By Bernard E. Harcourt
The Grundrisse is a set of unpublished notes, contained mainly in seven manuscript notebooks, that Marx used as a preparative for the writing of his two published works on political economy, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (published in 1859) and Capital (the first volume published in 1867). The manuscripts are the fruit of his research on political economy conducted in the British Library at the British Museum after he had moved to London, mainly in the years 1857-1858.
The Grundrisse appeared late in the reception of Marx. It had not been assembled by Engels and only became known in the West in the mid-1950s. So, it is of more recent vintage than, say, the Paris manuscripts (the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844), which were first published and “discovered” by readers of Marx in 1932, or the Brussels manuscripts (the German Ideology), also first “discovered” by readers in 1932.
The Grundrisse, a hefty volume running about a thousand pages long, has become the urtext for those readers of Marx who have sought to infuse the more scientific and economistic later Marx of the Capital with the earlier philosophical, political, and social theoretic Marx of the 1840s. For these readers, it serves as the final bridge to Capital. It still contains traces of the early philosophical theory of alienation from the Paris manuscripts and in fact hints at how those ideas are transformed into questions of fetishism. It still retains a conversation with Hegel, this time with his Science of Logic. Marx explicitly discusses how his thinking is influenced by Hegel’s Logic. He emphasizes the centrality of social relations, in other words of social theory, in all the economic categories that he develops—money, value, capital. Marx speaks to the subjectivities of the workers, he discusses their consciousness of self, of “being for another” and “being for self.”[1] Marx emphasizes the conflict and struggle between capital and the workers. “The biggest exchange process,” he writes, “is not that between commodities, but that between commodities and labor.”[2] To which Toni Negri exclaims, in his book Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse, “boom! The first big leap, the first of the political excursuses of the Grundrisse.”[3]
The Grundrisse, in short, ties the future political economic work of the Capital back, in a prefigural backward gaze, to all of the preceding philosophical, political, militant, historical, and social theoretic work that Marx had done in the 1840s and early 1850s. It is a text that reveals Marx’s cheminement (slow movement on a path forward) to his elaborated critique of political economy.
In its reception, the Grundrisse has been particularly appreciated by those who have found Capital to be somewhat demobilizing politically—for people, like Toni Negri, who believe that Capital has too often “been interpreted in an objectivist and deterministic fashion to justify reactionary politics.”[4] The Grundrisse is thus of particular appeal to those thinkers who would prefer to emphasis the political and militant dimensions, or the social theoretic dimensions, of Marx’s mature economic writings.
At her keynote lecture for Marx 13/13, for instance, Seyla Benhabib emphasized the social theoretic aspect of the manuscripts. The Grundrisse is an important text, Benhabib suggested, because it lays out Marx’s social theory, within which Marx embeds his economic analysis. “When you read the Grundrisse, you understand that all these categories—modes of production, forces of production, history as the history of struggle, how the forces of production develop so much as to act against relations of production, et cetera—are all anchored in social relations. What is a mode of production? Is it an instrument? No, it’s a social relation. It’s an institution. So what Marx shows in the Grundrisse, brilliantly, is the totality of social relations in different formations—pre-capitalist and capitalist—and a brilliant analysis of exchange. All these more mechanistic distinctions, they cannot be discussed without talking about relations of production. The Grundrisse is such an incredibly rich work in that sense.”
At Marx 9/13, Michael Hardt and Sandro Mezzadra will highlight the political reading of the Grundrisse, drawing on the work of Toni Negri, from his lectures on the Grundrisse from 1978 published under the title Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse. In that work, Negri meticulously demonstrates how the Grundrisse operates as a praxis-oriented manual to guide revolutionary action. Negri shows how, in his words, “the revolutionary subject emerges from the relation with capital” through a process that makes possible the “auto-determination of the subject” that can then modify the processes of capitalism.[5]
With the recent publication of David Harvey’s A Companion to Marx’s Grundrisse in 2023—Harvey’s COVID-19 book—following on the works of Roman Rosdolsky, Toni Negri, and others, we are perhaps at the highpoint of the Grundrisse’s influence on the reception of Marx’s political economic writings. Whether the Grundrisse as an autonomous, stand-alone book will continue to exert such influence is unclear. Like the German Ideology, which has now begun to disintegrate back into the mass of unpublished manuscripts and notebooks in the new MEGA2 edition of the complete works of Marx and Engels,[6] the Grundrisse as well may lose its integrity as a single volume—as one unified text that we can refer to—as a result of the new MEGA2 edition. As Michael Hardt and Sandro Mezzadra write in their essay for Marx 9/13, “in the most recent edition of the Marx-Engels complete works (MEGA2) the Grundrisse effectively disappears among a sea of other drafts written by Marx during the late 1850s and early 1860s. With this ‘philological turn,’ despite all the gains it implies, there is a risk to lose the clarity and political effects that previous publication of the Grundrisse provided.”
