From the series Principles of Marxism
The Grundrisse require a sustained effort of attention from the reader. Marx uses scientific abstractions and conceptual connections as analytical tools. In the Grundrisse, we shall follow the guiding thread of Marx’s method. Some critics, including those within the Marxist camp, see traces of Hegelian thought in Marx’s procedures in this work.
Marx and Engels responded to these jibes, clarifying their relationship with Hegel. In the Afterword to the second edition of Capital, Marx wrote: My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian but is its direct opposite. To Hegel, the [...] process of thinking, which, under the name of ‘the Idea’, he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos of the real world [...]. With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought
.
Marx adds that, faced with mediocre epigones who treated Hegel as a dead dog
, I therefore openly avowed myself the pupil of that mighty thinker, and even here and there, in the chapter on the theory of value, coquetted with the modes of expression peculiar to him
. Hegel was the first to present [the] general form of working [of dialectics] in a comprehensive and conscious manner. With him, it is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell. [...] In its rational form, [dialectics] is a scandal and abomination to bourgeoisdom [...] because it includes, in its comprehension and affirmative recognition of the existing state of things, at the same time also the recognition of the negation of that state, of its inevitable breaking up
.
Engels, in his unfinished review of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, pays tribute to Hegel’s monumental conception of history
: This epoch-making conception of history was a direct theoretical precondition of the new materialist outlook, and already this constituted a connecting link with the logical method as well
.
Marx, says Engels, succeeded in extracting from the Hegelian logic the nucleus containing Hegel’s real discoveries [...], and [in] establishing the dialectical method, divested of its idealistic wrappings [...]. The working out of the method which underlies Marx’s critique of political economy is, we think, a result hardly less significant than the basic materialist conception [...]. The critique of economics could still be arranged in two ways – historically or logically
. The historical form has the advantage of being grounded in reality but the disadvantage of having to follow its leaps and bounds and [...] zigzag[s]
and of not being able to explain the history of the economy without that of bourgeois society. The logical method of approach was therefore the only suitable one
.
Marx’s analysis is guided by a consistent materialist and communist view of reality and by a historical and dialectical method. Marx uses what is rational in the method that Hegel discovered
, just as he uses, to a certain extent, the categories and method of Ricardo’s political economy; but in both cases, he develops his own method. As he himself explains, by means of materialism, he turns Hegel’s method upright from standing on its head to standing on its feet. His abstractions – capital in general
, value in general
, money in general
, etc. – are not categories of the Mind (or Spirit); rather, they are simple concepts that everyone knows in their concrete forms, and precisely for this reason conceive them as things. It was a matter of showing that they are social relations, historically determined in their material forms. Marx accompanies the working class in understanding the world, the economy, politics, and international relations.
Even at this stage, in this vision of concepts, and even before arriving at the discovery of the laws of capital, Marx’s method of analysis is a political method and not purely economic. Thanks to this same vision, in contrast to the great classical economists, he shows that the laws of capital he discovered – the law of population, the law of concentration, of the average rate of profit, of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, etc. – are not eternal laws but historical laws valid for the era of the capitalist mode of production. For Marx, scientific abstraction functions as an analytical crowbar, a weapon in political struggle.
The complexities of the Grundrisse exemplify the difficulties of all Marx’s notebooks, which were intended to take on a different formulation, scope, and form in their final draft, whenever that was possible. When he had finished writing the Grundrisse, Marx himself wrote to Engels: The damnable part of it is that my manuscript (which in print would amount to a hefty volume) is a real hotchpotch, much of it intended for much later sections
. Marx concluded that it was necessary to compile an analytical index of his notebooks in order to access them more easily.
The introduction to the Grundrisse begins with the statement: To begin with, the subject to be discussed is material production. Individuals producing in a society – hence the socially determined production by individuals is of course the point of departure
.
The social man
in political economy was by no means a foregone conclusion. The archetypal figure for the great economists, Adam Smith and Ricardo, is the producer – the individual and isolated
hunter or fisherman. Rousseau’s Social Contract imagines society as a contract between subjects that are by nature independent
. Marx says these fantasies belong among the 18th-century Robinsonades
, referring to Daniel Defoe’s fictional character Robinson Crusoe, who, shipwrecked on a desert island, manages to reproduce his own conditions of existence by his own efforts.
For Marx, this false idea of the origin of homo economicus does not stem solely from a modern nostalgia for natural man. It is, rather, the anticipation of ‘bourgeois society’
, which grew after the 16th century and made giant strides in the 18th century, i.e., the society of free competition. In it, the development of productive forces and the division of labour, dissolving feudal social forms, seem to sever the natural ties of family, clan, tribe, or community to which the individual was previously chained. Unlike the castaway in the fable of Robinson, isolated [...] outside society
, the individual
in modern society is socially isolated, a man atomised by bourgeois social relations, alone within society
.
The real free individual of free competition is not the natural individual
, the solitary producer imagined by Ricardo, but an historical result
. And his tools of labour are historical results. No production is possible [...] without past, accumulated labour, even if this labour is merely the skill accumulated and concentrated in the hand of the savage by repeated exercise. Capital is among other things also an instrument of production, it is also past, objectified labour
.
The idealised figure of the producer – Robinson, Adam, or Prometheus – was inherited by Proudhon and other vulgar economists, who found in it the quintessence of the autonomous agricultural or urban producer of the 19th century, who became the social reference point for petty-bourgeois socialism
.
Having established this first distinction within political economy, between the natural man and the historical social man (Aristotle’s political animal), Marx introduces another distinction: social production is determined by the degree of development of society.
Production in general
is a reasonable abstraction
because it indicates a common feature of the different modes of production, but then it is necessary to distinguish this general category
in its different determinations
. When referring to this general and common element
one must not let this obscure the essential difference
. When we speak of production, we always have in mind production at a definite stage of social development, production by social individuals
. Economists often forget precisely this essential difference
; On failure to perceive this difference rests [...] the entire wisdom of modern economists who are trying to prove the eternity and harmony of the existing social relations
. When economists discuss production in general, bourgeois relations are quietly substituted as irrefutable natural laws of society in abstracto. This is the more or less conscious purpose of the whole procedure
.
In these initial passages, we see that Marx proceeds from general abstraction to the differentiation of social processes; he shows that the general category [...] is itself segmented many times over and splits into different determinations
. Marx sees unity and divergence in social processes. Elsewhere, he observes that it is an academic habit to reveal differences while losing sight of the unity of processes, while it is characteristic of bourgeois apologetics to emphasise the unity and uniqueness of the economic processes of history, concealing the differences.
Marx considers the processes analysed by political economy alongside production (distribution, exchange, and consumption), warning that they are not simply stages in a unidirectional movement of products from the place of production to consumption, but processes that interpenetrate one other.