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Grun Drisse (changes)

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What is it?

• Series of seven notebooks created for Marx’s private perusal—for self-clarification and preparations for his 1859 Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy and 1867’s Capital —over 1857-8.
  • First published 1939 and 1941 by Marx-Engels-Lenin institute, but didn’t really get to West until first German ed of 1953.
  • Unedited notes.
• Go here to see topic headings and links straight to specific passages.

Topics

• 83: the intro
  • Says that the autonomous human subject posited not only by economists who start with Robinson Crusoe narratives, but even the social contractarians like Rousseau, are silly b/c they assume that this is an eternal human condition, saying that people are originally autonomous units.
  • Marx says NO, the autonomous being who is detached from “natural bonds” is actually an invention of the 18th century, a product of two forces: break-up of feudal society and creation of new production forces. They are “projecting” into the past, thinking that this kind of individual is where history starts, whereas in actuality this “notion of human nature” is an “historical result.”
  • 84: going further and further back in history, the Person is more and more dependent to “the greater whole”
  • Only the eighteenth century could think that the “various forms of social connectedness confront the individual as a mere means towards his private purposes, as an external necessity.”
    • free competition + people looking like they are free from natural bonds is NOT an accident
    • finally, the human emerges as a political animal, both social and individual
  • Hence, the Crusoe stories are absurd: no one will spontaneously produce outside of society, unless first inculcated into 18th c ideology; just as no single person would spontaneously develop language
    • And indeed, the entire reliance of Smith and Ricardo on these 18th century philosophies is really silly; so, classical P E depends on 18th c Enlightenment concept of man, which is historically inaccurate as a thesis for natural man
      • And this silliness is accepted by and parroted by more recent P E, Carey (American; optimistic; believed that wages would rise; pro-government intervention to mediate between labor and capital), Bastiat (pro free trade; French; said that interests of labor and capital are one and the same), and Proudhon
      • Even Mill: Mill says production is “encased” by natural laws, so that “bourgeois relations are then quietly smuggled in as the inviolable natural laws on which society in the abstract is founded” 87 (also Mill tries to separate production and distribution, which is silly)
  • You can’t separate production and distribution from the society, for they happen “Within and through a specific form of society” 87
    • They also naturalize property. Yes, men have always “appropriated” from nature, but it’s always in a specific way w/in context. Not always private. In fact, history says common property was first (India, Slavs, Celts) and still occurs in many societies 88
  • These political economists are “preachers” (cf German Ideology)
    • They don’t understand that the legal forms of these societies are directly related to mode of production; think that their being put together is more or less an accident
  • Overall Statement on “Eternal” Qualities of Modes of Production
    • Yes, there are some common characteristics, but they are merely constructs of the mind that mean nothing until seen within particular context
• Identity of Production and Consumption: What Most People Think
  • They are the same thing: “nothing simpler for a Hegelian than to posit [them] as identical” 93
    • Why? You can’t consume unless something has been produced; you can’t produce w/out consuming something; production determines the mode of consumption possible; consumption causes producer to decide to produce; there is productive consumption; consumption creates the need for more production to replace the article consumed
  • What is the truth about it? They aren’t exactly identity: “production, distribution, exchange, and consumption…form the members of a totality, distinctions within a unity” 99; “an organic whole” 100
    • They are all points on the same process
    • Also don’t forget distribution, reminds Marx
• PE chaotically wants to begin w/the population and then move downwards, but that will only leave you with a confused sense (this stuff is in Contribution too)
  • You should actually move from the constituent parts (price, labor, etc). That is the concrete and “scientifically correct method” 101
    • def of concrete: “the concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse” 101, where unity comes from “concentration” and a “result” rather than a beginning
  • Because you start with small categories depending on issues like the family and state, showing that each concept presupposes a certain social formation: it reveals that everything is historically determined
• Uneven development 109: his example is say material production versus “artistic development”
  • Certain periods in time, art “flowering…out of all proportion to the general development of society” 110
  • ex. Shax
  • Some forms of art not possible in some artistic historical situations: can’t have an epic b/c art is too developed now, artistic production is advanced
  • ex. Greek mythology was basis for Greek art (“this [myth] is its material”), but modern science put an end to the mystification that allowed mythology to develop: “What chance has Vulcan against Roberts & Co., Jupiter against the lightning-rod and Hermes against the Credit Mobilier?” 110