Before its disappearance, though, we will read Marx’s Grundrisse in conversation with Toni Negri’s Marx Beyond Marx. For this session, we are privileged to welcome to Marx 9/13 two brilliant critical philosophers, Michael Hardt and Sandro Mezzadra, who themselves collaborated closely with Negri for years. Notably, in Toni Negri’s book Marx in Movement, he traces the different phases of the workerist movement and its development, from its origins in the 1960s, through the work on social reproduction and the wages for housework movement of the 1970s, beyond the European focus in the 1980s, to the third phase in the 1990s with the birth of neoliberalism and financial mediations in post-Fordism. Negri concludes with the seminal work of our two guests: “And then there were the studies of Michael Hardt, Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson on global migration and the international dimension of the class struggle.”[7]
Hardt would go on to co-author important books with Negri, including Empire, Commonwealth, Multitude, and Assembly.Hardt and Mezzadra have coauthored important work as well, including Bolivia Beyond the Impasse (2023). Michael Hardt teaches political theory in the Literature Program at Duke University. His most recent book is The Subversive Seventies (Oxford UP, 2023). Sandro Mezzadra teaches political theory at the University of Bologna, and also teaches in Sydney and Hong Kong. His recent work has centered on the relations between globalization, migration and capitalism, on contemporary capitalism as well as on postcolonial criticism. With Brett Neilson he is the author of Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor (2013); The Politics of Operations. Excavating Contemporary Capitalism (2019); and The West and the Rest. Capital and Power in a Multipolar World (2024).
In this long-form introduction, I will provide some background on the two texts we will be reading at Marx 9/13.
The Context and Publication History of the Grundrisse
Marx’s study of political economy, which he had begun in Paris in 1844 in notebooks that he kept at the time (the “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,” aka “Paris Manuscripts”), was interrupted by his extensive writings against the Young Hegelians and Proudhon, by the French and German revolutions of 1848-49, and by his founding and editing of the New Rhenish Gazette. Marx began to return to his study of political economy in 1850 right after he had moved to London and re-immersed himself in classical political economy at the British Library.
During the early 1850s, Marx was also preoccupied with journalistic writings, especially with the New-York Daily Tribune but also with a series of other publications. Marx gives a good account of this period in his intellectual biography in the “Preface” to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859):
The publication of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung in 1848 and 1849 and subsequent events cut short my economic studies, which I could only resume in London in 1850. The enormous amount of material relating to the history of political economy assembled in the British Museum, the fact that London is a convenient vantage point for the observation of bourgeois society, and finally the new stage of development which this society seemed to have entered with the discovery of gold in California and Australia, induced me to start again from the very beginning and to work carefully through the new material. These studies led partly of their own accord to apparently quite remote subjects on which I had to spend a certain amount of time. But it was in particular the imperative necessity of earning my living which reduced the time at my disposal. My collaboration, continued now for eight years, with the New York Tribune, the leading Anglo-American newspaper, necessitated an excessive fragmentation of my studies, for I wrote only exceptionally newspaper correspondence in the strict sense. Since a considerable part of my contributions consisted of articles dealing with important economic events in Britain and on the continent, I was compelled to become conversant with practical detail which, strictly speaking, lie outside the sphere of political economy.[8]
It is in the summer of 1857, then, that Marx begins redacting a series of notebooks that would be published under the title Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Oekonomie (“Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy”).
Marx writes these notebooks in the shadow of a financial crisis in America that is motivating him to write day and night—and into the earliest hours of morning. “I am working like a madman for whole nights in order to coordinate my work on economics, and to get together the Grundrisse before the deluge,” Marx writes to Engels on December 12, 1857.[9] He is using this research to understand the financial crisis he is living through—as a way both to actualize theory and determine political praxis.
