Notes from Grundrisse

Here are some rough notes, jotted down in the order in which I read them, from Marx’s notebooks published as “Grundrisse”. I’ve not tried to add any particular organisation or interpretation to, I just wanted to capture the bits I found really interesting. Think of it as a transfer of learning exercise rather than something useful to read back.

Introduction

Page 89. Production, distribution, exchange, and consumption are described as a “regular syllogism”. Production as the ‘general’; distribution and exchange as the ‘particular’; and consumption as ‘the singularity in which the whole is joined together’. This is a point drawn out by Bertell Ollman who writes about how Marx’s method works down through levels of abstraction from the general where overarching rules and tendencies can be identified through to the singular which has no wider meaning. Consumption is the terminal point, an end-in-itself which is ‘outside economics’.

Section on Money

Page 137. Marx draws a distinction between the the value of a commodity and the market price. Real exchange value is determined by the cost of production. Market price fluctuates around this determined by supply and demand. Price is nominal to value as  real. This chimes with an interesting comment in Fine and Saad-Filho (2016 p.24) describing Marx’s approach to price as a value system based on the class relations of exploitation and production.

Page 156. Under capital everyone pursues their private interest, but even private interest is socially determined, can be achieved only within the conditions laid down by society and with the means provided by society. The social connection between individuals is expressed through exchange value, with general production for exchange (rather than use). Money as the expression of exchange value means the individual carries this social bond ‘in his pocket’.

Page 171. A window on Marx’s view of communism. Under capital particular production is mediated into the general through exchange (this is how a metal worker is enabled to buy food). To break this system production has to be posited as  a link in general production in the first place through communal ownership and distribution.

Page 172. The economisation of time is crucial under communism. The less time taken to produce the necessities of life the more can be assigned to other things. Society has to distribute its time in a purposeful way. This suggests that increasing free time and leisure is part of communism.

Page 198. Exchange is separated out into two separate acts facilitated by money which creates the conditions for crisis. This suggests crisis of disproportionality where the fact that the market system doesn’t balance out means that the system can clog up unexpectedly causing a crisis.

Page 200. Money resolves the problem of barter – making all commodities easily exchangeable for each other which isn’t the case when bartering two particular commodities. However it does this by separating the act of exchange into two and therefore generalising the problem. Money becomes an end in itself, suggesting a distortion in the exchange system caused by this separation.

Page 214. Exchange value as the representing socially mediated private labour, something that will change in a system no longer built on exchange value.

Page 217. Money defined as having three attributes or uses:

1. As a measure of value;
2. As an instrument of circulation;
3. Separated entirely from use in circulation as the independent representative of value.

Page 233. Money as a contradiction. The general form of wealth but also a pure abstraction that can only be realised only by being thrown back into circulation. It remains then as medium of circulation.

Page 235. Very Hegelian. Circulation is not an external movement of exchange value. Rather exchange value relates to itself through circulation. The movements of circulation and the reproduction of exchange values is what makes capital. Circulation posited as an act of production. The simultaneity of both poles is always presupposed, but in fact they often separated in time. This seems likely to cause disruption.

Page 238. Property as the command of alien labour. The separation of labour and property creates alien property which then commands alien labour.

Section on Capital

Page 245. Capital as built on exchange based on both equality and freedom. These concepts then become idealised and become the basis for juridical, political, and social relations in a way that is completely alien to other phases in history. This is historical materialism and the 11th thesis on Feuerbach in action.

Page 248. This freedom and equality in fact disappear as a result of free exchange. The individual’s product is not for him and must take on a general and therefore external form. The individual has an existence only as a producer of exchange value. The individual is therefore socially determined. This also implies the division of labour. The individual is posited historically and determined by society.

Page 258. If capital is seen merely as any objectified labour which serves as a means for new production this sees is as merely a thing and not as a relation. Capital is not a simple relation, it is a process in whose various moments it is always capital. This supports David Harvey’s view of capital as value in motion.

Page 260. Capital is value in motion. Exchange value is derived from circulation, presupposes circulation, and preserves itself within and through circulation. It is not lost through movement. Only with capital is exchange value posited in such a way that it preserves itself in circulation. Each element of exchange and circulation is just a different moment.

Page 263. Exchange value posits itself as exchange value only by realising itself. Money as capital has lost its rigidity, and from a tangible thing has become a process. Again this is Harvey, capital as process, constantly positing itself and realising itself.

Page 266. Exchange value posited as the unity of commodity and money is capital, and this positing itself appears as the circulation of capital. Again reinforcing the point about capital being a process, not a fixed thing.

