In the course of 1856, Marx completely neglected the study of political economy but the coming of an international financial crisis suddenly changed this situation. In a climate of deep uncertainty, which turned into wide-spread panic contributing to bankruptcies everywhere, Marx felt that the right time for action had come again and foreseeing the future development of the recession, he wrote to Friedrich Engels: ‘I don’t suppose we’ll be able to spend much longer here merely watching.’1 Engels, already infused with great optimism, predicted a scenario for the future in this way: ‘This time there’ll be an unprecedented day of wrath; the whole of Europe’s industry in ruins, […] all markets over-stocked, all the upper classes in the soup, complete bankruptcy of the bourgeoisie, war and disorder to the nth degree. I, too, believe that it will all come to pass in 1857.’2
By the end of a decade that had seen the reflux of the revolutionary movement, and in the course of which Marx and Engels were prevented from actively participating in the European political arena, the two started to exchange messages with renewed confidence in future prospects. The long-awaited date with the revolution now seemed much closer, and for Marx this pointed to one priority above all: resuming his ‘Economics’ and finishing it as soon as possible.
In 1857, Marx was convinced that the financial crisis developing at international level had created the conditions for a new revolutionary period throughout Europe. He had been waiting for this moment ever since the popular insurrections of 1848, and now that it finally seemed to have come, he did not want events to catch him unprepared. He therefore decided to resume his economic studies and to give them a finished form.
This time, unlike in past crises, the economic storm began not in Europe but in the United States of America. During the first few months of 1857, the New York banks stepped up their volume of loans, despite the decline in deposits. The resulting growth in speculative activity worsened the general economic conditions, and, after the New York branch of the Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Company became insolvent, the prevailing panic led to numerous bankruptcies. Loss of confidence in the banking system then produced a contraction of credit, a drying up of deposits and the suspension of money payments.
Sensing the extraordinary nature of these events, Marx immediately got back to work. On 23 August 1857 – the very day before the Ohio Life collapse that sowed panic in public opinion – he began to write the ‘Introduction’ to his ‘Economy’; the explosive onset of crisis had given him an additional motive that had been absent in previous years. After the defeat of 1848, Marx had faced a whole decade of political setbacks and deep personal isolation. But, with the outbreak of the crisis, he glimpsed the possibility of taking part in a new round of social revolts and considered that his most urgent task was to analyse the economic phenomena that would be so important for the beginning of a revolution. This meant writing and publishing, as quickly as possible, the work he had been planning for so long.
From New York, the crisis rapidly spread to the rest of the United States of America and, within a few weeks, to all the centres of the world market in Europe, South America and the East, becoming the first international financial crisis in history. News of these developments generated great euphoria in Marx and fuelled a huge explosion of intellectual productivity. The period between summer 1857 and spring 1858 was one of the most prolific in his life: he managed to write more in a few months than in the preceding years. In December 1857, he wrote to Engels: ‘I am working like mad all night and every night collating my economic studies, so that I might at least get the outlines [Grundrisse] clear before the deluge.’3
He also took the opportunity to point out that his predictions that a crisis was inevitable had not been so ill-founded, since ‘Saturday’s Economist maintains that, during the final months of 1853, throughout 1854, the autumn of 1855 and the sudden changes of 1856, Europe has never had more than a hair-breadth escape from the impending crisis’.4
Marx’s work was now remarkable and wide-ranging. From August 1857 to May 1858, he filled the eight notebooks known as the Grundrisse,5 while as New-York Tribune correspondent, he wrote dozens of articles on, among other things, the development of the crisis in Europe. Driven by the need to improve his economic circumstances, he also agreed to compose a number of entries for The New American Cyclopædia. Lastly, from October 1857 to February 1858, he compiled three books of extracts, called the Crisis Notebooks.6 Thanks to these, it is possible to change the conventional image of a Marx studying Hegel’s Science of Logic (1812–16) to find inspiration for the manuscripts of 1857–58.7 For at that time he was much more preoccupied with events linked to the long-predicted major crisis. Unlike the extracts he had made before, these were not compendia from the works of economists but consisted of a large quantity of notes, gleaned from various daily newspapers, about major developments in the crisis, stock market trends, trade exchange fluctuations and important bankruptcies in Europe, the United States of America and other parts of the world. A letter he wrote to Engels in December indicates how intense his activity was:
I am working enormously, as a rule until 4 o’clock in the morning. I am engaged on a twofold task: 1. Elaborating the outlines of political economy. (For the benefit of the public it is absolutely essential to go into the matter to the bottom, as it is for my own, individually, to get rid of this nightmare.) 2. The present crisis. Apart from the articles for the [New-York] Tribune, all I do is keep records of it, which, however, takes up a considerable amount of time. I think that, somewhere about the spring, we ought to do a pamphlet together about the affair as a reminder to the German public that we are still there as always, and always the same.8
Marx gave up the latter idea, however, in order to concentrate all his energies on the Grundrisse.