The notebook manuscripts were not published during Marx’s lifetime, nor were they assembled for publication by Engels. As Marcello Musto suggests, “it is likely that not even Friedrich Engels read the Grundrisse…. Engels never mentioned the Grundrisse, either in his prefaces to the two volumes of Capital that he saw into print or in any of his own vast collection of letters.”[10]
As Musto recounts in a detailed chapter on the reception of the Grundrisse, the Introduction to the work was published in German in 1903 by Karl Kautsky and translated into several languages; but the tome itself remained unpublished and unknown.[11]
The full, voluminous edition of the Grundrisse was first published in 1939-41 by the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute in Moscow, but it was hardly disseminated, and, coming in the middle of World War II, published in Moscow, it was effectively unknown. According to Roman Rosdolsky, who discovered a copy in a public library, there were only a handful of copies of this first 1939-1941 edition that reached the West. The Grundrisse was then republished in German in 1953 by Dietz Verlag in East Berlin (the publishing press of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany in East Germany), which is when it became known to Western readers.[12]
Marcello Musto recounts the odd publication history of that first Soviet edition:
Although the editorial guidelines and the form of publication were similar, the Grundrisse was not included in the volumes of the MEGA but appeared in a separate edition. Furthermore, the proximity of the Second World War meant that the work remained virtually unknown: the 3,000 copies soon became very rare, and only a few managed to cross the Soviet frontiers. The Grundrisse did not feature in the Sochineniya of 1928–47, the first Russian edition of the works of Marx and Engels, and its first republication in German had to wait until 1953. While it is astonishing that a text such as the Grundrisse was published at all during the Stalin period, heretical as it surely was with regard to the then indisputable canons of diamat, Soviet-style ‘dialectical materialism’, we should also bear in mind that it was then the most important of Marx’s writings not to be circulating in Germany. Its eventual publication in East Berlin in 30,000 copies was part of the celebrations marking Karl Marx Jahr, the seventieth anniversary of its author’s death and the 150th of his birth.
Written in 1857–8, the Grundrisse was only available to be read throughout the world from 1953, after 100 years of solitude.[13]
The first English edition only arrived 20 years later, in 1973.
As for the exact dates of the materials contained in the 1939-41 edition of the Grundrisse, Toni Negri details these in his book Marx Beyond Marx:
1) The Einleitung [Introduction] contained in a single notebook M, written between August 23 and mid-September 1857.
2) The manuscript of 7 notebooks (the Grundrisse) numbered and often dated by Marx himself, except for the first one, in the following order:
Notebook I: October 1857
II: around November 1857
III: November 29-mid-December 1857, more or less
IV: around mid-December 1857, February 1858
V: January 22, 1858-around the beginning of February 1858
VI: around February 1858
VII: end of February-March, end of May, beginning of June 1858
The secondary texts, which make up the Anbang [Appendix], and which are directly linked to the preceding texts, are:
3) The sketch of Bastiat und Carey, written in July 1857, before the Einleitung. Originally this text took up the first seven pages of the third notebook of the Grundrisse.[14]
There are also a number of additional minor passages and short texts, most of which are written in 1858-1859, with the exception of two series of extracts from Ricardo’s work that date back to 1850-1853.[15]
As noted earlier, the new edition of the complete works of Marx and Engels, the MEGA2, is changing the way we think about the Grundrisse as a book of its own. I had mentioned earlier that we may need to refer to the German Ideology in the future as the Brussels manuscripts of 1845 (like the Paris manuscripts of 1844). Perhaps at some point in the future, we will refer to the Grundrisse simply as the London manuscripts of 1857-58.
Highlights from the Grundrisse
Given the different receptions and readings of the Grundrisse, it is difficult to present highlights without giving a spin, but the text is dense and many consider it impenetrable, so I will try to propose an account of some of the important contributions of the text—as a way to set the stage for Toni Negri’s reading in Marx Beyond Marx.
The “Introduction”
Marx makes several important points in his “Introduction,” which appears to have been written before, rather than after, the substantive work of the seven notebooks. Marx positions his work by opposition both to the classical political economists and to contemporary radical thinkers like Proudhon, Bastiat, and others. As the introduction makes clear, he is using two sets of foils to articulate his view. I will focus on three points.
First, where to start the study of political economy. Marx argues that different regimes of political economy—feudal, capitalist, etc.—are necessarily situated in history and call for different entry points to the analysis. To study a feudal economy, it might make sense to start with landownership and agriculture (as the Physiocrats did, mistakenly though, since they were at the cusp of the transformation to a bourgeois economy). To study a bourgeois society by contrast, Marx argues, one must begin with production—and not agricultural production, but the production of commodities. “Capital is the all-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,” Marx writes. “After both have been examined in particular, their interrelation must be examined.”[16]
In this regard, Marx sets aside the tradition of classical political economists and modern political theorists (Smith, Ricardo, but also Rousseau) who begin with the individual—whether it is the individual hunter or Robinson Crusoe. The natural individual, he says, is an illusion. The individual in nature is by no means the natural state of existence and should not be the origin point. By contrast to thinkers like Rousseau who believe that there was first the individual and then civilization—for better or for worse, and for worse for Rousseau of course—Marx argues that there were first collectivities, clans, communal societies, and that only with some form of social development does it become possible for the individual to emerge—the individual with self-interests and a real conception of subjectivity. The human being is, Marx emphasizes, a “political animal,” or as he writes “an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society.”[17] So Marx casts aside any approach that begins with the individual as the rudimentary building block, focusing instead on the economic system and, in the case of capitalism, with production.
