From the series Principles of Marxism
In his Anti-Dühring, Engels dwells on the art of working with concepts
, explaining that concepts are the results in which experiences are summarised
. This art does not arise from innate gifts, intuition, or common sense, but rather depends on a general vision and a method of investigating reality, which Engels describes as real thought, [which] similarly has a long empirical history, not more and not less than empirical natural science
.
Commenting on this passage, Arrigo Cervetto wrote in February 1990: The thesis can be summarised in the formula of the necessity of theory. The results of experience are summarised in concepts, but without
.
the art of working with concepts
, of connecting them, selecting them, and comparing them, there is no theory
The Grundrisse notebooks represent Marx’s broad and systematic attempt to refine the art of working with concepts
in the specific field of political economy, developing his own method of analysis. This was not unfamiliar territory for Marx, who, thanks in part to his studies in classical economics, had embraced the materialist conception of history and begun his critique of political economy in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844; in his polemic against protectionism; in The Poverty of Philosophy, directed against Proudhon; in The Communist Manifesto, and in Wage Labour and Capital.
After the defeat of the proletariat in 1848 and the start of global expansion signalled by the new discoveries of American gold, Marx and Engels set themselves the task, in 1850, of providing a complete scientific treatment of the economic relations that form the basis of the overall political movement
. It was both a political choice and one dictated by struggle, requiring several years and several attempts before achieving the form of Capital. Without it, Cervetto comments, it would not have been possible to demonstrate how the law of motion of the socio-economic formation manifests itself in political dynamics
.
The main body of the Grundrisse (Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy, also known as the Economic Manuscripts of 1857-58) consists of seven notebooks, numbered and dated in chronological order, which Marx compiled between October 1857 and May 1858. The exception, within Notebook III
, is the section dedicated to Bastiat and Carey
— written before all the others in July 1857 — a short essay illustrating how the movement of socio-economic formation is reflected, in this case, in the political thought of two renowned economists, Henry Charles Carey, the Yankee
, and Frédéric Bastiat, the Frenchman
.
The text with which Marx intended to open the Grundrisse series is contained in an eighth notebook, Notebook M
, and is a draft of a methodological introduction of great interest. It was supposed to introduce the final and public version of the entire analysis, but Marx later decided to abandon it. We will return to these topics.
The start of work on the Introduction
, which was written in the last week of August 1857, coincided with the collapse of the New York Stock Exchange on August 22nd, which triggered panic in America and soon became a general crisis. The coincidence is striking, but given the speed of communication in that era, in the absence of the transatlantic telegraph, it was certainly not that episode that determined Marx’s decision to draw together the various threads of his economic investigations. Nevertheless, the crisis accelerated the urgency of the task that had matured over fifteen years of intense study.
After a long period of development, it was the political and military storms and ideological fanfare sweeping across Europe and the British Empire at the end of the Crimean War that made it urgent to provide the working class with a long-term perspective. A compass of theoretical and strategic independence was needed to enable the proletariat to face a tumultuous period marked by global capitalist development, the strengthening of bourgeois States, militarism, national ideologies, insurrectionist illusions, and pseudo-socialist fantasies. Capitalist development in Europe was littered with partial crises in the relationship between agriculture and industry, and in the development of a credit system affected by speculative fevers that reawakened the bourgeoisie’s fear of bankruptcy and a resurgence of social revolution.
The commercial crisis of 1857-58 occupies a special place in the history of economic crises. It was called a world crisis
by David Riazanov because of its unprecedented extent. For the German historian Hans Rosenberg, it was the first crisis of global dimensions
, a definition essentially accepted by Charles Kindleberger. The historian of the Bank of England, Harold Clapham, emphasises the simultaneous occurrence of the crisis in several countries.
The crisis broke out in quick succession in the United States, England, Hamburg, Scandinavia, and Central Europe, and its shock waves reached South America, South Africa, and the Far East. Spreading to all vital areas of the globe, the crisis confirmed Marx and Engels’ 1850 vision that, with the discovery of gold in California and Australia, the world market was expanding into all the regions washed by the oceans.
The world crisis cemented Marx’s fundamental scientific abstraction
, which, Cervetto points out, identifies even before surplus value, the typical character of the two classes of the capitalist mode of production, their universal, international character
. Every Marxist strategic framework for revolution stems from this vision. The world crisis of 1857-58 — and those that followed — is practical proof that global development and global crisis govern the historical pendulum of capital.
The world crisis of 1857 definitively buried David Ricardo’s denial of the possibility of a general crisis of capitalist production. The Old World was already shaken in 1856-57 by several partial crises. In September 1856, a financial crisis broke out simultaneously on the European continent and in England
. In 1857, Marx and Engels closely followed the Sepoy Revolt in India, the simultaneous resumption of the British war against Persia, the Second Opium War in China, the re-opening of the Eastern Question with the Sublime Porte
of the Ottoman Empire, and the growing pressure on the Habsburg Empire from Prussia, France, and Piedmont.
In the brief monetary panic
of 1856, Marx saw the end of the long period of prosperity that had followed 1848. For the upper classes, the war [in Crimea] has so far been the only cloud on their social horizon
. He predicted that 1857 would see the reappearance of the material conditions for the ideal tendencies of 1848
.
After the collapse of the New York Stock Exchange, Marx reminded Engels that another of their predictions was coming true: The American crisis — its outbreak in New York was forecast by us in the November 1850 Revue — is beautiful and has had immediate repercussions on French industry
. Engels replied in the same spirit: The American crash is superb and not yet over by a long chalk. [...] For the next three or four years, commerce will again be in a bad way. Nous avons maintenant de la chance
.
Marx and Engels saw revolutionary prospects reopening in Europe. Some of their reflections are lessons for the future of that revolution — which in fact did not occur — and for subsequent ones.
Engels, aware of the proletariat’s lack of preparation and judging that this time [...] it is a matter of life and death
, considered desirable an improvement
in the crisis from an acute to a chronic stage [...] A period of chronic pressure is needed to get the people’s blood up. [...] I shouldn’t care for anything to happen prematurely before Europe as a whole has been affected
.
In the meantime, he had plunged without delay
into his military studies. The Bolsheviks would remember this note during the two revolutions of 1917, when it was the imperialist war that spread the contagion
.
Marx and Engels studied the possibilities of a revolutionary wave, scrutinising the growing contrasts both between States and within them. Would protectionism prevail in America? Would France, in order to overcome its difficulties, throw itself into a military adventure? Would England be dragged into a continental war even though it was already militarily engaged in India and China?
Marx posed the deepest strategic question: bourgeois society had completed its historical task, the creation of the world market, at least in its broad outlines [...] For us, the difficult question is this: on the Continent revolution is imminent and will, moreover, instantly assume a socialist character. Will it not necessarily be crushed in this little corner of the Earth, since the movement of bourgeois society is still in the ascendant over a far greater area?
The crisis was overcome much sooner than expected, without producing the anticipated revolutionary movement. Over the past few weeks, the world has grown damned optimistic again
, wrote Marx. And Engels: Never before has such a violent wave receded so quickly
. Instead, the crisis strengthened national movements in Europe and sowed some of the seeds of the American Civil War.
For Marx and Engels, this magnified the need for the theoretical and organisational rearmament of the proletariat, for a scientific theory of bourgeois relations of production, and for an international workers’ organisation, intended as weapons of struggle in both the calms and the storms of capital.
The Grundrisse, followed by A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy [1859] and the International Workingmen’s Association in 1864, were the first steps.