Where to begin? How to embark on the critique of political economy, that ambitious and demanding project which he had begun and interrupted several times before? These were the first questions that Marx asked himself as he got down to work again. Two circumstances played a crucial role in determining the answer: he held the view that, despite the validity of certain theories, economic science still lacked a cognitive procedure with which to grasp and elucidate reality correctly;9 and he felt a need to establish the arguments and the order of exposition before he embarked on the task of composition. These considerations led him to go more deeply into problems of method and to formulate the guiding principles for his research. The upshot was one of the most extensively debated manuscripts in the whole of his oeuvre: the so-called ‘Introduction’ to the Grundrisse. In these pages, in a close encounter with the ideas of some of the greatest economists and philosophers, Marx there reaffirms profound convictions and arrives at significant theoretical acquisitions.
Marx’s intention was certainly not to write a sophisticated methodological treatise but to clarify for himself, before his readers, what orientation he should follow on the long and eventful critical journey that lay ahead. This was also necessary for the task of revising the huge mass of economic studies that he had accumulated since the mid-1840s. Thus, along with observations on the employment and articulation of theoretical categories, these pages contain a number of formulations essential to his thought that he found indispensable to summarize anew – especially those linked to his conception of history – as well as a quite unsystematic list of questions for which the solutions remained problematic.
This mix of requirements and purposes, the short period of composition – scarcely a week – and, above all, the provisional character of these notes make them extremely complex and controversial. Nevertheless, since it contains the most extensive and detailed pronouncement that Marx ever made on epistemological questions, the ‘Introduction’ is an important reference for the understanding of his thought10 and a key to the interpretation of the Grundrisse as a whole.
In keeping with his style, Marx alternated in the ‘Introduction’ between exposition of his own ideas and criticism of his theoretical opponents. The text is divided into four sections:
2.General relation between production, distribution, exchange, and consumption
3.The method of political economy
4.Means (forces) of production and relations of production, and relations of circulation, etc.11
The first section opens with a declaration of intent, immediately specifying the field of study and pointing to the historical criterion: ‘[t]he object before us, to begin with, material production. Individuals producing in society – hence socially determined individual production – is, of course, the point of departure.’ Marx’s polemical target was ‘the eighteenth-century Robinsonades’,12 the myth of Robinson Crusoe13 as the paradigm of homo oeconomicus, or the projection of phenomena typical of the bourgeois era onto every other society that has existed since the earliest times. Such conceptions represented the social character of production as a constant in any labour process, not as a peculiarity of capitalist relations. In the same way, civil society [bürgerliche Gesellschaft] – whose emergence in the eighteenth century had created the conditions through which ‘the individual appears detached from the natural bonds etc. which in earlier historical periods make him the accessory of a definite and limited human conglomerate’ – was portrayed as having always existed.14
In reality, the isolated individual simply did not exist before the capitalist epoch. As Marx put it in another passage in the Grundrisse: ‘He originally appears as a species-being, tribal being, herd animal.’15 This collective dimension is the condition for the appropriation of the earth, ‘the great workshop, the arsenal which furnishes both means and material of labour, as well as the seat, the base of the community [Basis des Gemeinwesens]’.16 In the presence of these primal relations, the activity of human beings is directly linked to the earth; there is a ‘natural unity of labour with its material presuppositions’, and the individual lives in symbiosis with others like himself.17 Similarly, in all later economic forms based on agriculture where the aim is to create use-values and not yet exchange-values,18 the relationship of the individual to ‘the objective conditions of his labour is mediated through his presence as member of the commune’; he is always only one link in the chain.19 In this connection, Marx writes in the ‘Introduction’:
