David Harvey on Marx's Grundrisse

the country's obviously is a work that comes before Capital it's a preparatory work for Capital um why did you put it off and what made you what was the trigger for um for for writing a book on it now I felt it was uh yeah I I taught it quite a lot of times every time I taught it I felt different things struck me out of it it's such a rich sort of text but also a confusing one and one which is in for some parts incredibly boring so I really found it first off I wasn't feeling very secure about exactly what I would say in a companion and and and secondly I had to have the courage to say look don't bother with Pages you know 280 to 320 because this is just sort of Mark's whinging on about Prudence or something like that and it does not terribly interesting for the what what I think is is the real contribution of the text um so that was that was always in my mind that I would I'd like to do it and I'd done the grindery so a couple of times over the last 10 years and I thought well maybe I should and then came the lockdown and you know I had to have something to do during the lockdown and this was the only book you found in your library it was it was it was a perfect time to say well okay I can now sit down and every day I can't go into my office my office is closed the university is closed I'm closed out and I've got my groceries and I'm going to sort of try to interpret and understand it now actually this time going through uh I think I finally basically get it but it's it's been a long time and I'm sure there are plenty of things that people are going to say about I missed out and I I know I've missed the stuff out which is important and I'm sure I'm sure there will be a dender and I hope there will be a dender to it so it's not as if I'm gonna but also it did arrives at a certain point in my life when I kind of felt look I don't care if I get criticism to hell with it you know I I it was a certain Liberty that comes with the old age and you say well okay I can write by the helmet please and and and and what is important to this book but again it's as I mentioned earlier my perspective always was to try and make it comprehensible as possible to to to people and to try to to emphasize those features in the grundry so that are relevant to understanding our current condition and those were the sort of conditions I had on it and there's lots of technical kind of stuff that goes on which I don't think uh I I tended to eliminate so even though uh it's my book is what 400 and something other pages long and so somebody said it's a 400 page book about an 800 page book yeah a little portion between the original and the companion is is um is different from uh with capital um okay so the grundresser has a peculiar status in the history of Marxism because um because of its late publication obviously um in in German and then even later in in French and then in English um and um it has been an Italian and many other languages um it has been used as because of this late appearance I think and because of obviously some of the content of the book it's been um championed by some uh strands within Marxism particularly um the workers tradition in Italy as being almost more important than Capital uh and having containing insights which are considered to be uh even more significant than some of the insights and capitals so obviously the two things that are mentioned most often are the notion of the general intellect and the fragment on machines first of all what is your assessment of these uh of these particular takes on on the grundresser and secondly why did you choose because you know one of the distinctive things of your book is that you you kind of play down those things that are most well known about the grinder so why did you make that choice I I I don't think I did play them down well you don't consider that you don't put them in this you know you don't erect them as as some do as these kind of uh you know no no absolutely yeah essential contributions to Marx's work that uh you know one yeah well I I you know in terms of the relation to to Capital I I think in the grundry sir Marx is much more revealing of his methodological tactics in investigating the nature of capital um I I it it's like you're you're seeing the underground of capital so so to me it's not something that goes beyond the capital or is something special that kind it's it's it's the underground structure of capital that you're looking at so I can't read this now and then read capital in the same way as I would without reading this because I know what the inner workings are for instance I make a lot of Marx's use of the term totality circulation moments things of this sound this language is very strong in the grand Reser but you won't want to find the word totality in the the marks and the cat in in capital uh you sometimes find a hole and talk about holism and so on but it's it's very so what you're getting Capital it seems to me is Marx coming to the surface I mean he has this model of what a researcher should do you start with what's on the surface and you go deep deep deep underground until you get the basic theoretical Concepts and then you bring them back onto the surface and explain what is going on in the surface and and the grunder is going down down down Into the Depths and it's telling you what the kind of concepts are in the very very base people then get brought up in capital to to explain you know things like the Working Day and machinery and all the rest of it so I I think that is how I position Grand racer in relationship and uh to to to Capital uh so that that that is we are one one part of it um but the crucial crucial phenomena for me was that I suddenly started to realize that Marx is actually decomposing the totality of capital into different circulatory systems and it's either around page 400 when he says well there are