It would be several weeks before Marx responded. His illness had become so severe that he had become unable to write. He was compelled to dictate his articles for the New York Daily Tribune to Jenny. His liver problems were worse than ever; it was the price for all the late hours. The illness could not have come at a more inconvenient time. Now it was simply a question of working!37
Engels responded that Marx could at least travel to Manchester, and Marx agreed to the adventure because he had got somewhat better. In addition, Engels promised to guarantee his travel costs.
The weeks Marx spent in Manchester would restore his health. He went out riding with Engels every day, and had withdrawal symptoms when he returned to London. Engels had been a skilled rider since his youth. In a letter of thanks, Marx wrote apologetically that it was his own misfortune that he was always compelled to break off his exercises on horseback as soon as he had begun finding pleasure in it – that is, achieving an elementary level of skill. It must have been a priceless sight when they both set out for the surroundings of Manchester: the one in good form in the saddle like a cavalryman, the other more like a sack of hay.
During the time in Manchester, they naturally also spoke about the writing Marx would grapple with as soon as he returned home. In fact, he could not completely abstain from the pen. Sorting out something that could be presented to the public from the kitchen sink of the Grundrisse was urgent.38
Having returned to London, he drew up an index that would help him find his way through all the notebooks full of scribblings that constituted the Grundrisse.39 It certainly worked. But the little amount of writing he later completed differed fundamentally from the matrix. The flow of associations had been toned down, and the diversity of topics had been replaced by a dry, logical consistency. Corresponding to the ‘Introduction’, as difficult to read as it was profound, was a brief, pithy preface to A Contribution, the simplicity and clarity of which played a large role in its success. The significance of the preface for the most widespread interpretations of Marx is so overwhelming we must pause to consider these brief pages in depth.
Base and Superstructure
The preface is four pages long and has a clear, simple construction. First, Marx indicates the plan for the entire critical work, which the published text was only the first instalment of; it was otherwise the same plan that he set out in the letter to Engels. Capital would be dealt with in the first section, and Part One deals only with the conditions for capital – that is, the commodity and money. The reader is given the impression that the remainder of the work lies ready to be sent to print.
Marx also explains that he did not intend to publish the ‘Introduction’ that he had already written in connection with his work on the Grundrisse. He found it inconvenient, ‘on further consideration’, to anticipate results that first needed to be substantiated. The reader who followed him would travel the path from the simple up to the general.40
Why had he not felt the same suspicion of far-reaching philosophical commentary when he sat down to write the ‘Introduction’? Why did he allow himself to be captivated by theoretical problems that were fascinating but difficult to penetrate in August 1857, while in January 1859 he found the same problems impossible to treat except after long, more down-to-earth exposition?
The explanations lie close at hand in external circumstances. The introduction was written on the cusp of a rapid social transformation. The fundamental mood was cheerful: no problem was too big to take hold of. The preface came to be in a more dismal time, when everything had returned to order after the crisis and Marx himself was sick and worn out. In addition came Engels’s reaction to a significantly more easily strained plan – ‘a very abstract abstract’.
But there were also internal reasons. Marx’s attitude towards these types of great philosophical questions that the ‘Introduction’ raises had long been split. He was both fascinated by and entertained suspicions towards them. It is no coincidence that the Grundrisse, as we shall see, has topics reminiscent of the Manuscripts; first of all alienation but also far-reaching theories about humanity, history, and even the future. In A Contribution, he was more ascetic in his choice of topics.
In the preface, he described in a few lines his own intellectual development, his studies where law was to have been the main subject but soon had to make way for philosophy and history, his experiences as a journalist, and his encounter with socialist and communist ideas in Paris. He spoke about his acquaintance with Engels and their common intention to reckon with Left Hegelian philosophy in the large manuscript that posterity – but not Marx’s own time – knows under the name The German Ideology.
It is the standpoints from The German Ideology that remain in the brief, constantly quoted declaration that Marx made about his scientific method of working. This declaration often serves as a summary of his entire theory – without exception in Soviet and Soviet-inspired descriptions, and is worth quoting here:
The general conclusion at which I arrived and which, once reached, became the guiding principle of my studies can be summarized as follows. In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production.
The passage also appears in the study by British philosopher Gerald A. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence. Cohen reproduces the central parts of the preface as a model for his account, which at the same time is an impassioned defence and a meticulous illumination of Marx’s arguments. He asserts that Marx provides a functional explanation of the relationship between base and superstructure. In order to explain his interpretation, he draws a concrete example from Capital, in which Marx says that Protestantism, ‘by changing almost all their traditional holidays into workdays’, was important for the emergence of capitalism. In Cohen’s opinion, this meant not only that the new religion had this effect, but above all that through this effect, it contributed to the explanation of the emergence of capitalism.41 It is certainly an important clarification, but still does not cover the entire problem area that Marx dealt with. The error does not lie in Cohen’s interpretation of Marx’s preface, but in that the preface is entirely too simple and conventional to be interpreted as a summary of Marx’s entire work.