The more deeply we go back into history, the more does the individual, and hence also the producing individual, appear as dependent [unselbstständig], as belonging to a greater whole: in a still quite natural way in the family and in the family expanded into the clan [Stamm]; then later in the various forms of communal society arising out of the antitheses and fusions of the clans.20
Similar considerations appear in Capital, Volume I. Here, in speaking of ‘the European Middle Ages, shrouded in darkness’, Marx argues that ‘instead of the independent man, we find everyone dependent, serfs and lords, vassals and suzerains, laymen and clergy. Personal dependence here characterizes the social relations of production just as much as it does the other spheres of life organized on the basis of that production.’21 And, when he examined the genesis of product exchange, he recalled that it began with contacts among different families, tribes, or communities, ‘for, in the beginning of civilization, it is not private individuals but families, tribes, etc., that meet on an independent footing’.22 Thus, whether the horizon was the primal bond of consanguinity or the medieval nexus of lordship and vassalage, individuals lived amid ‘limited relations of production [bornirter Productionsverhältnisse]’, joined to one another by reciprocal ties.23
The classical economists had inverted this reality, on the basis of what Marx regarded as fantasies with an inspiration in natural law. In particular, Adam Smith had described a primal condition where individuals not only existed but were capable of producing outside society. A division of labour within tribes of hunters and shepherds had supposedly achieved the specialization of trades: one person’s greater dexterity in fashioning bows and arrows, for example, or in building wooden huts, had made him a kind of armourer or carpenter, and the assurance of being able to exchange the unconsumed part of one’s labour product for the surplus of others ‘encourage[d] every man to apply himself to a particular occupation’.24 David Ricardo was guilty of a similar anachronism when he conceived of the relationship between hunters and fishermen in the early stages of society as an exchange between owners of commodities on the basis of the labour-time objectified in them.25
In this way, Smith and Ricardo depicted a highly developed product of the society in which they lived – the isolated bourgeois individual – as if he were a spontaneous manifestation of nature. What emerged from the pages of their works was a mythological, timeless individual, one ‘posited by nature’, whose social relations were always the same and whose economic behaviour had a historyless anthropological character.26 According to Marx, the interpreters of each new historical epoch have regularly deluded themselves that the most distinctive features of their own age have been present since time immemorial.27
Marx argued instead that ‘[p]roduction by an isolated individual outside society […] is as much of an absurdity as is the development of language without individuals living together and talking to each other’.28 And, against those who portrayed the isolated individual of the eighteenth century as the archetype of human nature, ‘not as a historical result but as history’s point of departure’, he maintained that such an individual emerged only with the most highly developed social relations.29 Marx did not entirely disagree that man was a ζώον πολιτικόν [zoon politikon], a social animal, but he insisted that he was ‘an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society’.30 Thus, since civil society had arisen only with the modern world, the free wage labourer of the capitalist epoch had appeared only after a long historical process. He was, in fact, ‘the product on one side of the dissolution of the feudal forms of society, on the other side of the new forces of production developed since the sixteenth century’.31 If Marx felt the need to repeat a point he considered all too evident, it was only because works by Henry Charles Carey, Frédéric Bastiat and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon had brought it up for discussion in the previous twenty years.32
After sketching the genesis of the capitalist individual and demonstrating that modern production conforms only to ‘a definitive stage of social development – production by social individuals’, Marx points to a second theoretical requirement: namely, to expose the mystification practised by economists with regard to the concept of ‘production in general’ [Production im Allgemeinem]. This is an abstraction, a category that does not exist at any concrete stage of reality.
