A World to Win

by Sven-Eric Liedman

  There is nothing in Marx’s text that says that feudalism is the only possible condition for capitalism. What is required is the free worker and the capitalist with their assets. It is the relation between them that is decisive. As we have seen, the German word Verhältnis signifies the parts in a totality in which no part can be replaced without a totality being dissolved. It is therefore, as Marx talks about, a Produktionsverhältnis, a relation of production. Surely, he also observes the freeman and the slave in ancient society, or the lord and the serf in feudalism, in the same way. But he does not emphasize this at all as strongly as when capitalism is concerned. It is capitalism that finds itself the focus of his constant attention.

  This does not mean that what he said about previous societies lacks significance. On the contrary, he promised a more detailed analysis of landed property and its development in the work that the Grundrisse was to result in. This was certainly the planned part on ground rent and the work that ultimately shrank down to one single instalment.67

  Among the most remarkable things about the Grundrisse is that there Marx betrays something of his thoughts about the nature of work in the society of the future. He does not say much; actually only a few pithy lines are involved, but it is still a lot in comparison with his other texts.

  The theme is work as sacrifice and as self-realization. He objects to the bourgeois economists from Smith to Senior, who see work as the same kind of burden throughout all of history. Only at rest can a person experience freedom and happiness. Such is their image of humanity: by nature, we are not active beings, naturally fitted for great efforts.

  Marx was and remained the advocate of another view of humanity. Back in the Manuscripts he had sketched out an image of humanity as fundamentally both social and active. In the Grundrisse, the image returns, but now without the wrapping of the thinking about essence. On the other hand, the word ‘alienation’ remains, even if not as frequent.

  Smith and his followers imagine not only that human production requires capital from start to finish. They also believe that bourgeois economists are the same as human beings that existed long ago, and that they would continue to exist for as long as the human race endures. They would always shun labour. The eternal indolence of the land of Cockaigne was an absurd utopia during the Middle Ages and it would remain so in the world of tomorrow. But its attraction would always remain just as great for Smith’s and Ricardo’s human being.

  In Marx’s opinion, people’s relation to work changes with the variation in the modes of production. Before capitalism, toil at the washtub or behind the plough was an external compulsion for the overwhelming majority: someone was commanding them. As a result of capitalism, the worker became formally free to work or to loaf about. But destitution forced them onto the factory floor. And the future?

  Fourier was mistaken when he asserted that work in a good society becomes a pure pleasure that could be performed under noisy cheerfulness, Marx said. He himself struck a different tone in one of his very finest aphorisms: ‘Really free work, e.g. the composition of music, is also the most damnably difficult, demanding the most intensive effort.’

  The word ‘compose’ deserves particular attention. In English, as in German (komponieren) it has the basic meaning of creating music, and Marx was of course not unaware of this. The profession of composer appears to many as the freest of all; it was certainly also like that for him. But the word can also have a broader meaning, referring to the work of creating order and the large amount of material where such an order is not given but requires both reflection and ingenuity. (The qualifier ‘of music’ is in addition to the English translation.)

  It was the kind of activity with which Marx was extremely familiar. He knew everything about both seriousness and toil. There was a fundamental freedom in the choice of projects – the exact freedom that neither the slave nor the wage labourer would ever experience during their working hours. But once the choice had been made, it required all the energy and care that could be raised.

  Marx’s brief sentence could stand as a model for all serious artistic, intellectual, and scientific work. But it is primarily not his own situation, and that of those like him, that Marx had in mind. In the next sentence, it turns out that it is material production of the future that he was speaking about. The sentence is long and rather complicated, and can well be quoted in its entirety:

  Work involved in material production can achieve this character only if (1) its social character is posited; (2) it is of a scientific character and simultaneously general [in its application], and not the exertion of the worker as a natural force drilled in a particular way, but as a subject, which appears in the production process not in a merely natural, spontaneous form, but as an activity controlling all natural forces.68

  Both elements in Marx’s image of humanity are thereby provided for. Work is social. People are not isolated from one another in and through production; they collaborate. Work is also scientific. Marx had recently pointed out that the modern wage worker did not understand the scientific principles that governed the machines of industry. But this distinction between brain and hand had to be overcome

  Work must also become general. Marx had come back to a question that occupied him greatly during the 1840s: the division of labour. In the Manuscripts, he saw the division of labour as the radical evil that maimed people. In The German Ideology, he and Engels dreamed of an existence in which people could switch between various activities.

  The brief lines in the Grundrisse did not mean that people would become free at any time to choose between a number of different pleasant occupations. The tone had been set by the sentence about the seriousness and the effort that characterized the activity once the choice of work task had been made.

  But what, then, is general labour? It must be work in which the person doing the work is in command of all the moments required, and thereby has the opportunity to govern and develop the machines that production requires. It is thus not the activity of a jack-of-all-trades but rather of the universally knowledgeable specialist. From these scanty lines of Marx, it is easy to become attached to the image of an extremely advanced production in which technology and science live in symbiosis. Activities of this kind are encountered today in both medicinal research and advanced programming.