It is important that Marx himself obviously did not have these ambitions with his declaration, either. He said explicitly that it was a thread (Leitfaden) for his studies. This term is important: the classically trained author thinks of the ball of yarn Ariadne gave Theseus as an aid to finding his way back out of the labyrinth once the Minotaur had been defeated.
Marx left a thread behind him when he entered into the confusion of paths that human society represents. Concrete reality forms such a confusing diversity that it cannot be made comprehensible without strict scientific studies. With the help of the thread, he would find his way back.42
A thread is not a map. The thread is a heuristic principle in the most literal sense of the word: it helps someone find a way out of a dilemma. The word can be compared with a similar reservation in The German Ideology: guidelines do not provide a schedule according to which history can be arranged. The concrete study of reality always remains; the result is not given from the beginning. But a guide is needed.
The guide Marx provided in his preface is robust enough. People enter into fixed relations of production that are independent of their will but a condition of their lives. The relations of production correspond to a fixed level in the development of the forces of production. A given economic structure is the base on which society rests. People’s consciousness is determined by the actual material circumstances under which they live. But these circumstances change. At a certain level, the forces of production come into conflict with the relations of production; people can achieve things with their skills, their technology, and their knowledge that are incompatible with the prevailing power over productio
n. The conflict is inevitable, and eventually the productive forces burst the limits set by the prevailing order. As a result, the enormous superstructure of political and legal institutions, as well as religious, artistic, and philosophical relations – or what Marx summed up as ideological forms – is transformed.
There is much to be said about these lines. The metaphorical pair of base and superstructure is defined here. ‘Base’ is no newcomer; for example, the word occurred a couple of times in the Grundrisse. But here it has been given its complement – superstructure – and the building is finished, a permanent structure that after Marx’s time has occasioned much more confusion than clarity. Dogmatism of all kinds has taken the simple analogy with a house as its starting point, and nothing has been simpler for opponents of everything Marx stood for than to interpret the metaphor narrowly and literally. This preface not only opened A Contribution, but also the entire motley tradition called Marxism.43
As we have already seen, early on in his development Marx was eager to emphasize his predilection for the stable and the robust through various images. He differentiated between earth and heaven, head and feet – in short, between more and less earthly conditions. Base and superstructure belong to the same family of expressions, but lend themselves more easily to dogmatic deadlocks: society becomes a building.
For his part, Marx is chiefly interested in the methodological difference between studying the play between relations of production and productive forces on the one hand, and political and legal institutions as well as human ideas on the other. An upheaval in the former can be observed with the exactness of the natural sciences, he said. This is not possible with the latter. But it is in politics, in art, and in thinking that people become aware of the conflicts that they are inevitably drawn into. It is there as well that they fight one another – with weapon in hand, or with words. Both ideas and feuds change with the base – sometimes more slowly, sometimes more rapidly.
In Marx’s own writings there is no clear boundary between the study of the fundamental conflicts and ideological forms. Material production is in focus in A Contribution, as it is in Capital, but in his purely polemical writings – as in his journalism – political complications, theories, and other subjects that must be considered part of the superstructure predominate.
There is a further problem with the superstructure that neither Marx nor anyone who wishes to anchor ideas and conceptions in concrete circumstances can escape. Does scientifically well-founded knowledge not become relative in this case? Is what we designate as true only true in relation to a given historical situation? What position did Marx himself speak from?
One thing is certain: Marx was not a relativist. Valid knowledge may have its basis in a definite historical conjuncture. Its validity is tested in other ways. In Capital, he would make his position perfectly clear.
Value and Money
There is more to be said about the relationship between the Grundrisse and A Contribution. The only instalment of A Contribution that Marx completed contains nothing more than the preliminaries to the promised work. The reader would reap their rewards only in the next instalment, with a better understanding of the age they lived in. A Contribution can only be regarded as a model for Capital in a limited sense. The opening scene is identical: bourgeois society appears as an ‘immense accumulation of commodities’. But, from there on, the text is more barren, lacking the perspective-widening concreteness that characterizes Capital.
The fundamental relations, however, are nailed down with a steady hand in A Contribution. The commodity as commodity has nothing to do with its concrete content. An ounce of gold can have the same value as a ton of iron or twenty lengths of silk. Value is determined by the labour time required on average to produce the commodity. In short, an abstraction is made from the concrete commodity, but this abstraction is not the product of ideas; it belongs in the real everyday world. The labour of the individual does not remain separate but is immediately incorporated into a wider social context of value exchange.44
The object of one of the most brilliant sections of Capital – commodity fetishism – is already under discussion here but only briefly, and it is easy to overlook. It is said that the labour that produces (exchange) value makes the relationship between people appear distorted, as a relationship between things. Another important thought also flickers by. Use value – that is, the usability a commodity has – is not created through labour alone; it has its basis in the material nature provides. It is only exchange value that is entirely dependent on labour time. A length of linen does not satisfy the same needs as a half pound of tea, but the exchange value can be just as great.