Second, Marx views capitalism specifically—and regimes of political economy more generally—as a totality, as a system. It is comprised of different moments, but it constitutes a whole. Some of the different moments include production, exchange, distribution, consumption, and circulation. Marx emphasizes that these different moments cannot be isolated and treated exclusively from each other. They all form part of one totalizing system. And so they have to be studied in unison.
This is important because it is the basis of his critique of Proudhon and other socialists who do not propose changes to production but call instead for changes in distribution. This is the model of welfare economists as well: do not touch production, allow it to be as efficient as possible, generate as much wealth as possible, and then just tax and transfer—in other words, distribute differently, tinker only with the distribution of wealth. Marx argues that focusing on distribution alone fails to understand how all the pieces are inextricably linked. And so, what Marx will propose will include radical transformation of the entire production process.
Now, although all the moments are integrated and form a whole, Marx argues that the best entry point to study capitalism is production, which is privileged in the sense that the economic cycle always rejuvenates through production. Marx writes:
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. […]A definite production thus determines a definite consumption, distribution and exchange as well as definite relations between these different moments. Admittedly, however, in its one-sided form, production is itself determined by the other moments. […] Mutual interaction takes place between the different moments. This the case with every organic whole.[18]
One can hear both the “organic whole” and the slight privilege for production, which ends up meaning that Marx starts with production, but does not consider it as separate from the organic whole—everything is integrated.
Third, methodologically, the work of classical political economists often focused on the category of “the population.” (Incidentally, this term, population, might remind you of Foucault’s lectures, Security, Territory, Population, where Foucault begins to argue that biopolitics focuses on populations). This too, Marx argues, is an illusion, and far too abstract and general. Instead, Marx argues, one needs to start by focusing at the more concrete level. “The population is an abstraction if I leave out, for example, the classes of which it is composed,” Marx writes. “These classes in turn are an empty phrase if I am not familiar with the elements on which they rest, e.g. wage labour, capital, etc. These latter in turn presuppose exchange, division of labour, prices, etc.”[19] And so, Marx proposes, the entry point for the analysis must be the most concrete categories, such as money, price, value, etc.
From this, finally, Marx concludes his “Introduction” with a plan for a book on political economy—a first outline for A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859) or, later, Capital, Volume 1 (1867). The Grundrisse will include several such plans. Roman Rosdolsky, in his meticulous recounting of the stepwise progression to Capital studied them all in his early book The Making of Marx’s Capital (1968) and charted their interrelationships.[20]
The Chapter on Money
Marx begins, as promised, at the most concrete level, with money. But instead of developing his own theory of money, he starts with a critique of the proposals of Proudhon and Alfred Darimon to transform the monetary system. Proudhon, Darimon, and others had offered several different proposals to fundamentally restructure the money, banking, and financial systems, in order to free up restrictions on credit and make money available to small artisans so that they would have more access to credit and could develop their trades and gain self-sufficiency. Marx criticizes their proposals. He attacks the idea that transforming the monetary system would somehow revolutionize society. He rejects any notion that reforming the banking system would have much effect on the other moments of production, distribution, or exchange.
Marx poses the question in straightforward terms: “The general question would be this: Can the existing relations of production and the relations of distribution which correspond to them be revolutionized by a change in the instrument of circulation, in the organization of circulation?”[21] His answer is no. Transforming the monetary system and replacing money currency with time-chits, labor money, credit money, or other alternatives is not a way to transform society. As Marx writes, “Various forms of money may correspond better to social production in various stages; one form may remedy evils against which another is powerless; but none of them, as long as they remain forms of money, and as long as money remains an essential relation of production, is capable of overcoming the contradictions inherent in the money relation, and can instead only hope to reproduce these contradictions in one or another form. One form of wage labour may correct the abuses of another, but no form of wage labour can correct the abuse of wage labour itself.”[22]
The bottom line is that the existing forms of money and the institutions of credit are only one moment in the overall “organic whole” of the production system and therefore cannot bring about a revolutionary transformation. For Marx, it is an illusion to believe that the banking system itself regulates the system or that money has independent, objective power. Money comes down to social relations.