    • Says that modern world won’t let an author be dependent on any mythology: our society “excludes” all mythologization
    • What about Pound and Eliot and H. D.? Me: Well, when all that’s solid melts into air, the material conditions of artistic productions involve the cynicism of foundationalism, and thus the ability to open up various myths as FORMS only, as emptied of meaning. And plus, it’s diff to combine lots of myths than just believing in one mythology: what the modernists show is an end of mythology in that ancient sense that they no longer believe in. So it is consistent with Marx.
      • He does admit that you can still get pleasure out of old art, based as it is on old society; but that doesn’t mean that we DON’T understand that they’re a product of an extinct, earlier society
• Objectification of labor: your labor confronts you as something alien to you 161
  • “Their own exchange and their own production confront individuals as an objective relation which is independent of them…. Comparison in place of real communality and generality.”
    • See how diff that is from Veblen, who sees invidious comparison as the human motivation!
  • Here’s a very interesting description that suggests something nifty, not something purely terrible, in objectification of production: “this is precisely the beauty and the greatness of it: this spontaneous interconnection, this material and mental metabolism which is independent of the knowing and willing of individuals, and which presupposes their reciprocal independence and indifference.” 161
    • hmmm can I compare this to Virginia Woolf’s London? The narrator IS capital insofar as she creates connex between individuals who know nothing of it. But the climax of Dalloway is the moment when the character DOES become aware of and cares about this other person.
• Labor being the negation of capital; dialectical relationship 274
  • Selling labor is a completely diff process from exchanging for goods. In simple exchange, A sells B in order to buy C, it doesn’t matter how the person consumes C; it’s irrelevant to economics. In buying labor, however, the “consumption” of the object actually PRODUCES new value and is therefore relevant to economics.
  • The separation between the purchase of labor and its use in productive labor allows this to occur.
• 253: Capitalism as it develops becomes about circulation patterns
  • First one M – C – M’
    • Money is exchanged for a commodity which is then exchanged for money: Step one, merchant capital
    • The form determines the content: exchange value was the point of production, not the actual product itself
    • Not self-renewed; the products expire, disappear, are consumed
    • People erroneously believe that this is the true model for ALL types of capitalist circulation
  • Then 2) commercial capital: which also looks like the same equation as earlier step, M – C – C – M’
    • Except by “buying commodities” we mean “buying means of production and labor”
  • Then money capital
    • 3) Usury: M – M’
  • Finally, commodity capital
    • the circulating commodity is the point
    • It’s consumption centered (254)
    • C – M – M – C
    • “Commodities constantly have to be thrown into it anew from the outside, like fuel into a fire.” 255
  • Ultimate Point: Circulation itself requires mediating processes, that is, as part of a whole process
    • def of circulation: when exchange occurs as a meeting of two exchange values (“a specific moment of exchange”) AND also means “Exchange regarded in its totality” 98
    • circulation becomes the whole point of the process
• 638 Capitalism as the circulation of “many capitals”
  • Means that capital is ALWAYS circulating capital 639, so that the initial process M – C – M’ isn’t actually true b/c depends on other transactions (for example, the capitalist might have borrowed the initial M, which could be the end process of some banker’s own capital transformation process; while the C made by him might be a part of the start of someone else’s production cycle)
  • Capital itself can have an objective form that hides the secret within: here, it looks like capital independently makes things happen, but underneath it’s dependent on so many other circulations
• 695 Machinery: machinery is crystallized knowledge, that is another form of labor congealed, but to the worker, it merely is someone else’s capital. Another fetishization. And it makes the worker look superfluous.
  • 699 Capitalism only fully developed when productivity doesn’t look like the worker doing anything, but instead just involved in “the technological application of science” (in a machine)
  • Capital makes production look scientific, so that labor is “reduced to a mere moment” in a process of science
    • Thus capitalism bound up in an historical development (you have to have a certain level of knowledge and tech)
    • At the end of which, “capital is developed into capital, as power over living labor”
  • Organic composition of labor decreasing 700: living labor is reduced and reduced as much as possible, looking less and less like the productive force, as machines (that is the development of science and its use for production) more and more look like the force MEANS THAT “capitalism thus works towards its own dissolution as the form dominating production.”
  • As capitalists reduce variable costs (ie wages) by investing in fixed costs (machinery, buildings and their organization), they limit labor itself, thus actually working towards socialism (where people won’t be weighed down by labor)
• 892 critique of PE
  • Full of “apologetic commonplaces” **