To mark PPE@10 this post continues a series of posts to celebrate ten years of Progress in Political Economy (PPE) as a blog that has addressed the worldliness of critical political economy issues since 2014.
From the beginning of February to the end of July this year the Past & Present Reading Group undertook a reading of Grundrisse. Meaning ‘rough plan’ or ‘draft’, Grundrisse is a series of seven notebooks written by Karl Marx between 1857-8. Unpublished in Marx’s lifetime, a defining feature of the work is its unfinished quality. Sprawling in nature at over 900 pages, any attempt to provide a precis of such a work would be a fool’s errand. So, given the acknowledged roughness of the text and, given also that the work formed the materials written in preparation for the more polished outcome of Capital, what is the value of reading this work? Why not just proceed directly to the finished product? In this short blog post I will provide a number of reasons why I think Grundrisse makes for compelling reading and should be read as part of a broader understanding of Marx’s work.
Before Capital and before Capital
For those interested in the evolution of Marx’s thought Grundrisse is an essential point of reference. In this respect Grundrisse can be situated between The German Ideology and Capital Vol.1. The former text, whilst setting out important postulates of Historical Materialist thought, was undoubtedly too crudely linear and neat in its stadial unfolding. Capital, meanwhile is where more sophisticated notions of tendencies and concrete struggles were brought into the picture in order to understand capitalism as a distinct mode of production. Grundrisse offers a window into the development of Marx’s thinking on these issues. As Martin Nicolaus states in his introduction, ‘The Grundrisse is the record of Marx’s mind at work, grappling with fundamental problems of theory.’ In terms of the method of Marx, a reader can gain a clear appreciation of his mode of holding one thing constant then adding more determinations to the picture to reveal its proper complexity and inner contradictions: As Marx states to himself at one point, ‘All these statements correct only in this abstraction for the relation from the present standpoint. Additional relations will enter which modify them significantly.’ This leads to his broader conceptualisation of totality and ‘the concrete’ as ‘the concentration of many determinations.’ A truly unique perspective on the social world is thereby developed. This is derived from rational abstractions (or concrete abstractions) that piece together the general and specific parts that make up the social whole. As Marx summarises, ‘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.’
This method of forming concrete abstractions is a defining feature of Historical Materialism as an approach to the Social Sciences and contrasts with those theories that instead rely on idealistic forms of abstraction. In the opening pages, Marx chides the notion of an [...]
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