It is in this context that Marx then develops early thoughts on value and price—which he will develop and refine in his published works. We see here the early formulations and experiments with these concrete categories. For instance, we see Marx developing the theory that what determines value is not the amount of labor time that any one person puts into the production of a commodity, but the amount of labor time necessary at any given historical period in that moment of production.[23] The value of commodities, as he writes, “is determined by their cost of production, in other words by the labour time required to produce them.”[24] Marx distinguishes this concept of value from the price of the commodity, which is determined by market forces. They differ in a form of contradiction that can be understood in Hegelian terms.[25]
Most importantly, Marx argues that value is, at its core, a social relation. This is perhaps the key point of the chapter: the thesis that money, value, commodities, and capital are embodied social relations. This is the critical praxis move—both the intellectual and practical move—that is at the heart of these manuscripts, namely to show that the categories boil down to social relations. In other words, they may all seem like external objects, independent of us, determining outcomes, but they are in fact nothing more than the product of social relations. They embody our human interactions. Marx writes:
Thus, in order to realize the commodity as exchange value in one stroke, and in order to give it the general influence of an exchange value, it is not enough to exchange it for one particular commodity. It must be exchanged against a third thing which is not in turn itself a particular commodity, but is the symbol of the commodity as commodity, of the commodity’s exchange value itself; which thus represents, say, labour time as such, say a piece of paper or of leather, which represents a fractional part of labour time. (Such a symbol presupposes general recognition; it can only be a social symbol; it expresses, indeed, nothing more than a social relation.)[26]
“It expresses, indeed, nothing more than a social relation”: this is a key contribution of the Grundrisse. The tension between the transcendental power, say, of money—how money becomes this external object that is seemingly independent of us, autonomous—and the fact that it is nothing more than social relations, is what will motivate the later notion of fetishism in Capital. In the Grundrisse, it is still expressed through the language of alienation from the Paris manuscripts of 1844.[27] Here, it is still about an objective type of alienation—how individuals in production become subordinated to relations that feel independent of them but are not.
Marx closes the chapter on money with a discussion of wealth, which he distinguishes from value. He argues that wealth turns into the main object and aim of desire, of greed, of accumulation.[28] “The possession of money,” he writes, “places me in exactly the same relationship towards wealth (social) as the philosophers’ stone would towards the sciences.”[29]What follows is a marvelous disquisition on money and greed:
Money is therefore not only an object, but is the object of greed [Bereicherungssucht]. It is essentially auri sacra fames [‘that accursed hunger for gold’ (Virgil, Aeneid, Bk 3, line 57)]. Greed as such, as a particular form of the drive, i.e. as distinct from the craving for a particular kind of wealth, e.g. for clothes, weapons, jewels, women, wine etc., is possible only when general wealth, wealth as such, has become individualized in a particular thing, i.e. as soon as money is posited in its third quality. Money is therefore not only the object but also the fountainhead of greed. The mania for possessions is possible without money; but greed itself is the product of a definite social development, not natural, as opposed to historical. Hence the wailing of the ancients about money as the source of all evil.[30]
The Chapter on Capital
From money, Marx turns to “money as capital” in a stepwise progression intended to take the reader to production and the different moments that follow—distribution, exchange, realization, circulation, etc. The burden of the lengthy chapter on capital is to explain what capital is and show how it is transformed in the production process. Marx begins with money as capital, demonstrating how money can be used to make more money.
It is at this juncture that Marx develops a key contribution of the Grundrisse, namely the argument that capital is not a thing—as the classical political economists suggested—but rather a process, and not just any kind of process, but one that goes through all the moments from production through circulation, continuously expanding and bringing about endless accumulation as the drive for more wealth leads to the accumulation of more capital.
In this thesis, what is key, again, is that capital, like money, is not just a thing, but is a social relation. It may appear as a thing, and for this reason becomes the focus of critique (the critique of that object) when in fact it is really social relations. Those social relations are, then, what should properly be critiqued. This anticipates, naturally, the argument about the fetishization of commodities in Capital.
Here, Marx is explicit about its make-up as social relations. Discussing money as capital, Marx writes:
The special difficulty in grasping money in its fully developed character as money – a difficulty which political economy attempts to evade by forgetting now one, now another aspect, and by appealing to one aspect when confronted with another – is that a social relation, a definite relation between individuals, here appears as a metal, a stone, as a purely physical, external thing which can be found, as such, in nature, and which is indistinguishable in form from its natural existence.[31]
Capital becomes naturalized, and people do not see the social relations that make it up. Critics then go after the objects as if they are the problem. Marx continues:
the illusion that metallic money allegedly falsifies exchange arises out of total ignorance of its nature. […] One or another kind of artful tinkering with money is then supposed to overcome the contradictions of which money is merely the perceptible appearance. Equally clear that some revolutionary operations can be performed with money, in so far as an attack on it seems to leave everything else as it was, and only to rectify it. Then one strikes a blow at the sack, intending the donkey. However, as long as the donkey does not feel the blows on the sack, one hits in fact only the sack and not the donkey. As soon as he feels it, one strikes the donkey and not the sack. As long as these operations are directed against money as such, they are merely an attack on consequences whose causes remain unaffected; i.e. disturbance of the productive process, whose solid basis then also has the power, by means of a more or less violent reaction, to define and to dominate these as mere passing disturbances.[32]
This and other passages show how closely Marx is tuning his analysis to praxis. And how much of it rests on the grounding that these categories—money, capital, etc.—all are formed by social relations. It is in this sense that Toni Negri would write that “while in Capital the categories are generally modelled on private and competitive capital, in the Grundrisse they are modelled on a tendential scheme of social capital.”[33]
Marx critiques the political economists—both classical and Proudhonian—who see freedom and equality in the reciprocity of exchange. Those ideals of freedom and equality are indeed naturalized by capital but betrayed by the reality of the labor process. Marx refers to this as “the utopian inability to grasp the necessary difference between the real and the ideal form of bourgeois society, which is the cause of their desire to undertake the superfluous business of realizing the ideal expression again, which is in fact only the inverted projection [Lichtbild] of this reality.”[34]
In bourgeois society, Marx explains, capital is viewed as (citing Adam Smith) “accumulated (realized) labour (properly, objectified [vergegenständlichte] labour), which serves as the means for new labour (production).”[35] But it is not anything like that, since this misconstrues capital as a thing. Marx emphasizes “Capital is conceived as a thing, not as a relation. [But] Capital is not a simple relation, but a process, in whose various moments it is always capital. This process therefore to be developed.”[36] This is what he does in the rest of the Grundrisse.
