Equally as striking is Marx’s image of people who see mere riches as the highest aim in life. They are the martyrs of exchange value, holy ascetics who live on their pillars of precious metals.49
But the text soon returns to its normal dry objectivity. A problem that would come to occupy Marx throughout his life turns up in the text. A commodity has a value that, according to his theory, is determined by the amount of labour put into it. But the commodity also has a price. How does one go from value to price? In A Contribution, he makes it easy for himself as regards what is known as the transformation problem. The commodity is the standard, the value is the gauge. It is a statement that may seem plausible. A metre is a standard, and the length of something can be determined with the help of a metre stick. If the comparison is to hold, price is only one way of checking the value. But it is not so simple: price varies even when the value does not. Marx knew that, of course, but he did not show it in A Contribution.50
The Chapter on Capital
It is easy to misunderstand the relation between money and capital in Marx. Money has existed since antiquity, but according to Marx, capital is a modern phenomenon. Did he not sketch out a historical development from something simpler – money – to something more complex – capital – when he took up the one and then the other in the Grundrisse, in the plans for A Contribution, and in Capital?
No, this is not so. He was not unaware of the previous history of money, but the money he was interested in here is money in a system where capitalism already exists and increasingly dominates both the economy and society in general. This can already be seen from the historical digressions in A Contribution. They never go further back than the epoch of merchant capital, which in the history of economic thought first left its mark towards the end of the seventeenth century. But more important is that the substantial treatment of money itself prepares the investigation of capital. Capital assumes money. The greater the power of capital, the more things become commodities. Money is invested in production in order to become commodities that can be sold for money, which in turn can be invested in the production of new commodities. The dynamic of capitalism is inseparable from money. But not all money is included in this creative circulation. A portion of it is placed in lockboxes, and as long as it stays there it is withdrawn from circulation.
As we have seen, it was the intention that the first instalment of A Contribution would come out at the same time as the second, on capital. Capital had been the subject of by far the largest part of the Grundrisse, and the topic thus seemed well prepared there. But, once Marx had sent off the manuscript for the first instalment to Duncker in Berlin – Engels had to pay for the postage – there was nothing more. It is true that in a letter to Engels in February 1859, he stated that he was working on the second instalment.51 But, if so, it was more an intention than actual writing. Soon after that he felt compelled to take on an entirely different task, namely to answer an opponent who spared no effort to smear his reputation: Karl Vogt. For eighteen months, he let his main work lie to instead write the 300-page pamphlet Herr Vogt, the last in a series of his violent polemical writings and the only one that came out in book form without Engels’s assistance. We will briefly take up the content later, but here we are concerned with the Grundrisse and A Contribution.
A Contribution was a torso, if even that. Without the analysis of capital, the point remained unclear for most readers. Engels bravely tried to rouse interest in the instalment with a review in the journal Das Volk. The review was to have been in three parts, but the third was never written. It was disastrous. The first part dealt exclusively with the conception of history that Marx had developed in the preface to his work, and the second also touched upon preliminaries – namely, Marx’s way of developing a rational scientific method from the philosophy of Hegel. The reader was given no idea of what the main text of the book dealt with.52
A Contribution aroused no enthusiasm even among their most faithful followers. Wilhelm Liebknecht, otherwise a devoted admirer, wrote in a letter to a friend that no book had disappointed him as much as this one.53 It is easy to understand why. He had expected an answer the great questions about society and got only a few introductory analyses about money.
The Grundrisse contains so much more, but the manuscript long remained unknown to the world. There, Marx laid important foundation stones for his economic theory, and in the chapter on capital, developed perspectives that he never had the occasion to return to. It is this latter aspect that will now come under discussion.
Marx often opened important perspectives on society and history in a few short lines. The free exchange of exchange values was ‘the real productive basis of all equality and freedom’. It is thus in commerce not inhibited by privileges and other restrictions that the highest bourgeois ideal has its necessary foundation. Perceived as pure ideas and ideals, they are only this base at ‘a higher level’.54 How this metaphor, this higher level, is to be perceived in greater detail remains unclear, except that there is a relationship of dependency. Marx’s historical digression is clearer: Freedom and equality were certainly being spoken of back in antiquity. But the freemen of antiquity had their freedom at the price of other people’s direct forced labour. In bourgeois society, the worker is formally free. It is better to be free than a slave, and yet the freedom of the worker under capitalism is illusory. The choice is between barely scraping by at the machines or pure starvation. Even equality remains illusory. The difference in power and influence are entirely too large.
