Reading Marx's Grundrisse with David Harvey (PT1)

hello everybody good evening thank you all for coming to the People's forum we're very very excited to be hosting this class with David Harvey we had a wonderful session of Capitol Valley one volume one last semester and we're incredibly lucky that he is teaching this very important text with us here for the spring semester I have just a few logistical things to cover before we start one as I'm sure you know this class is being recorded and live stream 10 we're having viewers from actually all over the world joining in which is very exciting but if you do have any issues with that please come and see me that also means that if you would like to make any comment or question please raise your hand and wait for me or somebody else to bring you the mic there's not so many of us here so we can hear each other without it but the audio recording needs you to speak in the mic the other thing is if anyone has been unable to get a copy of the text please see me we have a few copies left in our library and you're welcome to borrow it for the duration of the course if you have any questions you can email me I think I have been emailing all of you or come see me any time and with that I'll pass it to Professor Harvey okay well thanks a lot and it's great to be back here and I'm looking forward to this session on the grundrisse er now as you've probably already discovered if you didn't already know the grundrisse ER is a very complicated kind of text it's a better set of notes that Marx was writing to himself a rather frantic time when it looked like the economy was collapsing in 1857 58 and Marx is writing as he said himself like a madman into the middle of the night trying to figure out a way to understand what is going on theoretically so it's it's a particular kind of text and and Marx has a different set of ways of writing there are some of some some of his writings that were prepared for publications such as a Volume one of capital and there he's very concerned to try to come up with a language which he thinks his audience will understand there are other forms of writing where he is really just writing for himself you know using his own concepts and his own thinking and and and he's really talking to himself and that is the form that the grundrisse takes there's an intermediate way of writing which is if you like a systematic discovery form of writing where mark starts off and works through very carefully the idea the sort of thing you will find in the manuscripts out of which angles constructed volume 3 of capital it's not as free-flowing as the grundrisse ER and as open as the grundrisse ER and it's more sort of targeted and that Marx is there kind of trying to discover what the foundational relations are but the grundrisse er is this mix of of thinking the Marx talking to himself so we have to try and understand his language he's not always consistent with himself he frequently changes conceptual apparatuses in the middle he switches it around he's often not sure exactly what where he's going and so it has a somewhat messy character to it but at the same time as it's messy it's also open in I think some pretty astonishing ways now there various ways you could imagine setting about reading this you could try to read it very closely systematically and that would take you rather a long time in which he would sort of wonder about everything on every page very very deep kind of kind of reading there are other readings which try to take a particular angle on Marx's thinking for instance philosophers would read it looking for the sort of way Mitch Marx is appropriating Hegel or spin oats and and the like and then there are other arguments going on for instance you will find he's frequently an argument with Prudhomme and to be honest I often find the food on discussion a little bit tedious and mouths just being rude about through Dahl and and generally trying to sort of dismiss much of what he is what Pradhan is talking about so what I want to do however is to sort of do an overview reading which is to sort of try to get through the whole text in you know twelve weeks and there's about nearly 900 pages of it and the idea is to sort of pick out those areas in the grundrisse aware Marx is really engaging with fantastic imagination and thoroughness into a whole series of very important topics and then in between there are these passages where Marx is just sort of playing around with numbers and trying to make this work with that where which are not very informative what I want to do is is to go across the whole text so that you know where things are and with a bit of luck you may end up with an annotated version of the text where if you want you if you want to go back to it you can see okay this is where he deals with this or this is where he deals with that and I like to do this overview because until you get to the last hundred pages or so there is a definite unfolding of the text I mean Marx is moving across a whole set of questions and there's a systematic underpinning to where to where he's going when you get to about the last hundred pages however they're essentially notes and copies of various texts that he's thinking of we're analyzing he didn't have a photocopying machine so he sat in the British Museum and and took down all of the copied out loads of stuff and and with that you don't know exactly what he would have done with it there are the raw materials for further investigations but sometimes a hint of what he's thinking about it but a lot of the time it's just sort of copying out details so what I want to do then is to do this overview we start from the beginning take large chunks of text some weeks I've assigned well over 100 pages to read you'll soon find that when I do that it's largely because there are whole chunks of they're really not that interesting and you can skim read some of it and try and find meaty bits and this is particularly true and the in the first part where Marx is talking about money and he does all kinds of things he's mainly arguing with the Pradhan East's and that of course is drawing him away from very coherent approach to the money question so one some weeks I'm giving you large chunks of text to look at so that you look at it and try to figure out what are the interesting things and what what the theme is in the hundred pages and what what ideas come out of it so that's going to be the style if you like and it's largely going to be made up of me talking way through the text and you following along I hope that if there are elements which we're coming across in the text and things that I'm saying which you're not following then you just have to put your hand up and we're getting the microphone and have a little bit of discussion but most of the discussion I'd like to leave for some towards the end and then we can talk through what some of the ideas are and how important these ideas are now the email that was sent out suggested that you read the first part the introduction and I'm going to just kick straight in and start talking about what the introduction is doing and really there are there are four parts to this introduction the first couple of pages is about individual in independent individuals and he here takes on the question of how do we understand the individual and individualism and Marx has a very specific approach to this and a very critical approach of liberal theory this is encapsulated by him starting off and saying that he's gonna criticize the body cause the unimaginative conceits of the 18th century Robinson AIDS now in capital those of you familiar that text will know that he takes on the Robinson Crusoe myth and the Rosen Crusoe story upon which many political economists of the 17th and 19th century actually rested their economic theory just for your interest if you feel like reading novels then actually reading Robinson Crusoe is is it is interesting it's the kind of thing that I read as a kid and never you know we all Britain be already that sort of thing and as Mark says in capital it's astonishing there's Robinson on the island wondering what to do and he's he recovers ink and a pen and a ledger and he sits down and he starts doing double entry bookkeeping and this is therefore presented as a natural way in which somebody in an isolated situation would actually understand the world and of course Marx is laughing about it and sort of saying you know actually he's really understanding the world because he's brought with him in the ship wreck the whole imagination of a 17th or 18th century bookkeeper and but the point about this is that 18th century thinking about the individual was to naturalize the individual and with Rousseau you have this idea that there is the noble savage a noble savage gets together with other noble savages and they have a contract and they they make a society so so the individual is seen as somehow other the natural unit upon which political theory should be constructed Marx actually turns this the other way around and says well the natural unit was not the individual that was the group the band the tribe or whatever and it took a certain kind of society to create a situation in which the individual could start act as an entrepreneur as an individual and the individualism therefore is a product of a creation of a certain kind of society now this is politically very important because what we find is that the kind of the right-wing political theory is going to sit and say