Marx develops in the chapter on capital a theory of surplus value to explain how money and capital constantly expand.[37] He shows how capital is to be understood as a process of becoming. He discusses competition and over-production, and how the quest to generate surplus value creates surplus products that are not then easily exchanged in the market, resulting in devaluation and the need to expand the markets; how value is realized first in production, then in market exchange[38]; how alienated labor and alienated capital are in struggle with each other[39]; how circulation realizes value in the market; and how money and capital circulate throughout the different moments of the organic whole, coursing through production, into the markets, and turning back into the monetary form.[40]
Hegel’s Logic
At a philosophical level, the Grundrisse is the work that intersects most closely Hegel’s Science of Logic. We had seen earlier how Marx had focused on other texts of Hegel. In his Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1843) and the published introduction to that work in 1844, Marx had, naturally, engaged the Philosophy of Right. In his Paris manuscripts, the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx had engaged primarily Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Here, though, it is Hegel’s Logic that comes to the fore. “As far as the method [of the Grundrisse] goes,” Marx wrote to Engels on January 14, 1858, “the fact of having leafed through, once again, by mere accident, Hegel’s Logic rendered me a great service.”[41]
The reader of the Grundrisse can see this clearly in passages scattered throughout the notebooks. So, for instance, in his discussion of market value in the “Chapter on Money,” Marx explains that the “market value” of a commodity is never equated with its “real value as if the latter were a third party, but rather by means of constant non-equation of itself” and he then adds, in parenthesis, “as Hegel would say, not by way of abstract identity, but by constant negation of the negation, i.e. of itself as negation of real value.”[42] The concept of the negation of the negation was something that was especially important for Marx and would become important as well for some famous post-Marxian thinkers like Adorno.
In his letter to Engels, Marx goes on to write that “If I ever find the time for a work of this type, I would greatly desire to make accessible to the intellect of the common man … how much there is in Hegel’s method of rationality and mystification.”[43] According to Toni Negri, this is a reference by Marx to a methodological synthesis of critique and praxis, or what Negri calls “the spirit of theoretico-practical synthesis.”[44]
Incidentally, Marx’s relation to Hegel’s Logic is the subject of a book by Hiroshi Uchida called Marx’s Grundrisse and Hegel’s Logic.[45]
Antonio Negri, Marx Beyond Marx
It is important to realize that different texts of Marx play different roles in the intellectual development of different thinkers, as well as of intellectual movements and political praxis. There have also often been evolutions within a thinker’s relation to the different texts.
The Grundrisse played a key role for Toni Negri. It also played an important role in the development of the movement he co-founded, operaismo (workerism). Negri recounts that the operaismo movement itself found different value in different texts of Marx, gradually turning to the Grundrisse. In Marx in Movement, Negri explains:
At the beginning [of workerism] the tendency was to focus on volume 2 of Capital, which analyses the relationship between factory and society and the transition from extraction of surplus value in the factory to its accumulation at the level of social circulation. Then there was a shift to volume 3 of Capital, where the analysis moves up, to the level of the abstraction of value and to analysis of globalization; and it was followed by a shift to volume 1 of Capital; to the Grundrisse, where the historical theme of the subjectivation of struggles is the principal starting point of analysis…[46]
Negri’s book, Marx Beyond Marx, is intended, as its title suggests, to push us, with Marx, beyond Marx, in order for us to develop new ways of thinking about collective action and a communist horizon. What Negri emphasizes is the subjectivities of the workers as a way to propel a vision of autonomous collective self-government—which became known as the autonomia and operaismo movements (autogestion and workerism).