Page 287. Capitalists demand that their own workers save and are frugal, but wants everyone else’s workers to be affluent and spendthrift. Here’s the core of the contradiction that leads towards crises of underconsumption.

Page 295. The exchange between worker and capitalist in the purchase and sale of labour power is different on each side. The worker gets exchange value in return and uses that for consumption – C-M-M-C. The capitalist buys use value (labour power) creating commodities that are circulated and return as money – M-C-C-M.

Page 300. The process of production as “productive consumption”, resulting in an object. Not just a consumption, but a consumption of consumption itself. Production is therefore a Hegelian process of sublation. The absorption of labour into objectified labour.

Page 304. Capital becomes the process of production through the incorporation of labour into capital (living labour into objectified labour). There’s a process of reproduction here which means that the process of production of capital is not distinct from the material process of production as such.

Page 306. There’s a section here which implies that there is a gap in time between the value determined in production through the quantity of labour embodied in the product, and the price being realised through exchange determined through supply and demand. This surely influences the “transformation problem”.

Page 325. A long and very dialectical section. Capital drives the development of the productive powers of labour to the point where the possession and preservation of general wealth require less and less labour time from society as a whole. Labour becomes “general” and is no longer a specific activity. In the end capital and labour relate to each other as money and commodity in general this:

“creates the material elements for the development of the rich individuality which is as all-sided in its production as in its consumption, and whose labour also therefore appears no longer as labour, but as the full development of activity itself, in which natural necessity in its direct form has disappeared; because a historically created need has taken the place of the natural one.”

Page 361. Marx suggests that the production process is a Hegelian dialectic working thesis to antithesis to synthesis spiralling upward. Labour with objectified labour creating a higher object.

“The substance of cotton preserves itself in all of these processes; it becomes extinct in one form of use value in order to make way for a higher one, until the object is in being as an object of direct consumption.”

This is sublation, preserving value through the production process.

Page 367. Surplus value converted into money is a claim on future labour, on labour in production – “labour capacity in the process of becoming”. Holding money stockpiles property titles to labour.

Page 385. There is a basic demonstration here of Marx’s view on the labour theory of value. A labour intensive process which might therefore generate more surplus value in theory becomes unviable in practice because the sale price is too high – above what is socially necessary.

Page 399. Basic tendencies of capital towards the use of labour:

• It creates surplus labour by setting necessary labour in motion;
• It creates as much labour as possible, and reduces necessary labour to its minimum;
• It therefore tends to both increase the labouring population and posit part of it as surplus;
• It tends to make human labour superfluous, so as to drive human labour to infinity.

Page 401. Capital posits surplus labour, and therefore at the same time necessary labour. But it exists only in so far as necessary labour both exists and does not exist. This implies also the creation and growth of the potential for disposable time, leading to a growth in the service economy. This is very similar to the argument of Andre Gorz with the growth of commodification out into services. Necessary labour gets less, so capital has to spread into other areas to makes use of its surplus.

Page 402 onwards. A long section on the impact of the timeliness of realisation in circulation. This gap between production and realisation creates the potential for contradiction. Throughout this it has remain a use value or it becomes no longer exchangeable thereby destroying its value. There is no unlimited demand for use values – so the ability to consume itself also becomes a tendency to crisis.

Page 407. The need for constant expansion. Growing surplus value at one point creates the need for the creation of more and more surplus value at another point – to create the money for the first surplus values to be realised. A precondition of capital is therefore the production of a constantly widening sphere of production. Echoes of Rosa Luxemburg.

Circulation which appeared as a constant magnitude, now appears as a moving magnitude.

Page 408.

“The tendency to create the world market is directly given in the concept of capital itself.”

This constant expansion requires the production of new consumption, and the creation of new needs, new branches of production. Hence the exploration of all of nature in order to discover new, useful qualities in things. This leads to the development of the natural sciences to their highest point. Likewise the discovery, creation and satisfaction of new needs arising from society itself; the cultivation of all the qualities of the social human being. Hence the great civilising influence of capital. Wow.

Page 410. A simple statement of capital as a dialectic.

“But from the fact that capital posits every such limit as a barrier and hence gets ideally beyond it, it does not by any means follow that it has really overcome it, and, since every such barrier contradicts its character, its production moves in contradictions which are constantly overcome just as constantly posited.”

Page 411. Suggests crises of disproportion, caused by commodities identified as use values when exchange ignores specific qualities (but things can still only be saleable if they are usable). The timing of circulation influences this. Production is unplanned. What if too much of a commodity is produced and it is unsaleable.