If abstraction was not combined with the kind of determinations characteristic of any historical reality, then production changed from being a specific, differentiated phenomenon into a perpetually self-identical process, which concealed the ‘essential diversity’ [wesentliche Verschiedenheit] of the various forms in which it manifested itself. This was the error committed by economists who claimed to show ‘the eternity and harmoniousness of the existing social relations’.33 In contrast to their procedure, Marx maintained that it was the specific features of each social-economic formation which made it possible to distinguish it from others, gave the impetus for its development and enabled scholars to understand the real historical.34
Although the definition of the general elements of production is ‘segmented many times over and split into different determinations’, some of which ‘belong to all epochs, others to only a few’, there are certainly, among its universal components, human labour and material provided by nature.35 For, without a producing subject and a worked-upon object, there could be no production at all. But the economists introduced a third general prerequisite of production: ‘a stock, previously accumulated, of the products of former labour’, that is, capital.36 The critique of this last element was essential for Marx, in order to reveal what he considered to be a fundamental limitation of the economists. It also seemed evident to him that no production was possible without an instrument of labour, if only the human hand, or without accumulated past labour, if only in the form of primitive man’s repetitive exercises. However, while agreeing that capital was past labour and an instrument of production, he did not, like Smith, Ricardo and John Stuart Mill, conclude that it had always existed.
If the error is made of ‘conceiving capital in its physical attribute only as instrument of production, while entirely ignoring the economic form which makes the instrument of production into capital’,37 one falls into the ‘crude inability to grasp the real distinctions’ and a belief that ‘there exists only one single economic relation which takes on different names’.38
For this to be plausible, economists depicted the historical circumstances prior to the birth of the capitalist mode of production as ‘results of its presence’ with its very own features.39 As Marx puts it in the Grundrisse:
The bourgeois economists who regard capital as an eternal and natural (not historical) form of production then attempt […] to legitimize it again by formulating the conditions of its becoming as the conditions of its contemporary realization; i.e. presenting the moments in which the capitalist still appropriates as not-capitalist – because he is still becoming – as the very conditions in which he appropriates as capitalist.40
From a historical point of view, the profound difference between Marx and the classical economists is that, in his view, ‘capital did not begin the world from the beginning, but rather encountered production and products already present, before it subjugated them beneath its process’.41 For ‘the new productive forces and relations of production do not develop out of nothing, nor drop from the sky, nor from the womb of the self-positing Idea; but from within and in antithesis to the existing development of production and the inherited, traditional relations of property’.42 Similarly, the circumstance whereby producing subjects are separated from the means of production – which allows the capitalist to find propertyless workers capable of performing abstract labour (the necessary requirement for the exchange between capital and living labour) – is the result of a process that the economists cover with silence, which ‘forms the history of the origins of capital and wage labour’.43
