Marx's telescope (part 3)

Submitted by martin on 28 October, 2007 - 4:30

Part 1 here | Part 2 here

Despite the Grundrisse being 150 years old, such ideas in it are, essentially, new for the left even today. The huge manuscript remained almost unknown for over a century.

One fragment, a draft introduction, was published by Kautsky in 1903. The whole text was published in Moscow in 1939-40, but ignored in the tumult of war. Only three or four copies reached the West.

A new edition (again, in the original German) was published in 1953, but again, little noticed. An English translation of excerpts on Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations was published by Eric Hobsbawm in 1964.

The Grundrisse became a live element in Marxist debates only in the late 1960s and the 1970s. Roger Dangeville’s partial French translation came out in 1968; Martin Nicolaus published an English translation in 1973 and a widely-read article on “The Unknown Marx” as a “trailer” for it in 1968; David McLellan published a short selection of excerpts in 1971; Roman Rosdolsky’s monumental study The Making of Marx’s Capital appeared in German in 1968 and in English in 1977.

Crisis — the political crisis which shook the capitalist world in 1968, the first post-1945 world recession in 1969-71, and the jerkier slump of 1974-5 — had been the impulse pushing the text in front of the Marxist reading public.

Conditions of acute capitalist disarray and revolutionary triumphalism were, however, the least conducive to calm considerations of the insights to be got from “Marx’s telescope”.

Most of the discussion centred round two other elements of the Grundrisse: the very “Hegelian” language, and the concept of “capital in general” (as distinct from particular capitals).

Martin Nicolaus was a Maoist. Thus his introduction to his translation of the Grundrisse babbled exultantly that capitalism was “now entering perhaps the greatest and last” of its “cataclysms”. Already, to see Marx’s idea of the “abolition of the individual as private proprietor, rise of the social individual” lived out in practice, “one has only to consider the youth of Vietnam and China”.

Marx’s emphatic rejections, in the Grundrisse, of romantic, ascetic, barracks-communist “anti-capitalism” went past Nicolaus unnoticed.

Today Nicolaus himself reports: “Having got thoroughly burned in the M-L sectarianism of the 70s [the Maoists always called themselves ‘Marxist-Leninists’], I have had no political affiliations for 25 years, other than the occasional local cause or issue”.

Not all of the 1970s’ flurry of interest in the Grundrisse was useless, by any means. Roman Rosdolsky wrote in his preface:

I am, by profession, neither an economist nor a philosopher. I would not have dared to write a commentary on the Rough Draft if a school of Marxist theoreticians still existed today... However, the last generation of notable Marxist theoreticians for the most part fell victim to Hitler’s and Stalin’s terror... Given these circumstances I feel obliged to offer this work to the reading public... in the hope that a new generation will follow for whom, once more, Marx’s theory will be a living source...

We can only strive to live up to Rosdolsky’s challenge. However, Rosdolsky, in his younger years active as a Trotskyist in the Ukraine, had been out of active politics since being put into a Nazi concentration camp in 1942. Dying at the age of 69 just months after he wrote his preface, he could take no part in the debate which followed his book.

Rosdolsky’s book is a tremendous treasure-hoard of debates and concepts from the era of Marxist debate before the darkness of Stalinism.

Nevertheless, his large emphasis on Marx’s deployment of the concept of “capital in general”, and construction of “transitions” from that concept to others (labour, landed property) in the style of Hegel, attracted most attention at the time. Nicolaus shared that emphasis on the “Hegelian” character of the Grundrisse.

It led E P Thompson, in The Poverty of Theory (1978) to identify the Grundrisse as the root of recurrent tendencies in Marxism to construct its theory as a “perfected” Hegelian-type system. This sort of Marxism, so Thompson argues, represents society as a tidily closed system, constructed as “capital posits conditions”, one after the other, “in accordance with its immanent essence”.

Actually — Thompson cites Engels here — economic concepts, including capital, “are subject to change and transformation” and no economic law “has any reality except as approximation, tendency...” “Nor”, adds Thompson, has historical research “found any society which can be simply described as ‘capital in the totality of its relations’.”

This is not the place, nor am I a person qualified, to enter deep into the subject of the relation between Marx’s thinking and Hegel’s. It seems to me, though, that the Grundrisse is, on the contrary, the work where Marx most extensively establishes the working class as more than just the “dialectical negation” of capital.

“Hegelian” language in Marx’s notebooks is not necessarily evidence of especially deep thinking. Marx, let us remember, had been drilled in “Hegelian” terminology and turns of phrase as a philosophy student today might be drilled in Wittgenstein, or an economics student in Arrow and Debreu.

It was the terminology that would come first to hand when constructing an argument. Its prevalence may, and I would suggest does, indicate passages where Marx is scribbling ideas down more sloppily or tiredly, relying more on stock, in contrast to those where he had got things clearer in his mind before putting pen to paper.

As Engels pointed out, the “dialectical transitions” by which Hegel loped from concept to concept were generally the weakest part of his work, “forced constructions” devised to complete a spuriously complete “system”. Marx made similar scathing comments on those “transitions” in his 1843 notes on Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.

In the Grundrisse itself, Engels chided Marx gently, I often followed the dialectical transitions only with difficulty... I am still not entirely clear on the dialectical transition from land-ownership to wage-labour... The abstract, dialectical tone of this resumé will naturally disappear in the complete work...” Or certainly, Karl, it should! So Engels hinted (letter of 9 April 1858).

The Grundrisse contains a passage (pages 271 to 281) in which Marx starts from the concept of capital, attempts to demonstrate that “the only use-value which can form the opposite pole to capital is labour”, then tries to establish dialectical transitions between both those concepts and landed property.

It is the most “Hegelian-system-like” section of the Grundrisse; and it is wrong. It is corrected by Marx later in the Grundrisse itself. In later sections of the Grundrisse, Marx discovers, by more sober analysis, that “the use-value which forms the opposite pole to capital” is not in fact labour (as earlier economists thought, and Marx himself had assumed in his earlier thinking) but labour-power.

The Grundrisse is a series of notebooks, never readied for publication. It has sections which are obvious early drafts of arguments expressed more clearly and concisely in Capital; sections which are blind alleys in argument which Marx turned back from and never returned to; sections attempting to clarify issues by illustrative calculations which get lost in arithmetical errors; sections which are just Marx’s jottings from long-forgotten economists with cursory comments. Many pages are given to discussions of capitalist crisis, all of them in my view very clumsy first drafts compared to the discussions in Capital volume 2 and in Theories of Surplus Value.

On the distinction between labour and labour-power; on why labour is the substance of value; and on why the exchange between capitalist and worker is simultaneously free commerce and exploitation, the “early draft” sections are often, though rougher and clumsier, fresher and more vivid than the terse finished formulations in Capital.

The most important passages in the Grundrisse, for today, are those where Marx takes up his telescope to look at the very long-term trends of capitalist development.

Part 1 here | Part 2 here

• More: grundrisse.blogspot.com

• Thanks to Bob Carnegie, Roger Clarke, Mick Fulton, Alan Gardiner, Murray Kane, Holly Patterson, Stella Riethmuller, Ted Riethmuller and Melissa White for contributions to discussions in preparing this study.

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