  We do not know his own concrete ideas. He did not paint a vivid utopia. He did not even make any general predictions; he only indicated the conditions for free labour within material production (which, in his opinion, sets the limits for all other activity). He said nothing about how all the people who do not have a place in this advanced industry are to occupy themselves.

  Nonetheless there is a remarkable brightness around these few lines. He compares good work with both art and science, he gives away how he views his own research work, and he gives an idea of what human freedom is: the project that absorbs everything else, in close collaboration with other people.

  He spoke not of the many small freedoms of choice in capitalist society, but the choices of decisive importance and existential proportions.

  The Great Matrix

  Of all the finished and unfinished works of Marx, the Grundrisse is the most complete, claimed British scholar David McLellan in his introduction to a British selection of the works. Another translator, the American Martin Nicolaus, calls it Marx’s ‘unpolished masterpiece’.69

  The unrestrained character of the text has made it popular among postmodernists. One of them, Thomas M. Kemple, concentrated in part on Marx the author in his 1995 book Reading Marx Writing. He emphasizes, with reason, Marx’s interest in fiction – Balzac in particular – but in the final chapter he goes further and finds a grandiose erotic and aesthetic utopia in Marx’s works in general. It can be questioned whether his interpretation has textual support.70

  The Grundrisse is a work that continuously inspires (and even entices) readers to entirely too audacious wanderings far from Marx’s intentions. On the one hand, the work is the result of a
tremendous creative rush; on the other hand, it is unfinished with many loose threads and marked in long sections by the down-heartedness that replaced the initial enthusiasm.

  When Marx gave up the project, he sought to arrive at a clearer and stricter form in A Contribution. But, after the preliminaries, new tasks intervened. It was often like this for Marx: something else always came up. Nine years lay between the Grundrisse and the first volume of Capital. During those years, he managed to do a lot – but only a smaller part of what he had mentioned in advance in his great manuscript.

  Despite its unfinished state, the Grundrisse is an important work. In it, the outlines emerged of the entire project that Marx never managed to complete. The self-criticism that otherwise was so typical for Marx sometimes had to give way to the momentary flash of wit. Among these flashes of wit there are also pearls of wisdom that we have every reason to make use of. They are scattered everywhere, from the quick sketches of the introduction to the remarkable ones about the strict internal conditions of free labour.

  The Grundrisse points forward to Capital, but also contains much else that bears witness to Marx’s entire multifarious world of ideas. It is both a preparatory work and a work in itself.

  11

  The Unfinished Masterpiece

  The Grundrisse is a crucial stage in the great project that a few years later would be given the name Capital. Capital is not a finished work. Marx did not even bring the first volume – the only one he sent to print – to a conclusion. He reworked it for every new edition, and at the end of his life he was ready to tear the text up again. Capital is otherwise a number of manuscripts, often in several versions, and various even more incomplete drafts and rough outlines – quite a few of them in the form of letters to friends and acquaintances.

  Summarizing Capital is the greatest challenge for anyone writing about Marx. The attempt that follows here begins with a few glimpses into the life Marx was living when he was working on his great project. After that, it concerns the external history of the work: how the first volume was completed, printed, and edited time and again, and how its sequel remained a series of fragments.

  What was nevertheless written constitutes a grand attempt at capturing an entire society in its dynamic development. Marx weaves an intricate net of concepts in order to succeed in his purpose, and it is this network that is scrutinized closely in the following section. Capital also has its own history of interpretations, which starts with Engels and continues on up to the present – in fact, it has been given renewed intensity in our time. A special section deals with this history, and in particular with the interpretative alternatives that today seem the most fruitful.

  A number of problems that a reader of Capital will encounter are dealt with individually in the second half of the chapter. This concerns both what I call the metaconcept of the ‘form and content’ type with which Marx constructed Capital, and also the connection he sees between ideas about society and the world on the one hand and fundamental social relations on the other. One important theme is his sometimes misdirected striving to provide his account with a kind of natural scientific exactness. It was an ambition that could come into conflict with his method of constructing his conceptual apparatus. Another question I ask concerns the extent to which his general view of history influences the specific theory he develops in Capital. Finally, I illustrate how his concept of class goes no further than a few suggestions in Capital, probably because he encountered unexpected problems at the prospect of joining empiricism with theory.

  When Marx finally saw the end of the work on the first volume approaching, he remembered Honoré de Balzac’s story ‘The Unknown Masterpiece’. He clearly recognized himself in the main character, the painter Frenhofer. As we shall see, the parallel says much about his own hopes and fears before Capital.