A number of passages in the Grundrisse criticize the way in which economists portray historical as natural realities. It is self-evident to Marx, for example, that money is a product of history: ‘to be money is not a natural attribute of gold and silver’, but only a determination they first acquire at a precise moment of social development.44 The same is true of credit. According to Marx, lending and borrowing was a phenomenon common to many civilizations, as was usury, but they ‘no more constitute credit than working constitutes industrial labour or free wage labour. And credit as an essential, developed relation of production appears historically only in circulation based on capital.’45 Prices and exchange also existed in ancient society, ‘but the increasing determination of the former by costs of production, as well as the increasing dominance of the latter over all relations of production, only develop fully […] in bourgeois society, the society of free competition’; or ‘what Adam Smith, in the true eighteenth-century manner, puts in the prehistoric period, the period preceding history, is rather a product of history’.46 Furthermore, just as he criticized the economists for their lack of historical sense, Marx mocked Proudhon and all the socialists who thought that labour productive of exchange value could exist without developing into wage labour, that exchange value could exist without turning into capital, or that there could be capital without capitalists.47
Marx’s chief aim is therefore to assert the historical specificity of the capitalist mode of production: to demonstrate, as he would again affirm in Capital, Volume III, that it ‘is not an absolute mode of production’ but ‘merely historical, transitory’.48
This viewpoint implies a different way of seeing many questions, including the labour process and its various characteristics. In the Grundrisse, Marx wrote that ‘the bourgeois economists are so much cooped up within the notions belonging to a specific historic stage of social development that the necessity of the objectification of the powers of social labour appears to them as inseparable from the necessity of their alienation’.49 Marx repeatedly took issue with this presentation of the specific forms of the capitalist mode of production as if they were constants of the production process as such. To portray wage labour not as a distinctive relation of a particular historical form of production but as a universal reality of man’s economic existence was to imply that exploitation and alienation had always existed and would always continue to exist.
Evasion of the specificity of capitalist production therefore had both epistemological and political consequences. On the one hand, it impeded understanding of the concrete historical levels of production; on the other hand, in defining present conditions as unchanged and unchangeable, it presented capitalist production as production in general and bourgeois social relations as natural human relations. Accordingly, Marx’s critique of the theories of economists had a twofold value. As well as underlining that a historical characterization was indispensable for an understanding of reality, it had the precise political aim of countering the dogma of the immutability of the capitalist mode of production. A demonstration of the historicity of the capitalist order would also be proof of its transitory character and of the possibility of its elimination.
In order to have the energy demanded by his Herculean project, Marx would have needed some tranquillity, but his personal situation was still extremely precarious and did not allow him any respite. Having employed all the resources at his disposal in the relocation to a new home, he was short of money again to pay the first month’s rent. So he reported to Engels, who lived and worked in Manchester at the time, all the troubles of his situation: ‘[I am] without prospects and with soaring family liabilities. I have no idea about what to do and in fact my situation is more desperate than it was five years ago. I thought that I had already tasted the quintessence of this shit, but no.’50 This statement deeply shocked Engels, who had been so sure that after the move his friend would finally be more settled, that in January 1857 he spent the money received from his father for Christmas to buy a horse and pursue his great passion: fox hunting. However, during this period and for his whole life, Engels never denied all of his support to Marx and his family, and, worried about this difficult juncture, he sent Marx £5 a month and urged him to count on him always in difficult times.