okay we have to protect individual liberty and of course Marx is seen as one of the chief offenders against individual liberty because he's supposed to be in favor of collective action Marx's point however is that no he's very much in favor of the individual but you can't get that kind of individual and individualism without collective action so in a sense it turns the whole kind of liberal Theory upside down and says it's not the individual proceeds Society the individual arises out of the construction of kind of society which makes individualism probable and possible and I think it's important politically to be able to demonstrate that that Marx has an actual actual interest in individual liberty and freedom and that the high point of his politics is precisely the creation of a world in which there's a great deal of individual liberty and freedom it's not about curtailing it it's about saying we need to create collective possibility so that individual liberty and freedom can be available to all and this is a theme that is actually opened up here right at the beginning as he says at the bottom of the first page that we have to look at the existence of the individual not as a historic result but as history well the the Robinson aid so on think of it not as a historic result but its histories point of departure as the natural individual appropriate to their notion of human nature not arising historically but posited by nature so it's seen its its naturalizing individualism and then viewing it as if you like a species being species essence that that becomes critical so and he says on page 84 only in the 18th century in civil society do the various forms of social connectedness confront the individual as a mere means towards his private purposes as the external necessity but the epic which produces this standpoint that of the isolated individual is also precisely that of the hitherto most developed social from this standpoint general relations the human being is in the most literal sense a fluid achill animal not merely a gregarious animal but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society so the the individuation that creates a situation in which individual entrepreneurial ISM become as possible is a social product in a historical product it's not a natural order at all and as Marx cheerfully says there's a lot of twaddle about all this in political theory and we have to get it the right way around but I think you can see the political importance of this and what I would like to do is to ask you when you're reading through the grundrisse or to watch out for those times where marx comes back to this theme of what is it that founds the possibility of the individual and individualism and how is that sociality constructed that allows for the production of the individual and so on so that's really just the first couple of pages which which is if you like an item in itself and this then leads him into a general discussion about production and the like and he starts off on 85 by saying whenever we speak of production what is meant is always production at a definite stage of social development production by social individuals and then kind of says you know but all societies engaged in some form of production and we therefore have to look very carefully at what all of those different societies have in common so he kind of says modern boys were production and that is indeed our particular theme is a specific kind of production which can be differentiated from other forms of society where production means something rather different but there are certain commonalities and he looks at these commonalities by setting up this idea of production in general but the production in general he said is an abstraction but a rational abstraction insofar as it really brings out and fixes the common element and that saves us repetition and so there are commonalities in production from one historical situation to another so the way he sets this up then is to say well let's think about production in general which is production across all different forms of society mister then leads him to say on page 86 if there's no production in general then there is also no general production production is always a particular branch of production agriculture cattle raising manufactures etc or it is a totality now this term totality is I think terribly important and in reading the grundrisse er you you have to recognize that Marx is always thinking in terms of the totality and the particular moments he's looking at certain parts of the totality but the totality becomes significant so he introduces it then on page 86 he talks about it round down the page that production is not only a particular production it is always a certain social body a social subject which is active in greater or Sparsit totality of branches of production and again production in general particulars of production totality of production and then further on he then kind of says this the general part consists or is alleged to consist of conditions without which production is not possible I in fact to indicate nothing more than the essential moments of all production to two words here production as a totality and moments and production now the easiest way I think I couldn't deal with that is to is to use the little diagram which I have you've all got hold up which is which which is which is this diagram beautifully laid out drawn by my good friend Miguel here who but the point here is that marks sets up the idea of capital as a totality and what you see here is a set of relations if we start at the very bottom of the argument you've got money capital which is money which is being used as capital and the capitalists takes that money and converts that money into commodities particularly means of production and labor power and then the capitalist as owner of means of production and of labor power takes that into the production process and produces a new commodity and then that new commodity is taken into the market and sold for money now what's happened is you've gone from money to commodity to production to commodity to money but what happens in the moment of production is that the value of all of the commodities which have been bought the labor power means of production are reproduced through a labor process at the same time as a surplus value is also produced that is an extra amount of value is produced and that extra amount of value is then embodied in the commodities which are produced and it's then goes into the market where the value of the commodity is realized in money form so you've gone back to the money form but now it's money plus more money which is the profit so the surplus value which is produced in in production then produces the profit now the monetary form in in sales consumption that conversion that monetization of that occurs through selling in the market entails consumption behind it but the money is then distributed so you go over to the third area in which some of it goes as wages to the worker and those wages come back and have spent to buy commodities which then go back to the reproduction of labour power and bring the laborer back into production some of it is goes to industrial profit of the person who is involved in doing all of this but some of it is also passed to the merchant capitalist who helps with the buying and selling of the product of the commodities some of it goes to the landlord his rent and some of it goes to the the banker as interest or something of that kind and some of it is taken as taxes so you get these different different moments of investment production which is the first red box then there's realization of value or the market which is the second and the third is distribution now these are different moments in this overall process all right and Marx is kind of saying the totality of what capital is about is really captured by this sort of thing now there are various ways in which you could draw this I mean I'm not saying this is the only way you can do it and in fact there are many other ways you could you could do it but I'm trying to give you the idea of a totality this is a picture a mental construction if you like of a totality in which capital is circulating through these different moments and then comes back and circulates again so the different moments in the total and and become significant and the way mark sets this up is to kind of say look we have to understand of production consumption distribution reinvestment exchange and all the rest of it our moments within the totality and one of the problems of classical political economy was that it didn't have a good sense of the totality it would take each one of these elements and treat it as somehow other autonomous whereas mark says they're not autonomous they are in relation to each other you cannot talk about production without talking about consumption and realization you cannot talk about that without talking about distribution you have to talk about all of these elements as they flow in to each other so this language of totality and moments it's something that you will again find flows throughout a lot of what is going on in the grundrisse I Marx often doesn't come back and say okay I'm talking about the totality he sometimes does but the idea of totality and moments is there so when you're reading what he's saying you've got to say well where am i in the totality and and and what part of the totality we're looking at here am i looking at this moment