Материал: Karl Marx_ A Biography ( PDFDrive )

becomes the activity of a subject controlling all the forces of nature in the production process.34

Marx envisaged a time when production would depend not on the amount of labour employed but on the general level of science and technology, when wealth would be measured by an increase in production quite disproportionate to the labour-time employed, and when 'man behaves as the supervisor and regulator of the process of production'. Then the true emancipation of mankind would take place:

In this re-orientation what appears as the mainstay of production and wealth is neither the immediate labour performed by the worker nor the time that he works - but the appropriation of his general productive force, his understanding of nature and the mastery of it as a special force; in a word, the development of the social individual.

The theft of others' labour-time upon which wealth depends today seems to be a miserable basis compared with the newly-developed foundation that has been created by heavy industry itself.

As soon as labour, in its direct form, has ceased to be the main source of wealth, then labour-time ceases, and must cease, to be its standard of measurement, and thus exchange-value must cease to be the measurement of use-value. The surplus labour of the masses has ceased to be a condition for the development of wealth in general; in the same way that the non-labour of the few has ceased to be a condition for the development of the powers of the human mind in general.35

These extracts obviously cannot give a full picture of the contents of the Grundrisse; but they do give a clear impression of Marx's thought at its richest. The nature of the vision that inspired Marx is at least adumbrated: communal production in which the quality of work determined its value; the disappearance of money along with that of exchange value; and an increase in free time affording opportunities for the universal development of the individual. The Grundrisse is important not only as a vital element for the understanding and interpretation of Marx's thought. The contemporary relevance of Marx's views on the ambivalent nature of technology is sufficiendy obvious.

Thus Marx's thought is best viewed as a continuing meditation on central themes first explored in 1844 ~ this process culminating in his writings of 1857-58. The continuity between the Manuscripts and the Grundrisse is evident. In correspondence Marx himself wrote of the Grundrisse as the result of fifteen years of research, 'the best period of my life'.36 (This particular letter was written in November 1858, exacdy fifteen years after Marx's arrival in Paris in November 1843.) He also said in the Preface in 1859: 'the total material lies before me in the form of monographs, which were written at widely separated periods, for self-clarifi-

cation, not for publication, and whose coherent elaboration according to the plan indicated will be dependent on external circumstances'.37 This can only refer to the 'Paris Manuscripts' of 1844 and the London notebooks of 1850-52. Marx constandy used, and at the same time revised, material from an earlier date (Capital, for instance, was written with the aid of his 1843-45 notebooks).

The beginning of the Grundrisse's chapter on capital reproduces almost word for word the passages in the Manuscripts on human need, man as a species-being, the individual as a social being, the idea of nature as (in a sense) man's body, the parallels between religious alienation and economic alienation, and so on. The two works also have in common a Utopian and almost millennial strain. One point in particular emphasises this continuity: the Grundrisse is as 'Hegelian' as the '1844 Manuscripts'. This is sometimes said to have been a superficial Hegelianism, and a letter from Marx to Engels in January 1858 has often been quoted to justify this: 'In the method it has been of great use to me that by mere accident I have leafed through Hegel's Logic - Freiligrath found some volumes that belonged originally to Bakunin and sent me them as a present.'38 Marx's reading of Hegel may have been accidental; but certainly Hegel's influence on him was profound. Some of the most Hegelian parts of the Grundrisse - and particularly the index of the part on capital - were written before the receipt of Freiligrath's present. In a note in the Grundrisse Marx himself wrote in November 1857, 'later, before going on to another problem, it is necessary to correct the idealist manner of this analysis'.39 Moreover, while finishing the Grundrisse he wrote to Lassalle that Hegel's dialectic was 'without a doubt the last word in all philosophy' but that just because this was so 'it is necessary to free it from the mystical side it has in Hegel'.40 (A justifiable parallel has sometimes been drawn between the renewal of Marx's interest in Hegel and Lenin's reading of Hegel that preceded the writing of his Imperalism and The State and Revolution.) To give a further example of the continuity of Marx's thought, reference may be made to the term 'alienation' (which occurs much more in Capital than some writers appear to think). In the Grundrisse the concept is central to most of the more important passages.

Marx never disowned any of his writings. It is, of course, true that he wrote of his embarrassment when re-reading the Holy Family. But this was characteristic: 'it is self-evident', he commented in 1846, 'that an author, if he pursues his research, cannot publish literally what he has written six months previously'.41 Again in 1862, he remarked: 'I find unsatisfactory a work written four weeks before and rewrite it completely.42 He stated that even the Communist Manifesto was in need of emendation as time went on. Nevertheless he was, for instance, quite

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willing in 1851 to see reprinted his essays from as long ago as the Rheinische Zeitung of 1842. His intellectual development was a process of 'clarifying my own ideas' (to use his own expression),45 which can neither be split into periods nor treated as a monolith.

By the end of February 1858, Marx's burst of creative effort had come to an end, and he was faced with the (for him) more difficult problem of how to get his 800 manuscript pages into publishable form. Lassalle had offered to act as Marx's literary agent in Berlin. Marx hit upon the idea of publishing his work in several short volumes, giving as his reasons that he had neither the time nor the means to work up the whole of his material, that it would thus reach a wider audience, and that it would be easier to find a publisher. At the same time he informed Lassalle of the stage he had reached in his proposed 'Economics' which he described as a 'critique of economic categories or, if you like, a critical description of the system of bourgeois economics'.44 Three weeks later he informed Lassalle that he was ready to forgo a royalty on the first part if that would make it easier to find a publisher. The first part, he went on, would have to be 'a relative whole' and would contain '1. Value, 2. Money, 3. Capital (Productive Process of Capital; Circulation Process of Capital; the unity of both Capital and Profit, Interest)' - material which in fact comprised the whole of the eventual three volumes of Capital. This part would deal in particular with the contradictions between Ricardo's correct treatment of value and his theory of profit, a contradiction which economists would find on closer inspection 'altogether a dirty business'.45