Page 413. Capital’s drive to create more surplus pushes beyond the correct proportion, leading to crises of disproportion.

Page 416. Crises of overproduction, driven by the development of the productive forces and therefore higher productivity leads to collapse – but also to recreation at a higher level with the improved productive forces. The credit system as a prop to this process of overproduction and collapse.

Page 420. Crises of underconsumption – see page 287.

Page 442-443. A long working out of a reproduction schema to demonstrate that disproportionality creates overproduction.

Page 449. The general form of money is wealth in general. The general form of capital is capital in general. Well it made sense when I wrote it. Specific capital (factories, machinery etc.) remains general capital.

Page 450 footnote. From Hegel that “this universal notion contains the three moments: universality, particularity, and individuality”. Marx mirrors these in the process of capital from production to circulation to consumption.

Page 470. Covers the development of capitalism. The first accumulation of surplus value must have value to then buy constant and variable capital. After that it becomes self-sustaining and therefore posits its own starting point in a circular movement. It becomes self-creating. Property created by labour becomes an alien power which is used to control labour itself – because capital owns the output of labour, not the labourer. So private property becomes the impoverishment of the worker = the negation of property.

Page 487. In antiquity, wealth does not appear as the aim of production. The questions is always which mode of property creates the best citizens. In the modern world production appears as the aim of mankind and wealth the aim of production.

Page 488. What is wealth other than the universality of human needs, the full development of human mastery over the forces of nature. The absolute working out of man’s creative potentialities, with no presupposition other than the previous historic development (that historic specificity is important). The development of all human powers as an end in itself. He does not reproduce himself in one specificity, but produces his totality. Strives not to remain something he has become, but is in the absolute movement of becoming. But in bourgeois production this complete working-out becomes a complete emptying-out. This is why antiquity seems “loftier”.

Page 490. Language as the product of an individual is an impossibility. But the same holds for property.

Page 495. Talks about community as the first great force of production. Particular kinds of production conditions develop particular forces of production both subjective and objective, with the subjective appearing as qualities of individuals. This then is a description of historical process. I think this implies putting relations ahead of technology both between individuals and with nature.

“In the last analysis, their community, as well as the property based on it, resolves itself into a specific stage in the development of the productive forces of working subjects – to which correspond their specific relations amongst one another and towards natured. Until a certain point, reproduction. Then turns into dissolution.”

Change driven by productive forces driven by relations of production.

Page 528. Technological development (talking here about agriculture) pulls the foundations of every industry away from any natural ground. The conditions of production are transferred outside itself into a general context. What was superfluous (technologically) becomes what is necessary. This is the tendency of capital, leading to the foundation of all industries on general exchange itself – that is the world market, the totality of all activities.

Page 530. This an interesting section on the development of necessary social infrastructure, when it might be taken on by private ownership, when it might get left to the state, and when it might not get done at all. For the private sector to take it on, there has to be enough capital available to take on building the infrastructure, and there has to be enough activity and wealth in the economy to make it worth while.

Page 532. Capital only does stuff if it can realise (extra significance) a surplus value from it, even if it is socially useful.

Page 533. A section here that suggests the state will taken on creating the general conditions of production, creating a relation of general conditions to social production distinct from the conditions of a particular capital and its particular production process (think things like the internet).

“All general, communal conditions of production – so long as their production cannot yet be accomplished by capital as such and under its conditions – are therefore paid for out of a part of the country’s revenue – out of the government’s treasury – and the workers do not appear as productive workers, even though they increase the productive forces of capital.”

Circulation proceeds in space and time.

Page 534-535. The gap in time before a commodity is realised as money is pure loss. Constant continuity is a fundamental condition for production, even though the phases are separate in space and time. Credit is used to mitigate this.

Page 536. Capital as value relating to itself as value going through several metamorphoses or moments. Passing from one moment to another. Capital is thus posited as value-in-process (David Harvey’s view).

Page 545. The time taken in circulation as a barrier to the realisation of capital. Again this supports David Harvey. Capital is driven to annihilate space through time.

Page 587. Defines the difference between craft production and capitalism. In craft, the master owns the conditions of production and his position rests on both this and his own skill. Under capital the principle is instead to make any special skill superfluous,  to make labour general, to transfer skill instead into the dead forces of nature.

Page 589. Capital creates social production, grouped in place of isolated individuals.

Page 590. Suggests primitive accumulation. Before accumulation by capital, there is presupposed an accumulation which constitutes capital, which is a part of its conceptual determination.