The book is the outgrowth of nine lectures that Negri delivered in Louis Althusser’s seminar at the École normale supérieure on the rue d’Ulm in Paris in the Spring of 1978.[47] In terms of the timing, here, it is important to recognize that the Grundrisse was first translated into French in 1967-68, but, as Marcello Musto notes, “it was of inferior quality and had to be replaced by a more faithful one in 1980. An Italian version followed between 1968 and 1970, the initiative significantly coming, as in France, from a publishing house independent of the Communist Party.”[48] So the text was still very new to its Parisian and Western European readers when Negri was lecturing about the Grundrisse in Althusser’s seminar in 1978.
As for Althusser, the timing is also interesting. As Musto notes, Althusser and his proposal of an “epistemological break” between the early philosophical and political Marx and the mature scientific and economic Marx have been criticized for not incorporating the Grundrisse as a pivotal moment, or potentially as the bridge that explains an epistemological continuity. Musto refers to the critics who have argued that, “‘with the exception of texts such as the Introduction [. . .] Althusser never read the Grundrisse, in the real sense of the word reading.”[49] Musto himself argues that “the most striking and representative example [of the non-reading of the Grundrisse is] that of Louis Althusser. Even as he attempted to make Marx’s supposed silences speak and to read Capital in such a way as to ‘make visible whatever invisible survivals there are in it’ [citing Reading Capital which was originally published in 1965] (Althusser and Balibar 1979: 32), he permitted himself to overlook the conspicuous mass of hundreds of written pages of the Grundrisse and to effect a (later hotly debated) division of Marx’s thought into the works of his youth and the works of his maturity, without taking cognizance of the content and significance of the manuscripts of 1857–8.”[50] At the time of the seminars at the ENS that gave rise to the publication Reading Capital, in 1964, the “Introduction” to the Grundrisse was well known, having been published in many languages in the early 1900s (including in French in 1903 and English in 1904[51]), and the full edition had been published in German in the East German edition at Dietz Verlag. The Grundrisse was not the well-known tome that it has become today in 1964, but surely the Reading Capital seminar could have been a place where it could have emerged—and all the participants read the texts in German.
What Negri finds most powerful about the Grundrisse is that, by contrast to conventional Marxism, it allows us to see Marx as a militant and not as a professor.[52] On Negri’s reading, which naturally goes beyond Marx, all the economic questions become political ones. Or, as he writes, “All the problems of exploitation are by now immediate political problems.”[53] They become political problems based on an economic analysis. As Negri underscores: “Marx’s Grundrisse founds and undoes the law of value. In the Grundrisse, Marx appears as a communist militant who forces the theoretical limits of the classical analysis of value, and who justifies communist hope. He does not deceive himself as to the immediacy of the process, but he does clarify its subjective necessity.”[54]
The lectures, then, unearth the political and militant dimensions of the Grundrisse: the central conflict between capital and labor; the subjectivities of the workers and their evolving consciousness of the struggle; the emergence of the revolutionary subject from the relation with capital[55]; the way in which the theory of surplus value here provides the basis for class struggle—or as Negri emphasizes, “from money to surplus value—this is the political path that furnishes class weapons.”[56] “The Grundrisse constitutes the subjective approach (‘the imminent crisis’) to the analysis of the revolutionary subjectivity in the process of capital. The notebooks,” Negri writes, “represent the strongest point of analysis and of imagination in the revolutionary will of Marx.”[57]
I could go on, the passages are legion, and legendary—but Michael Hardt and Sandro Mezzadra will develop this at the seminar. So let me conclude, then, with a final passage from the inimitable Toni Negri:
Marx beyond Marx. Beyond vulgar determinism. Beyond all hypotheses implying homogeneity. The most ingenuous revolutionary consciousness can find here [in the Grundrisse] plenty for the most sublime exaltation.[58]
Welcome to Marx 9/13!
Watch Marx 9/13 here.
Further Readings
Riccardo Bellofiore, Guido Starosta, and Peter D. Thomas, eds., In Marx’s Laboratory: Critical Interpretations of the Grundrisse (Historical Materialism Book Series, Volume 48)(Brill, 2013)
David Harvey, A Companion to Marx’s Grundrisse (Verso, 2023)
Marcello Musto, ed., Karl Marx’s Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy 150 Years Later(Routledge, 2008)
Moishe Postone, Time, Labor and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory (Cambridge University Press, 1996)
Roman Rosdolsky, The Making of Marx’s Capital (London: Pluto Press, 1992)
Hiroshi Uchida, Marx’s Grundrisse and Hegel’s Logic, ed. Terrell Carver (Routledge, 1988)
Notes
[1] Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), at p. 244.
[2] Marx, Grundrisse, at p. 31.
[3] Antonio Negri, Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse, trans. Harry Cleaver, Michael Ryan and Maurizio Viano (London: Pluto Press, and Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1991), at p. 31.