or am i looking at that moment and and and why is Mark saying that I can't understand that moment without understanding its relationship with all of the other moments but when you think of this this totality then you see why that is the case and this idea of totalities and and and so on it comes back again and again sometimes like I say explicitly for instance let me find a this is one of those moments where I probably won't be able to find it we're marks comes back yeah if you go you go to text you can go to page 278 and you'll see marks talking about while in the completed bourgeois system every economic relation presupposes every other in its bourgeois economic forum and everything positive is thus also a presupposition this is the case with every organic system this organic system itself as a totality has its presuppositions there are presuppositions even with respect to the totality and its development to its totality consists precisely and supported subordinating all elements of society to itself or in creating out of it the organs which it still lacks this is historically how it becomes a totality the process of becoming this totality forms a moment of its process of its development so this is the kind of framework which is coming coming coming back the the analogy here is with an organic system and this is going to crop up in these passages - so okay keep that in mind but then start to follow Marx when he says look I'm now going to look at the question of production and I'm going to look at it through the lens of how classical political economy has set it up and classical political economy tended to set up these categories so he says let's look at the categories the classical political economy looked at they looked at production and a doctor distribution essentially they're treated as separate the classical political economists look to production and consumption and then ask the question what is more important here and on page 89 he says this he says well when we look at the various categories which the economists line up them what we see is something like this that this is on page 89 production creates the objects which correspond to the given needs distribution divides them up according to social laws exchanged further parcels out the already divided shares in accord with individual needs and finally in consumption the product steps outside this social movement and becomes a direct object and servant of individual need and satisfies it in being consumed consumption takes goods out of this totality they disappeared we eat it and it disappears so consumption is the moment where something has been created but then disappears in this system cellmark's production appears at the point of departure consumption as the conclusion distribution and exchange as the middle which is however itself to fold since distribution is determined by society and exchanged by individuals distribution determines the relation in which products fall to individuals exchange determines the production in which the individual demands the portion allotted to him by distribution thus production distribution exchange and consumption form a regular syllogism production is the generality distribution and exchange the particularity and consumption the singularity in which the whole is joined together this is admittedly a coherence but a shallow one I mean classical political economy saw there was relationships but it's a shallow one it's not the way he's laying it out in this kind of flow diagram the opponents of the political economists she says approach the political economists view and tend to object to the way in which production is privileged in this system this accusation as to what is top dog in the system as it were and what is more important than the other and me in the system is based precisely on the economic notion that the spheres of distribution and of production are independent autonomous neighbors or that these moments were not grasped in their unity so Marx is going to say when you view it from the standpoint of the totality you see that these things are flowing into each other production is not production without flowing into consumption consumption doesn't work unless you get distribution distribution doesn't work you know so okay it's like it's like if you ask the question is production more important but in this flow within the totality is production more important than distribution and Marx's answer is he wouldn't ask that question it's like saying is your liver more important than your heart doesn't make any sense you know so so that's why this organic analogy starts to become rather important so Marx then sets up and he looks at how of classical political economy looks at consumption and production and there are two forms of consumption which you can see again in this diagram one is a formal consumption which is final consumption where product is eaten worn or used thrown away or whatever and the other is a line of production of means of production which flow back into the system so there is says marks a category about two-thirds way down page 90 of productive consumption now what's more important final consumption or productive consumption in particular situations will find that this distinction between final consumption and productive consumption is terribly important for instance in the crash of 2007 2008 Chinese export industries lost their market in the United States final consumption collapsed so all of the industry is producing final consumption we're going bankrupt millions of people we've been thrown out of work because final consumption was not working so what did the Chinese do they switched all of their energies into productive consumption that is they built infrastructures they built railroads they built highways they built you know they invested in new plant and equipment infrastructures there was a proposal in this country to do the same thing but there you know at the time the Republicans wouldn't allow that you know because that would create deficits and things but the point is that there's a distinction between production final consumption and productive consumption and that distinction again in a flow of this kind within the totality you can see you've got some options the final consumptions not working okay but let's do the productive consumption let's get into that circuit but the way this looks to classical political economy is that what it does is it actually starts to bring production and consumption together as if they are part and parcel of each other production he says is also immediately consumption consumption is also immediately production that is the relationship between production and consumption is a tautology and the tautological qualities of the economic theory become rather powerful for instance one of the big tautological precepts something called sales law which says that since every purchase is a sale and every sale is a purchase that can't be an access of purchases or sales they're always in equilibrium and if they're always in equilibrium then you know you can't have a general crisis and sales law dominated economic theory from Ricardo right the way through to the 1930s and Keynes when everybody started to say this is nonsense to say there can't be a general crisis because we're living in one and so say his law got overthrown as it were in the 1930s the same thing occurred by the way in the in the financial services since every credit of the debt and every debt as a credit that can't be an excess of debts or credits it's what's called the efficient market hypothesis which says basically you don't want to regulate anything you've got to leave everything alone because the only thing that will get you messed up so it's because the market will clear and in 2007 2008 it didn't clear so the tautology and the tautological formulation is a real problem in economic theory and Marx is talking about that tautology very directly here and this is a however there is a certain truth to the proposition of the relationship between production and consumption as he says a railway on which no trains run hence which is not used up not consumed is a railway only in potentiality so what he does then is to say look let's look at how the The Economist set things up he says because consumption creates the need for new product production that is creates the ideal internally compelling cause production consumption creates the motive for production it also creates the object which is active in production as its determinants aim it is clear that production offers consumption it's external object it is therefore equally clear the consumption ideally posits the object of production as an internal image as a need as drive and his purpose so he's looking at production and consumption in in the way in which classical political economy looked at it and then saying well okay what this does is to produce a following situation and he outlines these on page 93 production is consumption consumption is production you can have consumptive production or you can have productive consumption the political economists call both productive consumption but then make a further distinction the first figure is as reproduction the second as productive consumption all investigations into this recognize that relationship between production and consumption the second point however is that one appears as a means for the other is mediated by the other without production no consumption without consumption no