In light of this, he attacks the conviction of Proudhon and other socialists that material production in itself is good. The relationships between people are destroyed by money and capital, Proudhon said. If these powers can be held in check, both freedom and equality would flourish. Marx angrily dismisses this: production and distribution – all of society, in fact – constitutes a totality. Both capital and wage labour are inevitably parts of the capitalist totality.55
Marx uses the word ‘power’ relatively infrequently, but his fundamental social theory deals with power relations in society to a great degree. There is a memorable formulation in the Grundrisse in which he turns his venom against David Ricardo, who maintained that capital only strove for more wealth. No, Marx said; the goal was to ‘command’ – that is, to rule over as much value and as much objectified labour as possible. In short, economic power was the main issue.56
This observation is a result of the conviction that production does inevitably appear as an interaction between things, but that ultimately deals with relationships between people. With aphoristic incisiveness, he wrote: ‘Society does not consist of individuals, but expresses the sum of the relationships and conditions in which these individuals stand to one another.’57 This is an interesting sentence, in which he attempts to capture the dynamic in society. Physics speaks of field theories, in which the starting point is neither atoms nor smaller particles but the dynamic interaction between them. Marx, it could be said, embraced a field theory of society.
Society Beyond Capitalism
One of the most famous sections in the Grundrisse deals with the forms of production and property that preceded capitalism.58 What Marx called the Asiatic mode of production has in particular attracted attention and debate.
The immediate reason for the interest cannot be sought in Marx’s own text, but in the Marxist orthodoxy that developed chiefly during the Stalin epoch. According to this, development and all societies follows a fixed schedule. First came a primitive proto-society, then a slave society of the Greek and Roman type, and after that a feudal system from which the capitalist system sprouted forth. Faced with the simple theory of stages, a particularly Asiatic mode of production appeared as an inconvenient exception or even an alternative road to capitalism.
Ideas that China – and India in particular – fundamentally differed from most European states had turned up in the 1850s in Marx’s and Engels’s newspaper articles and correspondence. But the idea’s pr
esence in the Grundrisse signified something entirely different. It could not be blamed on any temporary deviations; it constituted an integrated part of an ambitious work.
Heated discussions broke out about pre-revolutionary China not having been a feudal society, as had previously been said. In fact, how did it relate in general to what was sometimes called the Third World, the lands beyond Europe, the United States, and the Soviet Union?
The debate acquired new overtones when, in 1957, German historian Karl A. Wittfogel published his work Die orientalische Despotie (Oriental Despotism). Wittfogel was a peculiar man; he began as a communist but gradually developed into the exact opposite. In the United States, where he emigrated, he even took part in Senator Joseph McCarthy’s campaign of persecution against ‘un-American activities’. In his book, Wittfogel maintained that both the Soviet Union and the newly communist China were contemporary examples of Oriental despotism. But he also carried out a rather ambitious survey of Marx’s theories on the Asiatic mode of production.
After Wittfogel’s book, a few more level-headed voices also made themselves heard. Back in 1964, Eric Hobsbawm authored an elegant and illustrative introduction to the first English translation of the Grundrisse, in which he concentrated on the question of the Asiatic mode of production. The preface can be found in the updated 2011 version of his great book, How to Change the World. In 1969, Italian political scientist Gianni Sofri published Il modo di produzione asiatico, which not only meritoriously summarized the ongoing discussion but also – and above all – went through the Marxist text and the historical background to it.59
A new angle on the question of the Asiatic mode of production emerged with the Marxist and feminist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Marx and Wittfogel, Hobsbawm and Sofri had regarded the Asiatic mode of production from a European point of view. Spivak’s starting point was Asia – India, to be precise – at the same time as she also analysed British, French, and North American culture at the highest level. Marx came into her life early, and the Grundrisse has remained his text that she recommends above all to everyone who wants to know more about Marx.
She herself has consistently depicted reality in a perspective from below. The peoples of the colonies, women, and proletarians have been the subject of others’ expositions, but are there reasons to listen to their own voices? Can the subaltern, the subordinate, speak in general? Spivak tries to listen.
Spivak is usually considered to be part of the tendency called post-colonialism, which has played an important role in the intellectual and scientific debate from at least the 1990s and onwards. Several of its leading representatives have a free, anything but uncritical yet devoted relationship to Marx. The Grundrisse – especially the section on pre-capitalist forms of production and property – has played a special role.60
Now it is time to look at this text more closely. It is barely forty pages long and rather freely organized. Marx distinguishes a number of different social forms, the primary common element of which is that they are pre-capitalist. On the other hand, he does not sketch out a one-way line of development through a number of stages. This notion – which Marxist orthodoxy long recommended – has no support in the Grundrisse, while it has been easier for them to reproduce a sentence in the preface to A Contribution: ‘In broad outline, the Asiatic, ancient, feudal and modern bourgeois modes of production may be designated as epochs marking progress in the economic development of society.’ But is he really talking about a chronological order? Of those mentioned, capitalism obviously comes last, but what about the others? The far more detailed presentation in the Grundrisse provides no conception, for example, of the Asiatic mode of production passing into either an ancient or a feudal mode. The focus lies entirely on the relation to capitalism. His images of humanity’s early development are vague; he has not yet familiarized himself with the new social anthropology.
