick, had to try to develop what could be of value for another, slower period from his massive manuscripts.

  Engels’s reaction to the letter was mixed. It was ‘a very abstract abstract indeed’, and he found it difficult to follow a number of the dialectical transitions. He excused himself by saying that he was unused to that kind of reasoning, now that he was compelled to occupy himself with mere earthly affairs. But with these words, he implied that most potential readers of Marx’s future work would encounter the same problems he had.36