production this identity figures in economics in many different forms and then the third point is not only is production immediately consumption and consumption immediately production not only is production a means for consumption and consumption the aim of production but also each of them apart from being immediately the other and apart from mediating the other in addition to this creates the other in completing itself and creates itself as the other very important idea the other is the completion of itself so what Marx is doing here is kind of saying okay classical political economy analyzed it this way I'm now beginning to develop some of my own ways of looking at things and I understand this immediate identity this mediated position and then this creation of consumption the completion of consumption and the act of production and the like and this of course is frequently cited in economics in terms of relation of demand and supply and the equilibrium between demand and supply and he then actually quotes say on page 94 and then he says the important thing to emphasize here is only that whether production and consumption are viewed as the activity of one or many individuals they appear in any case as moments of one process production and consumption are different moments of one process we don't know exactly what that process is but that's part of what Marx wants to uncover and this then leads him to look at distribution and production and he does it in exactly the same way he analyzes the way in which distribution is a form of production and production effects distribution and why it is that the structure of distribution is completely determined by the structure of production distribution is itself a product of production but it is altogether an illusion deposit land in production ground rent and distribution and that therefore production and distribution are in a similar relationship to production and consumption now one of the things that that that happened in classical political economy was there was a tendency to understand production as being prior and privileged and that prior privilege really meant that it was natural and again we come back to the naturalness versus the social construction it is natural and because it is natural human beings cannot radically transform production distribution is not natural its social so we actually get then a concept of socialism which is that of John Stuart Mill and many of the Ricardian sand which we have to this day which is socialism is about distribution it's not about reorganizing production you can't touch production because it's natural and it's given but you can do something with distribution and he says under 97 it is said that since production must begin with a certain distribution of the instruments of production it follows a distribution at least in this sense precedes and forms a presupposition of production then the reply must be that production does indeed have its determinants and preconditions which form its moments comeback concept a moment comes in right the question raised above raised above all reduce themselves in the last instance to the role played by general historical relations in production and their relation to the movement of history generally so Marx is going to challenge the idea the production is natural yes there are natural moments in it but it is a social organization and social and it is socially important of course one of the things that Marx is going to talk about is very much this push for understanding the revolution in the new Brahma production which is going to be foundational for how we can think about the construction of socialism or communism so Marx goes on in this kind of way and I'm not going to go through all of the ways in which the other creates the other and this flows into that and that flows into this but I think you're getting the point but he comes to the conclusion which is on page 99 where it says the conclusion we reach is not that production distribution exchange and consumption are identical but that they all form the members of a totality distinctions within a unity production predominates not only over itself in the antithetical definition of production but over the other moments as well the process always returns to production to begin anew yeah you always come back into production that exchange and consumption cannot be predominant is self-evident likewise distribution is distribution of products while as distribution of the agents of production it is itself a moment of production so the distribution of the means of production is of course foundational for how production is organized so to say that production creates distribution is also to say that the distribution of the means of production is actually foundational for the organization of production so the class relations which exist in production a definite production thus determines a definite consumption distribution and exchange as well as definite relations between these different moments notice this idea the moments coming back in again so the moments within the totality admittedly however in it's one-sided form production is itself determined by the other moments for example if the market ie the sphere of exchange expands then production grows in quantity and the divisions between its different branches become deeper a change in distribution changes production eg concentration of capital different distribution of population between town and country etc finally the needs of consumption determine production mutual interaction takes place between the different moments this is the case with every organic whole could use the word totality this is the case with every organic totality mutual interaction takes place between the different moments so when you construct a theory of the totality of the Sothis portrayed in this diagram what you're going to do is to construct a situation in which there's going to be mutual interaction going on right throughout this whole system all of the moments are in interaction with each other yes it is true that production dominates over others from certain perspective from another perspective you see that distribution dominates over production I like this system in part because it also tells you something else where and why this system might get in trouble why might it run into crises and you can see that Christ he's gonna arise at any one of the moments if something goes wrong at the moment realization then all of the other moments are dead in the water they can't be completed the other cannot can be completed if there's a strike and all production comes to an end then there is an effect right throughout the whole system so this is a these passages here is to try to read what classical political economy was doing through the lens of the totality and the moments and to see that classical political economy was not that they weren't idiots they were struggling to understand what was going on but they were doing it from a perspective which in effect inhibited the full explication of what was going on because they had did not have the concept of the totality and they did not have this concept of moments within the totality so when you approach the economy with this totality and moments then you start to see things in a very different light so that's the second part of this chapter the third part is the method of political economy now it's very rare for Marx to write about the method of political economy so he should pay close attention to what he does right here because you know you couldn't you can figure out what the method of political economy is from what he does but it's very rare that he ever tries to explain to you you know in words what it is that he does but here he tries to talk a little bit but again it's from an angle and the angle is from a critique of classical political economy so when he talks about the method of political economy it's not his own method of political economy so much as it is really talking about the method of political economy which is exhibited in the works of the political economists and he says well when you turn to the works of the political economists what do you see what you see that you the starting point of classical political economy is what is cause the real precondition to begin in economics is you start with the population which is the foundation and the subject of an entire social act of production so this is what the classical political economists start with now he doesn't explain here why they start with this and because he's so critical of it that you would think it would be obvious why I shouldn't start with this because he then goes on to say the population however on closer examination this proves false now this can be the foundation the population is an abstraction if I leave out for example the classes of which it's composed these these classes in turn are an empty phrase if I am not familiar with the elements on which they rest eg wage labour capital etc these latter in turn presuppose exchange division of labor prices etc for example capital is nothing without wage labor without value money price thus if I were to begin with the population this would be a chaotic conception you're not gonna be able to get anywhere you start with in fact if you'd begin with the population the only thing you can do is to move analytically to break it down into very smaller and smaller simple concepts and what you imagine you're doing is that you're taking the concrete