Engels’s role was certainly not limited to financial support. In the deep isolation Marx experienced during those years, but through the large correspondence exchanged between the two, Engels was the only point of reference with whom he could engage in intellectual debate: ‘more than anything I need your opinion’.51 Engels was the only friend to confide in at difficult times of despondency: ‘write soon because your letters are essential now to help me pluck up. The situation is dire.’52 Engels was also the companion with whom Marx shared the sarcasm solicited by events: ‘I envy people who can turn summersaults. It must be a great way of ridding the head of bourgeois anger and ordure.’53
In fact, uncertainty soon became more pressing. Marx’s only income, aside from the help granted by Engels, consisted of payments received from the New-York Tribune, the most widely circulated English language newspaper at the time. The agreement on his contributions, for which he received £2 per article, changed with the economic crisis that also had had repercussions on the American daily. Aside from the American traveller and writer Bayard Taylor [1825–1878], Marx was the only European correspondent not to be fired, but his participation was scaled down from two articles weekly to one, and – ‘although in times of prosperity they never gave me an extra penny’54 – his payments were halved. Marx humorously recounted the event: ‘There is a certain irony of fate in my being personally embroiled in these damned crises.’55 However, to be able to witness the financial breakdown was an unparalleled entertainment: ‘Nice, too, that the capitalists, who so vociferously opposed the “right to work”, are now everywhere demanding “public support” from their governments and […] hence advocating the “right to profit” at public expense.’56 Despite his state of anxiety, he announced to Engels that ‘though my own financial distress may be dire indeed, never, since 1849, have I felt so cosy as during this outbreak’.57
The beginning of a new editorial project slightly eased the desperation. The editor of the New-York Tribune, Charles Dana [1819–1897], invited Marx to join the editorial committee for The New American Cyclopædia. Lack of money drove him to accept the offer, but he entrusted most of the work to Engels in order to dedicate more time to his research. In their division of labour between July 1857 and November 1860, Engels edited military entries – i.e. the majority of the ones commissioned – while Marx compiled several biographical sketches. Although the payment of $2 per page was very low, it was still an addition to his disastrous finances. For this reason, Engels urged him to get as many entries from Dana as possible: ‘We can easily supply that amount of “unalloyed” erudition, so long as unalloyed Californian gold is substituted for it.’58 Marx followed the same principle in writing his articles: ‘to be as little concise as possible, so long as it is not insipid’.59
Despite efforts, his financial situation did not improve at all. It actually became so unsustainable that, chased by creditors he compared to ‘hungry wolves’60 and in the absence of coal for heating during the cold winter of that year, in January 1858, he wrote to Engels: ‘if these conditions persist, I would sooner be miles under the ground than go on vegetating this way. Always being a nuisance to others while, on top of that, being constantly tormented by personal trifles becomes unbearable in the long run.’61 In such circumstances he also had bitter words for the emotional sphere: ‘privately, I think, I lead the most agitated life imaginable. […] For people of wide aspiration nothing is more stupid than to get married, thus letting oneself in for the the small miseries of domestic and private life.’62
Poverty was not the only spectre haunting Marx. As with a major part of his troubled existence, he was also affected at the time by several diseases. In March 1857, the excessive labour done at night gave him an eye infection; in April, he was hit by toothache; in May, he suffered continuous liver complaints for which he was ‘submerged in drugs’. Greatly enfeebled, he was incapacitated and unable to work for three weeks. He then reported to Engels: ‘in order that my time should not be entirely wasted I have, in the absence of better things, been mastering the Danish language’; however, ‘if the doctor’s promises are anything to go by, I have prospects of becoming a human being again by next week. Meanwhile I’m still as yellow as a quince and vastly more irritated.’63
Shortly afterwards, a much graver occurrence befell the Marx family. In early July, Jenny gave birth to their last child, but the baby, born too weak, died immediately after. Bereaved once more, Marx confessed to Engels: ‘in itself, this is not a tragedy. But […] the circumstances that caused it to happen were such to bring back heartrending memories (probably the death of Edgar, the last child he lost). It is impossible to discuss this issue in a letter.’64 Engels was highly affected by this statement and replied: ‘things must be really hard for you to write like this. You can accept the death of the little one stoically, but your wife will hardly be able to.’65
The situation was further complicated by the fact that Engels fell ill and was seriously hit by a glandular fever, so he could not work for the whole summer. At that point, Marx was in real difficulties. Without his friend’s entries for the encyclopaedia, he needed to buy time, so he pretended to have sent a pile of manuscripts to New York, and that they had been lost in the post. Nonetheless, the pressure did not decrease. When the events surrounding the Indian Sepoy rebellion became more striking, the New-York Tribune expected an analysis from its expert,66 without knowing that the articles concerning military matters were in fact the work of Engels. Marx, forced by the circumstances to be temporarily in charge of the ‘military department’,67 ventured to claim that the English needed to make a retreat by the beginning of the rainy season. He informed Engels of his choice in these words: ‘it is possible that I’ll look really bad but in any case with a little dialectics I will be able to get out of it. I have, of course, so formulated my words as to be right either way.’68 However, Marx did not underestimate this conflict and reflecting on its possible effects, he said: ‘in view of the drain of men and bullion which she will cost the English, India is now our best ally’.69
Poverty, health problems and all kind of privations – the Grundrisse was written in this tragic context. It was not the product of research by a well-to-do thinker protected by bourgeois tranquillity; on the contrary, it was the labour of an author who experienced hardship and found the energy to carry on only sustained by the belief that, given the advancing economic crisis, his work had become necessary for his times.