three circulatory systems I want to look at the first uh is the circulation of uh of of capital as a whole and I have a sort of diagram of the total circulation of capital what's about he then says I need to talk about the circulation of Labor capacity and then he says I need to talk about the circulation of fixed capital and actually you can then go on from that and say well he actually um suggested you can't understand the circulation of fixed Capital without standing the credit system and so you need to understand the circulation of interest bearing Capital you can't understand that without understanding a theory of money so the state so so in fact uh the the linkages in the in the in the base if you like between these basic these basic circulatory processes are about trying to understand the totality uh and understanding it as a set of different circulatory systems I use the analogy of the human body and say well okay let's treat the human body as a totality we get a concrete abstraction the General Medical kind of description of what a human body contains and it contains different circulatory systems the heart pumps the blood the oxygen comes through the lungs energy comes through the digestive system control comes to the neurological system waste is taken care of by the Sydney by the you know and you have Medical Specialties coming up about you know the urologists and cardiologists and Pulmonary Specialists and so on so when you look at the analogy and say well Marx is beginning to look at Capital like that it's it's a it's a totality and there are different circulatory systems for instance the circulation of fixed capital is very different from the circulation of capital in general circulation of Labor capacity is different and they intersect with each other and this is where I kind of say that Marx is clear about this that he wants to understand Capital as he says as an organic totality but he says it's growing it's changing it's shifting it's it's it's it's it's in motion uh and it is therefore expanding and and therefore you're creating the World Market and you're you're going over space and you're doing Colonial practices and all of those kinds of things so so he tries to emphasize that so this is this is if you like the framework of it and you realize at the end what he's done in capital is to start with the study of money in the circulation of money it's a circulatory system on its own then Commodities then uh money is capital and then he's going to look at the circulation of Labor capacity and all of these circulatory systems support each other so one of my arguments is that you know somebody asked the question yesterday have you given up on production as being the the central issue my argument was well it depends you know which would you rather have die upon you your heart or your liver so it's it's a silly question you know you can only and Marx is very clear you can't understand production without understanding consumption and the production and realization are united uh they're a contradictory Unity he says in the grindery sir and so actually working class consumption starts to become important to the whole kind of circulatory process I mean Marx is clear along with Malthus that working class consumption can't absorb all of the value on the other hand working-class consumption is a hell of a chunk of of of of how the how the value is moving and and and if you suddenly cut off all of the all of the the the the wages all the production would be useless yeah so so you know so Marx is very clear about those relations and uh this to me is a very different way of of configuring how how an economy works and it's very full of course of stuff about contradiction so that you have circulatory process you have contradictory unities between production and consumption as opposed to identities which is you know important you have so and you have the circulation of Labor capacity which I find a fascinating kind of concept because and their Marx talks about the way in which the character of the worker is exhausted as soon as they become money holders and they go out and start spending their money on things then they're buyers and they change their role so in fact on a daily basis the worker has several different roles they play and then you kind of say if roles dictate Consciousness and there's a fragmented Consciousness comes out of this and you can get trade-offs and in fact were the capital says to the worker you put up with a totally job and you get enough money to have a happy life at home and that's the that's that that's what we're going to offer you of course it turns out not to be true but on the other hand when you start to look at this then then you have well what does a worker do when they become a buyer well they need a place to live who do they pay rent to and what what are the struggles which go on and then and of course to me this is very important because when I'm talking about urbanization I'm talking about all these struggles going on over housing and Healthcare and all this kind of stuff and and a lot of people would say oh well that's not really what Marxist you know Marx's Marx Marx was really talking about production you say well you know it's a bit like being a doctor and saying the only organ that really matters is the heart and yes it's true if if if if everybody who dies well their heart stops beating but that doesn't mean that the only cause of death is heart failure you know so I I think that again it gives a different kind of notion of of how the economy is functioning and and it's all very clear you know Marx is very clear about this in in the grindery sir uh in a way that he's not so clear about when when you're in capital but you know it's in the it's in the basement as it were these currents are in the basement when you're reading capital so that's why I find it uh such a fascinating text and