[4] Harry Cleaver, “Introduction,” in Negri, Marx Beyond Marx, at p. xix.
[5] Negri, Marx Beyond Marx, at p. 165.
[6] As I discuss in the introduction to Marx 5/13, the editors of the MEGA2 have integrated the manuscripts back into the Nachlass. See Marx and Engels, Deutsche Ideologie: Manuscript und Drucke Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA) Ertse Abteilung, Band 5, ed. Ulrich Pagel, Gerald Hamann, and Christine Weckwerth (De Gruyter Akademie Forschung, 2017); Sarah Johnson, “Farewell to The German Ideology,” Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 83, No. 1, 143-170 (January 2022).
[7] Negri, Marx in Movement, at p. 4.
[8] Karl Marx, “Preface,” A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977), available at https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface.htm.
[9] Quoted in Negri, Marx Beyond Marx, at p. 2.
[10] Marcello Musto, “Dissemination and Reception of the Grundrisse in the World: Introduction,” 179-188, in Marcello Musto, ed., Karl Marx’s Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy 150 Years Later (Routledge, 2008), at p. 179, available at https://marcellomusto.org/dissemination-reception-grundrisse/.
[11] Musto, “Dissemination and Reception of the Grundrisse in the World: Introduction,” at p. 179-180.
[12] See n.1 to Foreword by Martin Nicolaus, in Marx, Grundrisse, at p. 7.
[13] Musto, “Dissemination and Reception of the Grundrisse in the World: Introduction,” at p. 179-181.
[14] Negri, Marx Beyond Marx, at p. 3.
[15] Negri, Marx Beyond Marx, at p. 3.
[16] Marx, Grundrisse, at p. 107.
[17] Marx, Grundrisse, at p. 84.
[18] Marx, Grundrisse, at p. 99-100.
[19] Marx, Grundrisse, at p. 100.
[20] Roman Rosdolsky, The Making of Marx’s Capital (London: Pluto Press, 1992).
[21] Marx, Grundrisse, at p. 122.
[22] Marx, Grundrisse, at p. 123.
[23] Marx, Grundrisse, at p. 135.
[24] Marx, Grundrisse, at p. 137.
[25] Marx, Grundrisse, at p. 137.
[26] Marx, Grundrisse, at p. 144.
[27] Marx, Grundrisse, at p. 158.
[28] Marx, Grundrisse, at p. 222.
[29] Marx, Grundrisse, at p. 222.
[30] Marx, Grundrisse, at p. 222.
[31] Marx, Grundrisse, at p. 239.
[32] Marx, Grundrisse, at p. 240.
[33] Negri, Marx Beyond Marx, at p. 27.
[34] Marx, Grundrisse, at p. 249.
[35] Marx, Grundrisse, at p. 257 (quoting Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, Vol. II, pp. 355-56).
[36] Marx, Grundrisse, at p. 258.
[37] Marx, Grundrisse, at p. 321-322.
[38] Marx, Grundrisse, at p. 421.
[39] Marx, Grundrisse, at p. 514.
[40] Marx, Grundrisse, at p. 678.
[41] Quoted in Negri, Marx Beyond Marx, at p. 2.
[42] Marx, Grundrisse, at p. 137 (referring to Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller, London, 1969, p. 416).
[43] Quoted in Negri, Marx Beyond Marx, at p. 2-3.
[44] Negri, Marx Beyond Marx, at p. 3.
[45] Hiroshi Uchida, Marx’s Grundrisse and Hegel’s Logic, ed. Terrell Carver (Routledge, 1988)
[46] Antonio Negri, Marx in Movement: Operaismo in Context, trans. Ed Emery (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2022), 2.
[47] Negri, Marx Beyond Marx, at p. xiv.
[48] Musto, “Dissemination and Reception of the Grundrisse in the World: Introduction,” at p. 182.
[49] Musto, “Dissemination and Reception of the Grundrisse in the World: Introduction,” at p. 187, n.4 (citing Lucien Sève, Penser avec Marx aujourd’hui, Paris, La Dispute, 2004, at p. 29).
[50] Musto, “Dissemination and Reception of the Grundrisse in the World: Introduction,” at p. 185.
[51] Musto, “Dissemination and Reception of the Grundrisse in the World: Introduction,” at p. 180.
[52] Negri, Marx Beyond Marx, at p. xv.
[53] Negri, Marx Beyond Marx, at p. xvi.
[54] Negri, Marx Beyond Marx, at p. xv.
[55] Negri, Marx Beyond Marx, at p. 165.
[56] Negri, Marx Beyond Marx, at p. 61.
[57] Negri, Marx Beyond Marx, at p. 10.
[58] Negri, Marx Beyond Marx, at p. 163.