The chapter on the commodity ends with an overview of previous theories on the subject. Criticism of political economy for Marx was never simply a criticism of actual conditions, but also of the ideas about them. With this collected history of economic thought, he refers to a particular manuscript that was published in an incomplete state long after his death as Theorien über den Mehrwert (Theories of Surplus Value). The brief sketch he provided in the middle of his account in A Contribution contains some interesting details such as the fact that James Steuart – the Scotsman Hegel was deeply influenced by – spoke about alienation in connection with industry, or that Benjamin Franklin, the American Enlightener and inventor of the lightning conductor, was the first to posit the idea that the value of commodities was determined by the labour put into it.45
The second chapter dominates the first instalment, and deals with money. It has counterparts in both the Grundrisse and in the first volume of Capital; even a brief comparison among the three can open up certain perspectives. In both A Contribution and Capital, the commodity has been broken out as its own, introductory chapter. Marx left a more chaotic, open account rich in associations and instead presented a text that had been cleaned up and strictly constructed. In the postscript to the second edition of Capital, he made a sharp distinction between the methods of research and of presentation. The researcher operates in a diversity of details that is difficult to grasp, where it is a matter of finding connections. These connections then govern the final presentation itself, which can easily give an impression of ‘a mere a priori construction’.46
Nowhere is this step from the diversity of research work to an almost ascetic method of presentation clearer than from the Grundrisse to A Contribution. The Grundrisse is marked by sudden changes, dizzying views, and genius flashes of wit. With the first instalment of his great criticism, on the other hand, he showed that he assumed a patient reader who gladly awaited the grand perspective of society in the coming instalment. The reader of the Grundrisse has a journey that is more entertaining but not as certain.
The chapter on money in the Grundrisse is full of exciting digressions, not infrequently bracketed by parentheses. Marx could scatter brilliant thoughts about in a few inspiring pages. Universally developed individuals are not the products of nature, but of history, he stressed. It is not nature, but people themselves who created the circumstances that compel them under definite relations of production. Liberation must also be a human deed. At earlier levels of society, private individuals could appear as more comprehensively developed than today, due to the fact that material conditions were not as complex back then. Today, people are locked up in their narrow roles, but the longing to return was a romantic whim, as much as it was a bourgeois illusion that people will have to live forever under the lack of freedom that reigns today. Liberation must mean that all people become masters of their own circumstances, thereby developing fully.
And, he added in a new set of parentheses: A comparison can be made here with the relationship of the individual to science. He does not develop the idea; it remains open to our own further interpretations. These words probably point forward to his conclusion further on in the manuscript that satisfactory labour must have a scientific character (see below, page 392).
But he is soon ready for a third set of parentheses, and he has c
hanged subjects. It now concerned money, the main theme of the chapter. Comparing it to blood is incorrect, he said. It is the word ‘circulation’ that gives rise to this absurd comparison. It was equally wrong to see money as a kind of language. Ideas cannot be separated from language, he said, implying the continuation ‘like commodities can be separated from money’. In short, there is a temporary relationship between commodity and money whereas language constitutes the solid anchorage of every idea. However, in the next breath he remembers how beautifully Shakespeare showed how money places completely different things on an equal footing. As in the Manuscripts, he certainly had Timon of Athens in mind (see above, p. 155).47
Sometimes the presentation calms down, the multitude of associations thins out, and the main argument about money in its various present-day functions is carried further. But the difference with A Contribution is still enormous. In the Grundrisse, we can acquaint ourselves with Marx’s flow of associations in its full breadth; he does not brush aside thoughts that do not carry the account forward, and his image of humanity and society develops. If the Grundrisse is like a primeval forest where everything can grow freely, A Contribution resembles more a French garden. The Grundrisse is an adventure in reading, A Contribution is a walk among a number of well-groomed concepts.
But A Contribution also provides some interesting glimpses of other concerns. In his newspaper articles, Marx had provided several lively descriptions of the phenomenon of globalization, and in A Contribution he did so again brilliantly. ‘The busiest streets of London are crowded with shops whose showcases display all the riches of the world. Indian shawls, American revolvers, Chinese porcelain, Persian corsets, furs from Russia and spices from the tropics, but all of these worldly things bear odious, white paper labels with Arabic numerals and then laconic symbols £. s. d.’, he wrote.48 It was a world that Charles Baudelaire saw developing in the new, wide, straight boulevards in Paris, and that Emile Zola would write a famous novel about fourteen years later in 1883 – Au bonheur des dames (The Ladies’ Paradise).
A World to Win Page 45