I think this time when I started to emphasize the circulatory systems and the totality and the moments you really coming to something which is very very critical in terms of understanding marks and by the way an affair in volume two of La Vie quaterien has has quite a bit about totality and moments and and actually it's it's it's it's an interesting formulation so there was LaFayette we're trying to understand everyday life in the in through a theory of totality in moments and I'm I'm I'm sort of I've only discovered that recently by the way because I went back and I looked and I said oh yeah okay fine somebody somebody was sort of talking here but typical the fair if he gives you the idea and then walks away from it generally leaving you with no idea exactly how to use it but but I'm trying to use it so why do you think some people have got so excited about these passages on the general intellect and the fragment on machines and so on I don't know why they got so excited um I think it's because in grunderson because it's notes for himself Marx is giving more free reign to his imagination oh yes yeah definitely and then I I think that that that that passage where Marx is dealing with machine technology those passages are brilliant a lot of people who write about the general intellect fail for recognize the context in which Marx is talking about the general intellect the context is the circulation of fixed capital but you know fixed capital is not sexy so if you throw it out and you leave it aside but no fixed capital and it's the machine technology and the reason marks shift suddenly to the the general intellect in the social intellect is because the trajectory of technological changes is is Shifting dramatically I put I'll put it this way um uh technological change in the textile industry you know Along Comes somebody and they come up with a power loom and all this kind of stuff well they come up with the the cotton gin or they or in steel they come up with the Bessemer process in each one of these cases there's a production process going on which requires at some point or other an increasing productivity of Labor to be inserted within it but that expanding productivity of marks kind of says you know the power loom couldn't have occurred without the cotton gin so there's the necessity of that but all of this comes from inside of capitalist industrialism in other words the industries industrialist sees as a need and they set out and they find a motion to it but then there comes a point where technological change becomes generic as opposed to specific and the example which is a big one for Marx is a steam engine the steam engine is not connected to a particular thing it has multiple applications draining you know water out of the mines propelling my locomotives propelling machines you know all of those things so it's a generic form of Technology so it's not as if any particular industrialist came along and said oh hey I want to invent it uh what happens uh a steam engine no what happens is the steam engine gets invented and then it finds multiple uses the same would be true of computers for example computers get invented and then they have multiple uses all over the place so we end up with digital economies Etc so your computer is a generic form of Technology now who is going to create the generic forms of technology and Marx talks about how technology becomes a business and how technology is therefore emerging out of the creation of new new possibilities of Labor saving but the the creation of new products everything so technology actually moves from being a servant of industrial capitalism to becoming an avatar leading Cutting Edge of new production activity and that's why then the kind of knowledge which is being pervade is no longer the kind of knowledge that is tied to a Cotton Factory it's a kind of knowledge which is generic and social and that therefore the whole history of technological change under capitalism changes around when Marx was writing from something that was internal to the capitalist Enterprise to something that is coming from outside so very much what happens is that you come up with a new technology and you you know you see this in medicine for example they come up with a new medical technology and they go to the hospitals and they just say they've got to have this new technology it's not as if the people in the hospitals were kind of saying hey we need this new technology they suddenly find that that they need you know they're persuaded that there's new technology is going to be good for them so the whole whole dynamic of technological innovation shifts from the individual plant level to the generic level that's why he talks about social intellect because it's being drawn from you know people working in science and technology and and and interesting um there's a book I hate but by about slouching towards Utopia but one of the things the guy mentions which is correct is the one of the major things that Capital came up with was the research laboratory Bell labs and what does Bell Labs do you know or all of this what are the big think tanks do and it's all it's all you know so so that's why Mark seems this is the word General intellect because it's shifting where where technology is coming from and where technological change is coming from away from something that's internal to capitalist corporations is something that is actually floating and then is is imposed upon the capitalist corporations from without because at a certain point if you have the technology and I go to this Factory and I put the new technology in the factory and that factory becomes much more efficient the others the others will have to adopt that technology so it's it's it's generic and it's social and and he this also by the way affects the value Theory because the value Theory no longer attaches to what an individual laborer does it