which is a population from Marx says it's not concrete it's an abstraction but you think you're taking the concrete and then you're beginning to actually arrive at abstractions by gradually probing in deeper and deeper into the nature of the population and from this we end up move analytically towards ever more simple concepts from the imagined concrete which is the population towards ever thinner abstractions until I had arrived at the simplest determinations that is you've got down to say I don't know individuals of households or whatever and then he says from there the journey would have to be retraced until I had finally arrived at the population again but this time note as the chaotic conception of a whole but as a rich totality of many determinations and relations that is you can understand the population but if you assume you understand it and then sort of use it you're going to get things very wrong because what you need is a way of reconstructing what is the population is on the basis of the abstractions and the many determinations so that the population then is going to be considered as a rich totality of many determinations and relations the former that is taking the part of the population and then dissecting it into smaller and smaller things is the path historically followed by economics at the time of its origins the economists of the 17th century always begin with the Living Hall with population nation state several states but they always conclude by discovering through analysis a small number of determinant abstract general relations such as division of labour money value etc as soon as these individual moments have been more or less firmly established and abstracted there began the economic systems which ascended from the simple relations such as labor division of labor need exchange value to the level of the state exchange between nations and world market the latter is obviously the scientifically correct method the concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations hence unity of the diverse it appears in the process of thinking therefore as a process of concentration as a result not as a point of departure even though it is the point of departure in reality and hence also the point of departure for observation and conception along the first path the full conception was evaporated to yield an abstract determination and along the second the abstract determinations lead towards a reproduction of the concrete by way of thought now if you take for example the diagram that I've been working with what the diagram does is to try to illustrate how we can actually attempt to reproduce the concrete activities which occurring within a capitalist economy by starting with the abstract determinations and moving towards the concrete the method of rising from the abstract to the concrete says Marx is only the way in which thought appropriates the concrete reproduces it as a concrete in the mind but this is by no means the process by which the concrete itself comes into being how was this system which were deciding here created was created historically bit by bit now the concrete totality and he said is a totality of thoughts concrete in thought in fact a product of thinking and comprehending but not in any way a product of the concept which thinks and generates itself outside or above observation and conception a product rather of the working up of observation and conception into concepts the totality as it appears in the head as a totality of thoughts is a product of a thinking head which appropriates the world and the only way it can a way different from the artistic religious practical and mental appropriation of this world the real subject retains its autonomous existence outside the head just as before namely as long as the heads conduct is merely speculative merely theoretical so Marx is arguing that in the history of capitalism but the sort of totality he's representing and this in the three volumes of capital in the head in his out of his head a product of his thinking is connected and arises out of a historical process which has created something like this for example this system could not work unless there was a free exchange therefore this system will only work in a situation where you have private property rights exchange relations and all the rest of it those have been historically constructed and historically imposed and you build the society over time and as he said in that early you know exercises suggested the totality comes into being so the totality doesn't pre exist and the totality is not the simple product of thought but what the thinking head tries to do is to reconstruct what the reality is out there and to and this is what political economy market political economy is about is trying to reconstruct the totality that is being constructed through daily life and daily practices in the market and you know commodity exchange and and production activity and all the rest of it you're trying to reconstruct that in in in the head so I guess the way we should be really thinking about this mister is to recognize that there there's this dialogue I hesitate to use the words dialectic but dialogue if you like between how something is being represented as a totality and the process is the social processes that are producing totalities and sustaining totalities or dissolving totalities so it's not as if the totality is something which is you know solid its perpetually in the process of modification transformation and as it is being transformed so the conceptual apparatus that we use to represent it also has to transform otherwise what we do is we apply our concept of a totality to a situation where the totality is not working that way anymore it's working in some alternative form which is the kinds of issues which arise when people start to say well you know financialization changes everything the totality doesn't look like this anymore in fact there's a little thing in there which is to call the circulation of interest-bearing capital interest-bearing capital does not circulate in the same way as what Marx called normal capital or industrial capital it actually circulates in a different way interest-bearing capital doesn't have to go through production in order to claim it's part of the surplus I mean banks can lend the landowners to buy land banks can lend to merchant capitalists banks can lend to workers so that they have credit cards and they can get mortgages to buy a house or something so banks don't have to go through production in order to earn interest the way Marx has set this up is you have to go back through production what happens when a large segment of the economy is not going back through production so the totality then is to begin with this is not a this is not a complete representation of the totality even in Marx's time it's a simplified version it's helpful in some regards in other words in other respects it doesn't deal with everything that needs to be dealt with by any means but the task of economics and economic theory is to try to capture the totality and capture the nature of the relations between these different moments and it makes sense to kind of say well okay there's a moment of production as a moment and realization there's a moment of consumption there's a moment of distribution there's a moment of reinvestment and these are the moments are very important so this is the solution this is if you like but then ELISA a kind of a very interesting argument which is about the order in which the cat arrays should be presented and I'm 106 at the bottom says in the succession of the economic categories as in any other historical social science it must not be forgotten that they're subject here modern bourgeois society is always what is given in the head as well as in reality and that these categories therefore Express the forms of being the characteristics of existence and often only individual sides of this specific society this subject and that therefore this society by no means begins only at the point where one can speak of it as such this wholes for science as well it will shortly he says be decisive for the order and sequence of the categories for example nothing seems more natural and to begin with ground brentwood landed property since this is bound up with the earth historically the relationship the earth has a distributional form regulating production and who has access to the work earth and how they claim products from it about the earth is the source of all production and all being so we should start with the first form of production of all more or less settled societies agriculture but nothing he says will be more erroneous in all forms of society there is one specific kind of production which predominates over the rest whose relations thus assigned rank and influence to the others and then he talks about you know some of the ways in which historically many of these categories have been set up what Marx does here is to say the historical order in which these categories came into became significant has nothing to do with the situation in a fully developed bourgeois society of where these categories would lie and this is this creates a very interesting kind of question because money for example precedes capitalism credit and that precede capitalism landed property and extractions from landed property precede capitalism but what happens in a in the bourgeois form of capitalist society is that all of those categories get given a different