Nor is he on the hunt for a strict classification of pre-capitalist societies. That would be the timetable of history that he otherwise had warned about time and time again. He could speak about a Germanic form of society – and even a Slavic – in passing. But they are, if anything, elements in a typology.
Humanity’s first great decisive step entailed becoming farmers. There was no private property yet; it would not arise until the cities began to flourish and then also to obtain power over the lands by force. But different forms of society could arise from this town–country relationship, depending on a number of external circumstances.
It is crucial that Marx sees this entire course of events from the point of view of ‘the working (producing) subject’. Whereas his first great teacher, Hegel, began from the top and spoke about Asiatic despotism – a term that also provided the title for Wittfogel’s book – Marx started with those who were directly involved in material production. It was, he said, really only a tautology that human lives had always been dependent on material production (implied: whatever we do, we are dependent upon the bare necessities of life and strive for more). This is the starting point he would arrive at in his introduction.61
In this process, there is always a more or less obvious dynamic, a development of productive forces and thereby an expansion that sooner or later leads to conflicts among neighbours, and perhaps subjugation or colonization.
This is how Marx distinguished a particularly Asiatic mode of production. He not infrequently also used the term ‘Indian’, but neither Indian nor Asiatic have any fixed and limited geographic meaning. One crucial factor is the need for great collective efforts in order to ensure production, particularly in the form of irrigation works of various kinds. In this way, ancient Egypt as well as Peru also qualify for the designation.62
Large projects of this type provided living space for a number of small producers; high above them dozed the autocrat and his bureaucracy. The ruler was formally owner of everything of value in the country, but in reality the farmers provided for themselves and their progeny with what the earth produced. Above all, this required that they relinquish certain mandatory tributes to the despot. The mode of production lacked an inner dynamic to a great extent, Marx said.63 It is the same thought he expressed in his most famous article on India in the New York Daily Tribune, the one in which he said that British colonization was required for the country to be modernized.
There are two clear main themes in the section on the various pre-capitalist societies. The first is property in its various forms. Marx arrived at the conclusion that the original tribally-based forms of property have their foundation in peoples’ relationships with each other and nature, something that was the result of their special mode of working. European forms of production such as slavery and serfdom meant that the worker appeared as a natural condition for the entire society’s – and thereby free individuals’ – production.
It is the development of productive forces – that is, the development of people’s skills and knowledge, and thereby technology in the broadest sense of the word – that sooner or later dissolve the various modes of production (as regards the Asiatic mode of production, as we have seen, the dissolution must be pushed through by foreign invaders). Productive forces are dynamic, whereas the relations that regulate production are on the contrary conservative. Or, in other words: the ruling class wants to preserve the established relations of power, but the prevailing social structure that is the condition for their power increasingly becomes an obstacle for the development of production that takes place through the labour of the workers.
In the section on pre-capitalist societies, the latter form of expression with its perspective of class struggle would make way for the more impersonal terms ‘productive forces’, ‘relations of production’ and ‘forms of production’. The structure, in other words, is emphasized at the cost of the actors.
As Hobsbawm points out, the various forms of production that Marx spoke about (or in certain cases only suggested) are not without problems.64 Was there, for example, anything in ancient society that inevitably led to
a feudal system? Ancient society preserved its stability through enslaving people that had been conquered in war, and at the same time letting foreigners handle trade and handicrafts. In this way, the free citizens ensured their supremacy. But, in the long run, it did not succeed, and a new form of society gradually developed. But why precisely feudalism?
Even the term ‘feudalism’ itself in Marx’s text is troubling, Hobsbawm said. It is difficult because he says so little about the form in question. He does not discuss the inner tensions, and is equally quiet about serfdom as he had previously been on ancient slavery. The crucial difference between both of them therefore does not emerge: the serf, but not the slave, is an economically independent producer.
Hobsbawm’s criticism shows how completely crucial is Marx’s own warning against historical schematism. It was a warning that unfortunately resounded unheard when Marxist orthodoxy took form a few decades after his death.
The other dominant question in the section on pre-capitalist forms of production and property concerns the transition to capitalism. This had been prepared earlier in the text, it is in general the historical question that occupied the author of the Grundrisse more than any other.
Marx stressed with great emphasis that the conditions for the domination of capital are not an integral moment in capital itself. They ‘belong to the history of its formation but by no means to its contemporary history’, he said. One such condition is that the serfs free themselves from their serfdom and pour into the cities. They have thereby emancipated themselves from the bonds that formerly shackled them to the earth, but they are also without their own provision and their ability to work is their only asset.65 In order not to be cast into starvation, a future capitalist is required who is ready with capital large enough to keep the workers alive during the labour process. In this way, capital conquers its ‘eternal right to the fruit of other men’s labour’.66
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