By the end of March 1858 Lassalle had found a publisher, Franz Duncker, who was ready to pay Marx a royalty that was - according to Lassalle - considerably better than that obtained by Berlin professors. But in spite of his promise to have the part ready 'by about the end of May'46 Marx made litde progress: he sent Engels a long synopsis of the sections on value and money, but could not manage to complete the one on capital although it was 'the most important thing in this first part'.47 Marx's liver was again giving him trouble and Jenny wrote to Engels that 'his state is made much worse by mental stress and excitement which, with the signing of the publisher's contract, is naturally daily increasing as it is simply impossible for him to bring his work to a finish'.48 He made no more than a start before retiring to Manchester for the whole of May. On his return he was still looking through his manuscript trying to decide on what to include, but a combination of anxiety and physical illness prevented him doing anything for the next two months.

The chief difficulty that impeded Marx was once again financial. Engels had supposed that Marx's problems were solved once he was installed in

the Haverstock Hill house, and he was therefore taken by surprise when Marx wrote that the move had actually worsened the situation: 'I am living a precarious existence and am in a house in which I have invested my little ready cash and where it is impossible to piss one's way through from day to day as in Dean Street; I have no prospects and growing family expenses.... In fact I am in a more parlous situation than five years ago. I'd thought I'd already had all the shit that was coming my way. But no. And the worst is, that this crisis is not temporary.'49 Engels guaranteed a minimum contribution of £5 a month and Marx struggled on with the income from the New York Daily Tribune - to which his contributions were in fact declining as he was so occupied with the Grundrisse. He was also contributing regularly to the New American Cyclopaedia but - typically - overcalculated his fees and soon found himself in his publisher's debt. His only recourse was to the pawnshop, with the expectation of a crisis at the end of every quarter and the fear of the approach of winter when the coats and other clothes would have to be redeemed. But by July 1858 his financial crisis erupted in full force. He wrote to Engels: 'The situation is now absolutely unbearable.... I am completely disabled as far as work goes, partly because I lose most of my time in useless running around trying to make money and partly (perhaps a result of my feeble physical condition) because my power of intellectual concentration is undermined by domestic problems. My wife's nerves are quite ruined by the filth... .'so The doctor predicted an inflammation of the brain and recommended that Jenny be sent to the seaside, but even that would not help 'if the spectre of an inevitable and ultimate catastrophe pursues her'.51 Marx had applied to a loan society but all he had got out of it was a bill for £2 in fees. He enclosed a careful list of his debts compiled by Jenny, who was the one who dealt with the pawn-brokers, and including some still owed to Soho tradesmen, and finished: 'I have now made a clean breast of it and I can assure you that it has cost me no little effort. But I must be able to talk at least to one person. I would not wish upon my bitterest enemy to wade through the quagmire in which I have been sitting for the last eight weeks enraged by the additional fact that my intellect has been wrecked by the lousiest of situations and my work capacity completely broken.'52 Engels came to the rescue once again with a £60 advance and by August Marx had got down to work again.

By mid-September he could say to Engels that his manuscript for the two parts would go off 'in two weeks'.55 By the end of October he informed Engels curtly that the manuscript would not be ready 'for weeks'. The 'real reason' for this delay, he explained to Lassalle in November, was that 'the material lay before me; it was only a question of the

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form. But in everything that I wrote I could detect an illness of the liver.'54 It was important for the style to be good for it represented the result of fifteen years' research and 'the first attempts at a scientific presentation of an important view of social relationships'.55 By the end of November, however, Jenny was copying a manuscript to which Marx had added a chapter on commodities which was not in his original draft and expanded the section on money. By mid-December that manuscript would soon be ready but 'devil take me if anyone else could have been ready so early with such a lousy liver'.56 By the end of January the manuscript was in fact ready but could not be sent off 'because I have not even a farthing to buy a stamp and register it'.57 Marx's previous letter to Engels had continued the shocking denouement to the whole affair: 'The manuscript is about 12 printer's sheets long and - take a grip on yourself - in spite of its tide . . . contains N O T H I NG on Capital.'58 In other words, Marx had dropped the idea of publishing the second part on Capital simultaneously in spite of his previous insistence to Lassalle that 'this second part must appear simultaneously. The inner consistency makes it necessary and the whole effect depends on it.'59 Even when the manuscript was despatched, Marx's worries were not at an end: he suspected the authorities in Berlin of having confiscated his parcel and, when Lassalle still had not informed him of its arrival after two weeks, he was 'sick with anxiety'.60 When eventually it did arrive, the printing was much too slow for Marx: it took Duncker six weeks to produce the proofs. Even worse, two weeks after Marx had sent off the last corrected proof sheets, the arrival of an unfranked pamphlet by Lassalle, obviously given priority by Duncker, compelled Marx to pawn his last respectable coat to pay the necessary two shillings excess postal charge.

In the manuscript, which was finally published in early June, by far the most valuable part was the Preface which contained as succinct an account of the materialist conception of history as Marx ever produced. Marx opened the Preface with a statement of the scope of his 'Economics' and his progress to date. There followed a short piece of intellectual autobiography in which Marx stressed the importance of his journalistic work for the Rheinische Zeitung in giving him an insight into the importance of 'material interests' and 'economic questions'. He then withdrew into his study to examine Hegel's political philosophy The conclusion of this retreat was that

legal relations as well as forms of state are to be grasped neither from themselves nor from the so-called general development of the human mind, but rather have their roots in the material conditions of life, the sum total of which Hegel, following the example of the Englishmen and Frenchmen of the eighteenth century, combines under the name