meaning because they become absorbed within the totality and as the totality forms so it reconfigures of course what will get as much says in here we will get these anti diluvian histories he calls them of these different categories that they existed they've long pre-existed and they can carry over and be residual so there'll be feudal residuals the things that look like how it was in feudal times but there was funeral residuals are not the same as how for instance rent and interest exists within a bourgeois society in other words the sorts of credit and debit definitely and debt but you might find in ancient Sumer or in Roman Empire or anything like that it's completely different from the way in which debt and interest and saw him work in a bourgeois capitalist society similarly it would be true of the nature of rent that the landed property and the extraction of land rents and feudal society was a very common practice but the role of land rent under capitalism becomes radically different gets transformed so you don't start the analysis of capitalist society with the category of land rent you would start the analysis of feudal society with the category of land rent but not see what I'm saying so this so so Marx is kind of gonna gonna say as the totality forms so it actually gives an entirely different meaning to the moments of which the category is constructed and money enters in to a capitalist society and takes on very distinctive forms and we'll see that next week the rent takes on very distinctive forms under capital interest and Finance and one of the problems I have with something like David Graeber book on 5000 years of rent as each it treats of debt is that he treats debt in ancient Sumer as a now as no different in principle from debt today whereas debt is completely different in Marx's reading and kind of systems we've got a look at this for instance there was no market in debt but now he got debt market somewhere zoo so and and and that creation right now has a completely different configuration and a different function than that creation had in ancient Sumer so Marx says look ground rent cannot be understood without capital but capital can certainly be understood without ground rent capital says is the old dominating economic power of bourgeois society it must form the starting point as well as the finishing point and must be dealt with before landed property after both have been examined in particular their interrelation must be examined that is the again the method of moments is always there it would therefore be unfeasible and wrong to let the economic categories follow one another in the same sequence as that in which they were historically decisive their sequence is determined rather by their relation to one another in modern bourgeois society which is precisely the opposite of that which seems to be their natural order or which corresponds to historical development the point is not the historic position of the economic relations in the succession of different forms of society even less is it their sequence in the idea he then gives a bit of an explanation as to why the economists approach the world in the way they did starting with population and and why they haven't got their categories straight either and he puts it this way the concept of national wealth creeps into the work of the economists in the 17th century continuing partly with those of the 18th in the form of the notion that wealth is created only to enrich the state and that its power is proportionate to this wealth this was still unconsciously hypocritical this was the still unconsciously hypocritical form in which wealth and the production of work proclaimed themselves as the purpose of modern States and regarded these states henceforth only as means for the production of wealth ok you had a situation in the 17th and 18th centuries the state has become a sovereign state under the Treaty of Westphalia earlier so you have sovereign states sovereign states are interested in accumulating wealth because of accumulation of wealth is accumulation of power and if they're in contest with other states they want to accumulate more wealth more power so early economics was was really built upon the idea of giving advice to statesmen as to how to make your state wealthier and more powerful that's why they started with population because they started with the population of the state and they were going to end up with the population because they were going to you know tell the royalty or the Chancellor's or whoever it was here's what you've got to do if you want to become wealthier so the early schools of economic theory physiocrats kind of said wealth comes from the land from agriculture because of the relation to nature it's foundational it's therefore natural and all wealth comes from that relation to nature given in agriculture so the physiocrats said that's where it comes from the mercantilist said no it comes from trade and Marx is saying well no it comes from production and in particular the organization of capitalist production and Marx wasn't the only one saying that I mean this is what Adam Smith was saying now in giving advice to the Statesman of course one of the things that the economists were quickly doing was to say look if if you want to be if you want to become wealthy then the best way you can become wealthy is to have the state adopt a position of laissez faire get out of the way get out over a regulation stop regulating things and then individual initiative and entrepreneurial and if you liberate the animal spirits of the entrepreneurs and you liberate individuals and this then comes back also to individualism that is the state was not opposed to individualism the state through the political economists was saying mobilize individual creativity and innovation and entrepreneurialism and all the rest of it and then you will get the creation of immense wealth and the state will be able to tax that wealth and the state will become extremely wealthy and that we still have that form of argument around right I mean this is what the whole neoliberal thing was about was basically saying you know we've regulated too much we've got to deregulate everything and then we've become very rich and then but it's interesting that the economists themselves frequently did not necessarily agree with the production of a great deal of social inequality I mean Adam Smith basically would say to the leaders of the state apparatus would say look once you become wealthy what you do with your wealth is another question and if there is a great deal of inequality or poverty or something like that you may appropriate some of the wealth and redistribute it which is why you then get the distributive socialists who come after Ricardo so you get the Ricardian distributive socialists John Stuart Mill was one of the great advocates of this but again it's about distribution not about production and you can see why it was that the eighteenth-century economists were very much concerned with the question of free production because this was what was going to bring wealth privilege and power in rivalry with other other European states so that this was where things were out but then we then come to another feature of the grundrisse er which is page hundred mate and we're going to find this framework very frequently cropping up which is marks every now and again says well there's this but that doesn't belong here and what is clear is that one of the questions that's animating marks in his thinking is what kind of structure do I have to create to write down a complete understanding of how boudoir society works and there are several proposals in the grundrisse er as to what the form of his future work should be so he set up this way he says the order or the order obviously has to be one the general abstract determinants which obtained in more or less all forms of society but in the above explained sense that is how he's been talking about the categories to the categories which make up the inner structure of bourgeois society and on which the fundamental classes rest capital wage-labour landed property their interrelation town on country the three great social classes exchanged between them circulation credit system private concentration of bourgeois society in the form of the state viewed in relation to itself the unproductive classes taxes state debt public credit the population the colonies immigration fourth category the international relation of production international division of labor international exchange export and import rate of exchange five the world market and crises so Marx is actually saying there's got to be five books or if you save some of these other things that's maybe it's twenty books but that's that's he's kind of saying alright this is what I'm gonna have to work on some of the elements he's already covering and will be covered in the grundrisse er it was a great deal about the general abstract determinants it was a great deal about the categories which make up the inner structure of bourgeois society and I wish the fundamental class is rest there landed property doesn't really come in so there there are numerous plans for capital of the book and this is the first one there's an interesting book by this man called Ross dulski called the making of Marx's capital and Ross dulski came across a very very scarce German version of the grundrisse er of all places in the New York Public Library and he was a I think a refugee and Jewish