Материал: Karl Marx_ A Biography ( PDFDrive )

much richer content in terms of economic history means that the Grundrisse, while continuing the themes central to the '1844 Manuscripts', treats them in a much more sophisticated way than was possible before Marx had achieved a synthesis of his ideas on philosophy and economics. Thus to take the '1844 Manuscripts' as his central work - as many interpreters have done - is to exaggerate their significance.

As regards economics, the Grundrisse contains the first elaboration of Marx's mature theory. There are two key changes of emphasis. Firsdy, instead of analysing the market mechanisms of exchange (as he had done in 1844), he now started from a consideration of production. Secondly, he now said that what the worker sold is not his labour, but his labour-power. It was a combination of these two views that gave rise to the doctrine of surplus-value. For, according to Marx, surplus-value was not created by exchange but by the fact that the development of the means of production under capitalism enabled the capitalist to enjoy the use-value of the worker's labour-power and with it to make products that far exceeded the mere exchange-value of labour-power which amounted to no more than what was minimal for the worker's subsistence. In fact, virtually all the elements of Marx's economic theory were elaborated in the Grundrisse. Since, however, these elements were to be dealt with at greater length in Capital, the Grundrisse is more interesting for the discussions that were not taken up again in the completed fragments of his vast enterprise.

These discussions took place around the central theme of man's alienation in capitalist society and the possibilities of creating an unalienated - communist - society. What was new in Marx's picture of alienation in the Grundrisse was that it attempted to be firmly rooted in history. Capital, as well as being obviously an 'alienating' force, had fulfilled a very positive function. Within a short space of time it had developed the productive forces enormously, had replaced natural needs by ones historically created and had given birth to a world market. After the limitations of the past, capital was the turning point to untold riches in the future:

The universal nature of this production with its generality creates an estrangement of the individual from himself and others, but also for the first time the general and universal nature of his relationships and capacities. At early stages of development the single individual appears to be more complete, since he has not yet elaborated the wealth of his relationships, and has not established them as powers and autonomous social relationships, that are opposed to himself. It is as ridiculous to wish to return to that primitive abundance as it is to believe in the necessity of its complete depletion. The bourgeois view has never got beyond opposition to this romantic outlook and thus will be

accompanied by it, as a legitimate antithesis, right up to its blessed end.23

The ideas produced by capitalism were as transitory as capitalism itself: here Marx formulated his most succinct critique of 'classical' liberal principles. Pointing out that free competition was bound eventually to hamper the development of capitalism - however necessary it might have been at the outset, Marx alluded to

the absurdity of considering free competition as being the final development of human liberty.... The development of what free competition is, is the only rational answer to the deification of it by the middleclass prophets, or its bedevilment by the socialists. If it is said that, within the limits of free competition, individuals by following their pure self-interest realise their social or rather their general interest, this means merely that they exert pressure upon one another under the conditions of capitalist production and that collision between them can only again give rise to the conditions under which their interaction took place. Moreover, once the illusion that competition is the ostensible absolute form of free individuality disappears, this proves that the conditions of competition, i.e. production founded on capital, are already felt and thought of as a barrier, as indeed they already are and will increasingly become so. The assertion that free competition is the final form of the development of productive forces, and thus of human freedom, means only that the domination of the middle class is the end of the world's history - of course quite a pleasant thought for yesterday's parvenus!24

The key to the understanding of this ambivalent nature of capitalism - and the possibilities it contained for an unalienated society - was the notion of time. 'All economics', said Marx, 'can be reduced in the last analysis to the economics of time.'" The profits of capitalism were built on the creation of surplus work-time, yet on the other hand the wealth of capitalism emancipated man from manual labour and gave him increasing access to free time. Capital was itself a 'permanent revolution':

Pursuing this tendency, capital has pushed beyond national boundaries and prejudices, beyond deification of nature and the inherited, selfsufficient satisfaction of existing needs confined within well-defined bounds, and the reproduction of the traditional way of life.

It is destructive of all this, and permanendy revolutionary, tearing down all obstacles that impede the development of productive forces, the expansion of needs, the diversity of production and the exploitation and exchange of natural and intellectual forces.26

But in Marx's eyes, these very characteristics of capitalism entailed its dissolution. Its wealth was based on the introduction of machinery fol-

lowed by that of automation (Marx's foresight here is extraordinary); and this in turn led to an ever-growing contradiction between the decreasing role played by labour in the production of social wealth and the necessity for capital to appropriate surplus labour. Capital was thus both hugely creative and hugely wasteful:

On the one hand it calls into life all the forces of science and nature, as well as those of social co-operation and commerce, in order to create wealth which is relatively independent of the labour time utilised. On the other hand, it attempts to measure the vast social forces thus created in terms of labour time, and imprisons them within the narrow limits that are required in order to retain the value already created as value. Productive forces and social relationships - the two different sides of the development of social individuality - appear only as a means for capital, and are for it only a means to enable it to produce from its own cramped foundation. But in fact they are the material conditions that will shatter this foundation.27

Passages like this show clearly enough that what seem to be purely economic doctrines (such as the labour theory of value) are not economic doctrines in the sense that, say, Keynes or Schumpeter would understand them. Inevitably, then, to regard Marx as just one among several economists is somewhat to falsify and misunderstand his intentions. For, as Marx himself proclaimed as early as 1844, economics and ethics were inextricably linked. The Grundrisse shows that this is as true of his later writings as it is of the earlier work.