is the laboring mass that it becomes the object so again the technological Mass if you like the technological mass of Science and Technology this is this is what hung pins by the way the sort of transformation of language I mean in the 18th century industry was talked about in terms of Arts Matea rather than science and technology and it's that shift from Arts of betier to Science and Technology the Marx's acknowledging by saying now with the trouble with some of the literature about the general intact it makes it seem it's almost an idealist conception but somehow rather ideas magically changed or something like that well this is not what Marx is saying Marx is saying these these ideas are coming from a different area because the the role of technology is no longer individualized it's socialized and also the value theory is no longer individualized as socialized so you can end up with a situation which I describe in there of a firm that employs no labor whatsoever but which still receives its average rate of profit so this is a this is this has seen to me if you if you're reading if if you're reading the grindery so and you're recognizing that it's all about fixed capital and the general intellect is not something that can comes in as an idea it is something that is produced uh within the Dynamics of of what capital is about so I think that that for me was was why it's such an it's such an important phrase but uh but I know other people have used it in other ways and I I know and and Always by the way it's it's it's not understanding that this is about the circulation of fixed capital okay um what about pre-capless motor production and it's also another thing that people know about the grinder sub but um there's something you decided not to deal with because you felt it had already been dealt with by Hobbs bomb and others or you didn't have anything particularly to say on it or you have a choice when you're faced with with that you either go into it in great detail and yourself get back into the actual history and and so on or you kind of say look there is a well there was a pre-capitalist world which had certain function and I worked in a certain kind of way and many of these Technologies and so on were partially available the role of land shifts from this so there's lots of changes of role going on but one of the issues that I that I emphasize in the grindery sir is that Marx when he enters these situation always says okay there was land rent in feudalism but when land rent is charged under capitalism something completely different and there's a tendency to to say well you know there was Credit in ancient Sumer I mean it's just what David Graber was on about Michael Hudson too and and this is very interesting but what they don't know understanding is the rise of capital meant that credit that and so on actually I don't take on a completely different meaning uh within a capitalist mode of production and the same would be true in the state there are State forms which have existed but the capitalist state has a very specific form of the generic state of state state Theory so so again we have to pay attention to the very specific forms that land rent State and uh take under capital and not confuse and say they're just simply replicas of what existed back under in this pre uh pre-capitalist period And I think I think that literature is very interesting but I thought that people like hob spam and so on had enough to say about it speaking of that do you have a I mean there's been a Revival of interest in uh the late marks and his interest for non-capitalist social formations Russia obviously but even you know even when the guy goes to Algeria to recuperate he starts getting interested in Algerian history and so on um and you know there's been much debate about you know Marx and it's supposed eurocentrism and so on do you have a particular takeover View on that kind of debate that's happened yeah I think he he was put it this way he wasn't even mildly eurocentric I mean I think he was manchester-centric I mean volume one of capital is is a superb rendition of what's going on in Manchester industrialism and even at the time as I point out if angles father had a plant in Birmingham Capital would have read very differently because there you've got a small engineering firms producing you know uh machines and and guns and all those kinds of things and a completely different uh social uh construction of a labor force the the skilled labor force was very much more important in Birmingham than it was in and you know there's an interesting was that book by Foster on uh you know three different cities which we compared in terms of their class structure and Industrial structure and I think that sort of thing was was true of England at the time and I think that it's true also uh in general so I would I would argue that yes there are limitations that Marx has because his perspective is that and he says at a certain point he feels that Manchester industrialism is is the future of capital and he's holding up to the world their own future when he depicts Manchester industrialism well it may work in uh in Bangladesh and uh Shenzhen may work but I don't think it works very well as well so that's one of the limitations I think but you don't think he moves away from that uh later on oh later on in his life he began he begins to see that that there are actually all kinds of different labor systems are compatible with capital and uh Capital will take whatever kind of social system it finds including uh you know caste distinctions and we'll utilize them in certain ways so he starts to realize those sorts of things so much later in his life yes and I think that you know

Channel: Verso Books

Views: 3,912

Keywords: verso books, David Harvey, Marx, Marxism, Theory, Capitalism

Id: X3Nt4DHi278

Length: 27min 20sec (1640 seconds)

Published: Thu May 11 2023