Page 605. A refutation of Malthus on overpopulation for not being historic, regarding overpopulation as present in the same way throughout time.

Page 619. Two conjoined circulation processes: of capital itself; of commodities. This is interesting as capital moves from one process to the other and back again.

Page 620. Capital is always in motion, but is then frozen in each moment of the process.

“This takes the visible form that a part of the national capital is always stuck in on of the phases through which capital has to move.”

Surely this implies the possibility of disproportion and unintended breaks in the process. An economic model which implies that everything happens instantaneously and doesn’t account for the ‘jerky’ nature of circulation of both capital and commodities isn’t going to show this side of reality.

Page 622. These are not different types of capital (fixed or circulating for example) but the same capital in different forms.

“Capital as the unity of circulation and production is at the same time the division between them, and a division whose aspects are separated in space and time”

Page 629. It is the necessary tendency of capital to strive to equate circulation time to 0, in other words to remove ‘dead’ time from the process, to make the static equilibrium models true.

Page 639. The simultaneity of the different orbits of capital, like that of its different aspects, becomes clear only after many capitals are presupposed. In other words, models which extrapolate out the complexity of many interlinked capitals (including Marx’s own reproduction schema) are hiding this.

Page 646. Capital becomes permanent by being transitory and in motion, through many transformations.

“The permanence – the duration of value in its form as capital – is posited only through reproduction, which is itself double, reproduction as commodity, reproduction as money, and unity of both these reproduction processes.”

Page 651. Marx outlines the historic development of capital, making clear that it is not an eternal thing. In its early phases it relies on support from remaining elements of the previous mode of production which it then casts away as it gets stronger.

“Hence… the insipidity of the view that free competition is the ultimate development of human freedom; and tha thte negation of free competition = negation of individual freedom and of social production founded on individual freedom… capital… is therefore at the same time the most complete suspension of all individual freedom, and the most complete subjugation of individuality under social conditions which assume the form of objective powers… of things independent of the relations among individuals themselves.”

Page 657. Competition is determined by the fact that value (and surplus value) isn’t determined by the labour contained, but instead by the labour power necessary for reproduction (the distinction between ‘contained’ and ‘reproduction’ is significant). The positing of a general rate of profit leads capitals to distribute themselves among the different branches of production.

Page 671. Marx explains the tendency for money to develop away from precious metals. Its use in circulation to represent just one moment drives this to speed things up. The tendency of capital is circulation without circulation time.

Page 674. Reversal – the exchange between worker and capitalist turns into its opposite. Property and fair exchange become appropriation without recompense, dispossession for the worker who doesn’t even own his own output.

Page 676. The worker’s consumption also appears as the reproduction not of capital directly, but of the relations under which alone it is capital. Production doesn’t just produce things, it reproduces the relationships as well.

Page 678. The whole of circulation appears in three guises:

1. The total process, the course of capital through its moments, prone to getting fixed and interrupted at certain points.
2. Small scale circulation between capital and labour capacity, accompanying the production process.
3. Large scale circulation, the movement of capital outside the production phase with a distinction between fluid and fixed.

As fixed capital, it loses its fluidity, becoming identified with a specific use value, losing the ability to transform itself. This supports David Harvey as a potential source of crisis. Theory assumes capital can easily switch depending on rate of profit or technical developments etc. but in fact there is enormous inertia in the system.

Page 694. Capital as fixed capital is like the relation of the use value of capital to the use value of labour capacity. The value objectified in machinery becomes enormous when compared to the much smaller magnitude of labour capacity, breaking every connection between the product and the direct need of the producer. This is from the fragment on machines – production as disconnected from producers. Products as purely as conveyor of value.

“The development of the means of labour into machinery is not an accidental moment of capital, but is rather the historical reshaping of the traditional, inherited means of labour in a form adequate to capital.”

That is to a form that drives accumulation rather than need.

“The accumulation of knowledge and of skill, of the general productive forces of the social brain, is thus absorbed into capital as opposed to labour.”

Knowledge appears alien to the worker, owned instead by capital.

Page 700. Capital works towards its own dissolution by gradually removing direct labour as the determinant principle of production. General scientific labour (rather than specific labour) coupled to general productive force arising from social combination dissolves capital’s domination. This seems right, and is what drives much of the modern western economy, but capital has adapted and found a way to maintain control.

Page 701. Capital unintentionally reduces human labour to a minimum.

 

Marx, Karl Grundrisse (Penguin, London, 1973)

Fine, B. and Saad-Filho, A. Marx’s ‘Capital’ (Pluto Press, London, 2016)