  New Trials

  The first volume of Capital was published in 1867. For Marx and those close to him, it was a great relief. Marx had never been able to work undisturbed on his big project. In the early 1860s, he was still plagued with serious financial troubles. They became worse after losing his income from the New York Daily Tribune thanks to the American Civil War. Things went so far that he sought a position at a railroad office. But nothing came of it; his handwriting was entirely too illegible.1

  He now had to harass Engels all the more intensely with constant new appeals for financial assistance. On at least one occasion, he was so occupied with his own quandaries that he appeared thoroughly heartless to his friend. This was when Mary Burns, Engels’s live-in partner for many years, died unexpectedly at the age of forty-one. ‘I simply can’t convey what I feel,’ Engels wrote to Marx in January 1863. ‘The poor girl loved me with all her heart.’

  Marx’s reaction was strangely indifferent. The news surprised him as much as it dismayed him, he wrote. ‘She was so good-natured, witty and closely attached to you.’

  That was all. In the next sentence, he declared that he certainly also had problems. The attempt to raise money in France and Germany had been unsuccessful, and now the family had no credit with either the butcher or the baker. They were behind on the rent, and the children needed clothes – in brief, there was no end to the misery. At the end of the letter, he tried to mitigate the effects of his words by admitting that he was horribly egotistical. He would rather have seen his own mother die than Mary!

  Engels was upset and put off his response for a few days. In it, he admitted that the cool reaction had been very disagreeable to him. His philistine acquaintances had shown him greater sympathy and friendship than his closest friend! A penitent Marx explained that his wife and children could attest that he had become as upset at the news of her death as when any of the members of his own family had died. But before he had written his response, the troubles of daily life had overwhelmed him and rubbed off onto the letter. He had wanted to take back his words as soon as he sent them.2

  Engels was satisfied with that, and their correspondence returned to its customary order in which economic theory, politics, and daily problems and reasons to rejoice were given their fair share.

  Marx had wished for his mother’s death instead of Mary Burns’s, and in November 1863 the seventy-three-year-old woman actually died. The inheritance she left behind meant palpable economic relief; six months later, in May 1864, another death occurred that Marx really had not been looking forward to but which further improved the family’s situation. Wilhelm Wolff, his friend of many years, died after a painful illness, and when the will was read it turned out that the revolutionary teacher had bequeathed the greater part of his small fortune to Marx. Suddenly, they were in the money. His gratitude was of course great; he dedicated the first volume of Capital to Wolff with the words ‘my unforgettable friend Wilhelm Wolff, intrepid, faithful, noble protagonist of the proletariat’.3 (The intent was that the second part, which would consist of what posterity knows as Volumes II and III, would be dedicated to Jenny Marx, but nothing came of that as Marx never completed the sequel.)

  The money chiefly went towards the purchase of a house and a more respectably bourgeois lifestyle. Marx, however, never abandoned his habit of living beyond his means. But his troubles were on another level; destitution was no longer at the door.

  Now instead it was his health that tormented him the most. His ailing liver, which had bothered him as soon as he started grappling with his great scientific project, was now accompanied by an even more serious complaint – a skin disease that gave rise to an endless succession of large, pus-filled, painful carbuncles that sometimes prevented him from sitting, sometimes from standing, and occasionally became so bad that he had to lie in bed, unable to work. Jonathan Sperber conjectures that he likely was suffering from the autoimmune disease Hidradenitis suppurativa, which is still difficult to treat today. Arsenic was used as a remedy in the 1860s, with the risks that such a cure entailed.4

  But it was not only private circumstances that made Marx’s road to the finished work longer and
more difficult. Just when he was at the point of completing the second instalment of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, he was subjected to the furious attack from Karl Vogt that we have already touched on. His entire political activity was maligned, and he thus saw himself compelled to devote his entire attention to politics in the narrower sense and not social theory. The result was a text of another kind than the Grundrisse or A Contribution. Herr Vogt can rather be seen as a belated continuance of the Eighteenth Brumaire.

  A few years later still, he entered into politics again, and this time with full strength. Now it was a question of organizing the working class across national borders. Marx soon found himself in the midst of events – ideologically, in fact, he set the tone in constructing what posterity would know simply as the First International. His political activities will be the focus of a future chapter; both Herr Vogt and the International will be dealt with there, as well as Marx’s relationship with the Paris Commune of 1871. But for the immediate future, our object is the story of the genesis of Capital.

  The Long Road to Volume I

  Marx’s economic writings began in Paris in 1844 with the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts. Back then, he believed that he would soon be finished with his basic theory of society. But the years of revolution intervened, and he set to work again on his great project only in 1850, when the family had established itself in London. In many ways, the work took a new direction at that time. On the one hand, Marx got a great deal more material to work with through the British Museum. On the other, he engaged his predecessors – David Ricardo in particular – in a new, critical way. He questioned Ricardo’s fundamental theses, including his theory of money, and in that way set out on his own path as an economic theoretician as well.5