refugee and he wasn't a scholar or anything but he came across it and he thought oh my god how come people haven't taken this work seriously so from about 1947 to 1955 he worked on his own you know or amateurishly if you like but but very very carefully to try to reconstruct the different plans that existed for Marx's capital has laid out in the grundrisse a-- and he published his book in german and then it came out in english yes 1970 or something like seventeen maybe no later than 1970 but but but so so Rho script Dahl skis reconstruction of the ground racer is sort of interesting to read because he skips over a lot of things and just kind of says well okay now we have the third proposal and the fourth proposal and the fifth proposal so if you want to have a good sense of it in terms of other readings of the grundrisse er the other reading which i think is interesting is the one by tony Negri man it's called marx beyond Marx Negri of course is very much in the Opera is Moe kind of way of way of thinking he's really very very good on the relations on questions of labour he has seven lectures I think on the grundrisse and and of course he's also deeply involved in the some of the philosophical roots so if you're interested in Hagel and Spinoza and Marx and then the the Negri text is his it's very it's very good on that so that is the end of the if the method part and the method suggest ends up with a plan for the future inquiries which Marx is going to conduct an apart for their own if any of you have looked at it it's very it's just a bunch of notes but the notes can sometimes be he starts off with saying well I've got to say something about war and and and and the role of the army and the relation of productive force in relations of exchange in in the military he never really gets round to do any of that there's some other matters accusations against the materialism of his conceptions and the difference between historical materialism which is a social construct and naturalistic materialism he needs to deal with that dialectic of the concepts of productive force and relations of production this is a famous aspect of Marx thinking about productive forces and relationship production and other relationship is and he then six character is the uneven development material production relative to other forms of development in particular he's interested in artistic development and so they follow some remarks about what goes on in the arts and he kind of formulates the idea that that certain forms of arts such as the epic can no longer be produced in their world epoch-making classical stature because the society has changed and he tries to suggest that forms of artistic production not in immune from the the the relations of production which are and and productive forces which are around so he says what would Greek mythology and Greek imagination looked like when it was based on the self acting mule spindles and railroads and locomotives and electrical Telegraph's what chance has Vulcan against Robertson coal Jupiter against the lightning-rod and Hermes against the cruddy mobili a whole mythology over comes and dominates and shapes the forces of nature in the imagination by the imagination it there were therefore vanishes with the advent of real mastery over them so he then posed is always the question and this is often amuses people that the Greek arts and epic are bound up with certain forms of social development the difficulty is that they still afford assess artistic pleasure and he has to explain that and this he does by saying a man cannot become a child again or he becomes childish but does he not find joy in the child's naivete I must he himself not strive to reproduce its truth at a higher stage does not the true character of each epoch come alive in the nature of its children why should not the historic childhood of humanity its most beautiful unfolding with a stage never to return exercise and eternal charm well you could take that if you like and run with it it's kind of fun and this is this is sorts of things that crop up in the Grand Louisa quite frequently but also the snippets of this kind remarks of this kind some of which are extremely profound and some of which are kind of way out wacko but enjoyable which is kind of kind of fun so let me stop here and see if you have any questions about about either any of the three major parts which have been here the individual individualism kind of part the production consumption consumption production and all the relations between the moments you have any kind of comments questions about them or the method of political economy so one okay with this idea of totality and moments Minh yeah it seems that totality brings to mind a kind of spatial imagery and moment is obviously you know a little about time but at the same time from the text it seems that it's it's the other way around that totality is the historical stuff and moment is more about space yeah he actually if I go back to that passage on 278 where he says in the completed bourgeois system every economic relation presupposes every other and its bourgeois economic forum and everything posited is thus also a presupposition this is the case with every organic system this organic system itself as a totality has its presuppositions and its development to its totality consists precisely and subordinating all elements of society in it to itself or in creating out of it the organs which is still lacks this is historically how it becomes a totality the process of becoming this totality forms a moment of its process of its development that's what I read to you before but then he continues in the following way on the other hand if within one society and this comes back I think to this question of the political economists relation to the state it says on the other hand if within one society the modern relations of production ie capital are developed to its totality and this society then seizes hold of a new territory as eg the colonies then it finds or rather its representative the capitalist finds that is capital ceases to be capital without wage labor and that one of the presuppositions of the latter is not only landed property in general but modern landed property landed property which as capitalized rents is expensive and which as such excludes the direct use of the soil by individuals hence Wakefield's theory of colonies and he remember Wakefield's theory of colonies is what the last chapter of law and Volume one of capital is about which is about the geographical spread of the social relations of production from one territory to another and in Wakefield's case the territorial spread was largely mandated by political power in the imperial center which imposed upon territories like australia and so on certain kind of structures of land holding and this is what Marx is thinking about so with totality plainly can have a geographical referent and it's a bit surprising when you read that read it here that actually this geographical reference suddenly comes in and says well the totality actually this system works within a certain arena if you ask this that the totality portrayed in these relative relations where would you have found something like this totality in operation and the answer in Marxist time would be well you would find it in Western Europe Britain obviously and in the United States and Marx and we didn't get to this bookmark several times in these passages starts to say the totality looks very different in the United States and it looks in Britain why because there are feudal residuals in Britain and there are no funeral residuals in the United States therefore the totality as it is developed in the United States as a different character from the totality as it has developed in Britain so that the notion of the totality doesn't you know you can get a notion that somehow other it's it's fixed but its borders and boundaries are not secured it can be geographically expanding it can be colonizing spaces and it's free I guess if Marx had had the analogy of an ecosystem many the concept of an ecosystem came in in the late 19th century Marx never appropriated it but I think what he would have said is the organic process I'm looking at is more like an ecosystem which can be expanding and growing and transforming and changing internally so the totality is not something that is fixed and it's not something that's pre-designed it is something that's constantly in the process of evolution and when you start to think in terms of it or territorially you would say that there are certain kind of totalities which exists for it for instance the formation of the European Union in what sense did that actually start to construct a totality and what were the relations between the different moments which led to its construction how for example was production and distribution and and and so on organized through the European Union and to what degree did it then have to start to put borders around itself and say we're not we're not stretching it you know are we going to stretch into Turkey are we going to kind of will we admit Algeria or Tunis here or something like I mean there's all this sort of kind of kind of arena and and and how far does the European Union go up against up against Russia you know what what what's that about so the totality is not it's not it's not something that can't be given a territorial designation and Marx does just very briefly here mention that territoriality which by the way comes