Marx, then, started from the need to address a fundamental methodological issue: how to reproduce reality in thought? How to construct an abstract model capable of comprehending and representing society? Such questions are also posed in the ‘Introduction’ to the Grundrisse. The pages that Marx devoted to ‘the relationship between scientific presentation and the real movement’70 do not represent his final thoughts on method: they theorize the problelm inadequately and do little more than sketch out a number of points. Nevertheless, these reflections have made the ‘Introduction’ an indispensable theoretical text, as well as a fascinating one from a literary point of view, for all serious interpreters and readers of Marx.
Like other great thinkers before him, Marx first asked himself where to begin – that is, in his case, what political economy should take as its analytic starting-point. One possibility was that it should begin ‘with the real and the concrete, with the real precondition’, ‘the foundation and subject of the entire social act of production’: the population.71 But Marx considered that this path, taken by the founders of political economy, William Petty [1623–1687] and Pierre de Boisguillebert, was inadequate and erroneous. To begin with, such an indeterminate entity as the population would involve an overly generic image of the whole; it would be incapable of demonstrating the division into classes (bourgeoisie, landowners and proletariat), since these could be differentiated only through knowledge of their respective foundations: capital, land ownership and wage labour. With an empirical approach of that kind, concrete elements like the state would dissolve into abstract determinations such as division of labour, money or value.
No sooner had the eighteenth-century economists finished defining their abstract categories than ‘there began the economic systems, which ascended from simple relations, such as labour, division of labour, need, exchange value, to the level of the state, exchange between nations and the world market’. This procedure, employed by Smith and Ricardo in economics as well as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in philosophy, may be summed up in the thesis that ‘the abstract determinations lead towards a reproduction of the concrete by way of thought’; it was this that Marx described as the ‘scientifically correct method’ [wissenschaftlich richtige Methode]. With the right categories, it was possible ‘to retrace the journey until one finally arrives at population again, only this time not as the chaotic conception of the whole, but as a rich totality of many determinations and relations’.72
Yet, contrary to what certain commentators on the ‘Introduction’ have argued,73 Marx’s definition of the ‘scientifically correct method’ does not at all mean that it was the one he subsequently employed himself.74 First of all, he did not share the conviction of the economists that their logical reconstruction of the concrete at the level of ideas was a faithful reproduction of reality.75 The procedure synthetically presented in the ‘Introduction’ did, it is true, borrow various elements from Hegel’s method, but it also displayed radical differences. Like Hegel before him, Marx was convinced that ‘the method of rising from the abstract to the concrete is only the way in which thought appropriates the concrete’, that the recomposition of reality in thought should start from the simplest and most general determinations. For both, moreover, the concrete was ‘the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse’; it appeared in thought as ‘a process of concentration, as a result, not as a point of departure’, although for Marx, it was always necessary to keep in mind that the concrete was ‘the point of departure for observation [Anschauung] and conception’.