With the immense growth in the productive forces created by capitalism, there was, according to Marx, a danger that the forces guiding human development would be taken over entirely by machines to the exclusion of human beings: 'Science thus appears, in the machine, as something alien and exterior to the worker; and living labour is subsumed under objectified labour which acts independendy. The worker appears to be superfluous insofar as his action is not determined by the needs of capital.'28 In the age of automation, science itself could become the biggest factor making for alienation:

The worker's activity, limited to a mere abstraction, is determined and regulated on all sides by the movement of the machinery, not the other way round. The knowledge that obliges the inanimate parts of the machine, through their construction, to work appropriately as an automaton, does not exist in the consciousness of the worker, but acts through the machine upon him as an alien force, as the power of the machine itself.29

Yet this enormous expansion of the productive forces did not neces-

sarily bring with it the alienation of the individual: it afforded the opportunity for society to become composed of 'social' or 'universal' individuals - beings very similar to the 'all-round' individuals referred to in the '1844 Manuscripts'. This is how Marx describes the transition from individual to social production:

Production based on exchange value therefore falls apart, and the immediate material productive process finds itself stripped of its impoverished, antagonistic form. Individuals are then in a position to develop freely. It is no longer a question of reducing the necessary labour time of society to a minimum. The counterpart of this reduction is that all members of society can develop their artistic, scientific, etc., education, thanks to the free time now available to all. . ..

Bourgeois economists are so bogged down in their traditional ideas of the historical development of society in a single stage, that the necessity of the objectification of the social forces of labour seems to them inseparable from the necessity of its alienation in relation to living labour.30

It is noteworthy that here (as throughout the Grundrisse) there is no allusion to the agent of this transformation - namely, the revolutionary activity of the proletariat.

The 'universal' individual - a notion that Marx returns to almost ad nauseam in the Grundrisse - is at the centre of his vision of Utopia; the millennial strain is no less clear here than in the passage in the '1844 Manuscripts' describing communism as 'the solution to the riddle of history'. The universal tendency inherent in capital, said Marx, created

as a basis, a development of productive forces - of wealth in general - whose powers and tendencies are of a general nature, and at the same time a universal commerce, and thus world trade as a basis. The basis as the possibility of the universal development of individuals; the real development of individuals from this basis as the constant abolition of each limitation conceived of as a limitation and not as a sacred boundary. The universality of the individual not as thought or imagined, but as the universality of his real and ideal relationships. Man therefore becomes able to understand his own history as a process, and to conceive of nature (involving also practical control over it) as his own real body. The process of development is itself established and understood as a prerequisite. But it is necessary also and above all that full development of the productive forces should have become a condition of production, not that determined conditions of production should be set up as a boundary beyond which productive forces cannot develop.31

Marx very rarely discussed the form of the future communist society: in his own terms this was reasonable enough - for he would thereby have

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laid himself open to the charge of 'idealism', the spinning of ideas that had no foundation in reality. But certain passages in the Grundrisse give an even better idea than the well-known accounts in the Communist Manifesto and the Critique of the Gotha Programme of what lay at the heart of Marx's vision. One of the central factors was, of course, time - since the development of the 'universal' individual depended above all on the free time he had at his disposal. Time was of the essence in Marx's ideal of future society:

If we suppose communal production, the determination of time remains, of course, essential. The less time society requires in order to produce wheat, catde, etc., the more time it gains for other forms of production, material or intellectual. As with a single individual, the universality of its development, its enjoyment and its activity depends on saving time... ,32

Only by the extensive use of machinery was this free time possible. Whereas in the past machinery had been a factor hostile to the worker in the future its function could be radically altered:

No special sagacity is required in order to understand that, beginning with free labour or wage-labour for example, which arose after the abolition of slavery, machines can only develop in opposition to living labour, as a hostile power and alien property, i.e. they must, as capital, oppose the worker.

It is equally easy to see that machines do not cease to be agents of social production, once they become, for example, the property of associated workers. But in the first case, their means of distribution (the fact that they do not belong to the workers) is itself a condition of the means of production that is founded on wage-labour. In the second case, an altered means of distribution will derive from an altered new basis of production emerging from the historical process.33

Marx rejected Adam Smith's view of work as necessarily an imposition. Nor did he subscribe to Fourier's idea that work could become a sort of game. According to Marx, Smith's view was valid for the labour

which has not yet created the subjective and objective conditions (which it lost when it abandoned pastoral conditions) which make of it attractive labour and individual self-realisation. This does not mean that labour can be made merely a joke, or amusement, as Fourier naively expressed it in shop-girl terms. Really free labour, the composing of music for example, is at the same time damned serious and demands the greatest effort. The labour concerned with material production can only have this character if (1) it is of a social nature, (2) it has a scientific character and at the same time is general work, i.e. if it