to some degree from Hegel but that's another another another another question thank you yes so now I wanted to expand a bit on this question because immediately me as soon as you start reading this issue of the totality you know that he's totally in sync with or Hegel also brought in this concept of totality but it's it seems that I mean for Hegel he was searching for the truth in the totality whereas with Marx it seems that he's at least here as I was reading as he's searching for not fixed truth or any other form but it's also like the the continuation of a process right and so therefore the totality is not to be seen as something as you perfectly said as a forming process but something that it's perpetually you know changing and now that you brought this analogy of the European Union and it's also very interesting to to see how this concept could apply in different moments or different conditions of the territory in today's time so for example as one flies over the Middle East you know how the whole sort of territorial aspect of just Eden changes the whole airspace around it and it has its own particular this one's own production system whereas the European Union might have other particular this at the same moment in time right on how it conditions territory the same as New York and so it's also very interesting to see or to begin to read like these sort of like many totalities like that coexist but nevertheless they form part of a larger totality which might be what we call capital and that's what is a little bit complicated to begin to grasp into this so sometimes one wishes that he wrote more on totality yeah and he doesn't he doesn't deal very well with [Music] this is this issue where very talks and in here for example just very very briefly about about the historical development and that gets you just get into a certain point kind of saying well this notion of totality sounds like Hegel but in fact you know Hegel produced it out of his head whereas what we were trying to do is we're trying to produce it out of a study of the concrete forms which exist and okay we're certainly setting it up theoretically and giving you it giving it conceptually a particular particular form so yes it's but the kind of notion of totality is is not something that's fixed it's constantly evolving and what happens when different marks doesn't do you deal with what happens when different totalities collide as it were and in intimation that that fries where he wants to talk about uneven geographical do uneven development is is also it's also there and says well but these are things that seems to me that we can elaborate on as we want it's latent there in the text but marks doesn't himself get through it any other kind of comment just staying with the topic of totality there's a quote about how on 105 but there is a devil of difference between barbarians who have fit by nature to be used for anything and civilize people who apply themselves to everything yeah thinking of that through the understanding of bourgeois society being the kind of highest development of the totality the most developed totality in the synthetic being totalizing right would marx say that totality or at least the way that it's understood in bourgeois society doesn't exist historically prior that systems of totality are or this totalizing economic forum the referring to the diagram is something that is unique to bourgeois society I think he's he's saying that the form of the totality is unique the boys were society and it's you know constantly evolving internally but he's not saying that there's never been a totality before and and I think that there are some features well there's an interesting kind of phrase here on 105 that you mentioned where he says human anatomy contains the key to the anatomy of the ape the intimations of higher development among the subordinate animal species can be understood only after higher development is already known there is there is a in Marx frequently a kind of a bit of a teleological thing that there's an evolutionary process which is moving towards something which is superior and higher and then the question arises of how where that possibility comes from and I think the one of one of the issues which I think it's important to do is to recognize that where does he say this that the I mean at some point he will also mention race I said well okay the possibilities for transformation and the creation of the totality depend on a whole set of possible possibilities one of which is race from another which is fertility soil environmental conditions his history and culture and those kinds of things so he he does often have you know elements in his thinking which are somewhat you know sometimes quite a bit troubling I mean for instance they you know but it would be very unusual I think for anybody at this period in history not to have kind of I mean Kant was full of kind of this hierarchy of races and intelligence and and so on so we'll find it some echoes of that in Marx as well trying to find out exactly where he does where he does this so it's but it's but but it is a it's not clear when it starts to talk about this possibility of a higher form of society exactly what that means in relationship to other forms of society which may be yes right yeah so I I think you you know you you have to I mean you have to read this also with the weather with a critical somewhat critical perspective but at the same time the same time I think the the question of how to set up the alternative to classical political economy and what that would be about is it seems to me a bit foundational for what's going to be going on in the grundrisse er right throughout and and the the I think the most interesting stuff and most interesting aspects of this are going to be the way in which the different categories like money and when labor and so on start to get articulated so that we can understand what it is that that lies at the basis of the totality which is information but never think of the totality is something that is permanent or complete and and always think of it as he's trying to do here as something which is both real and concrete at the same time as it's abstract so he's got this notion of a concrete abstraction that it's that it's happening and to a degree that is happening the conceptual apparatus through which it is being presented also has to be transformed any other the other kind of cone of coins okay well let me let me talk just a little bit about I want you to take a real crack up the chapter on money and I've given an awful lot of reading up to about well you you've got the outlines right so there's a lot it begins with all this stuff about paper discounted by the banks and so on and he's he's really going after dairyman he's a crude oil so it's not a very exciting stuff at least I don't think it is so no one I spent too much time on it but but there are some important insights here and if you want a better understanding of money I think you would go to the other tax which is a contribution to the critique of political economy or the chapter three of Volume one of capital this stuff but Marx is still searching for the question of how to design capital as a book and one of the questions which is posed is should he start with the category of money I mean it would be an obvious thing to start with and in fact in the contribution of the critique and political economy he does stop he really does start with money but I think one of the things you will recognize from the writing in the grundrisse er that he realizes that he can't start with money in part because that's where Prudhomme was basically operating and and so he's got to find somewhere else to stop but also I think that what he's worried what he does is to show that while money is absolutely critical for understanding the dynamics of capitalism and what capital is about and all the rest of it it's not a starting point and can't be a starting point because - turning into a starting point would be to actually be able to transform the whole world by transforming money which of course was one of prudence hopes so so so there's a lot in here and and some of it is is sort of interesting I mean is there's this quite a few pages on the qualities of the of metals and and the practices of mining gold and all kinds of things like that which if you want to read them it's kind of okay but it on the other hand it's not it's not profound and and anyway a lot of it is fairly fairly dated and so on but but he's he's really asking the question of well if there's going to be a money commodity which metal would be best and and how's the metal how did the metal the metallic base of the global monetary system get it get established and what was going on with Americans silver and gold discoveries and this kind of stuff so this is that there's a lot in here of that sort but but I want to get through the money stuff as quickly as as we can because I don't think that it's the the most illuminating and most important part of it so you can skim read you have my permission to skim read as much of it but look for insightful comments and commentaries because there are some here which are very very you know very useful and and helpful so okay so maybe we should just leave it here and we will continue next week we're doing the chapter on money [Applause]

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Length: 111min 21sec (6681 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 29 2020