Beyond this common base, however, there was the difference that ‘Hegel fell into the illusion of conceiving the real as the product of thought’, whereas for Marx ‘this is by no means the process by which the concrete itself comes into being’. In Hegelian idealism, Marx argues, ‘the movement of the categories appears as the real act of production […] whose product is the world’; ‘conceptual thinking is the real human being’ and ‘the conceptual world as such is thus the only reality’, not only representing the real world in ideas but also operating as its constitutive process. Marx emphasized several times, in opposition to Hegel, that ‘the concrete totality, [as] a totality of thoughts, [like the] concrete in thought, [is] in fact a product of thinking and comprehending’, but that it is ‘not in any way a product of the concept which thinks and generates itself’. For ‘the real subject retains its autonomous existence outside the head just as before. […] Hence, in the theoretical method, too, the subject, society, must always be kept in mind as the presupposition.’76
In the ‘Introduction’, Marx turned to another crucial issue. In what order should he set out the categories in the work he was about to write? To the question as to whether the complex should furnish the instruments with which to understand the simple, or the other way round, he decisively opted for the first possibility.
Bourgeois society is the most complex historic organization of production. The categories which express its relations, the comprehension of its structure, thereby also allow insights into the structure and the relations of production of all the vanquished social formations out of whose ruins and elements it built itself up, whose partly still unconquered remnants are carried along with it.77
It is the present, then, which offers the indications for a reconstruction of the past. ‘Human anatomy contains a key to the anatomy of the ape [… and] the intimations of higher development among the subordinate animal species […] can be understood only after the higher development is already known.’78 This well-known statement should not, however, be read in evolutionist terms. Indeed, Marx explicitly criticized the conception of ‘so-called historical evolution’, based on the banality that ‘the latest form regards the previous ones as steps leading up to itself’.79 Unlike the theorists of evolutionism, who posited a naively progressive trajectory from the simplest to the most complex organisms, Marx chose to use an opposite, much more complex logical method and elaborated a conception of history marked by the succession of modes of production (ancient, Asiatic, feudal, capitalist), which was meant to explain the positions and functions that the categories assumed within those various modes.80 It was bourgeois society, therefore, which provided the clues for an understanding of the economies of previous historical epochs – although, given the profound differences between societies, the clues should be treated with moderation. Marx emphatically repeated that this could not be done ‘in the manner of those economists who smudge over all historical differences and see bourgeois relations in all forms of society’.81
Marx rejected the approach of chronological succession for the scientific categories, which he had used in The Poverty of Philosophy, in favour of a logical method with historical-empirical checks. Since the present helped one to understand the past, or the structure of man the structure of the ape, it was necessary to begin the analysis from the most mature stage, capitalist society, and more particularly from the element that predominated there over all others: capital. ‘Capital is the all-dominating economic power of bourgeois society. It must form the starting-point as well as the finishing-point.’82
In essence, setting out the categories in a precise logical order and the working of real history do not coincide with each other – and moreover, as Marx wrote in the manuscripts for Capital, Volume III, ‘all science would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of things directly coincided’.83
Marx, then, arrived at his own synthesis by diverging from the empiricism of the early economists, which yielded a dissolution of concrete elements into abstract definitions; from the method of the classical economists, which reduced thought about reality to reality itself; from philosophical idealism – including, in Marx’s view, Hegel’s philosophy – which he accused of giving thought the capacity to produce the concrete; from gnoseological conceptions that rigidly counterposed forms of thought and objective reality; from historicism and its dissolution of the logical into the historical; and, finally, from his own conviction in The Poverty of Philosophy that he was essentially following ‘the march of history’.84 His aversion to establishing a one-to-one correspondence between the concrete and thought led him to separate the two by recognizing the specificity of the latter and assigning to the former an existence independent of thought, so that the order of exposition of the categories differed from that which manifested itself in the relations of the real historical process.85 To avoid limiting the cognitive process to a mere repetition of the stages of what had happened in history, it was necessary to use a process of abstraction, and therefore categories that allowed for the interpretation of society in all its complexity. On the other hand, to be really useful for this purpose, abstraction had to be constantly compared with various historical realities, in such a way that the general logical determinations could be distinguished from the concrete historical relations. Marx’s conception of history thereby gained in efficacy and incisiveness: once a symmetry of logical order and actual historical order had been rejected, the historical became decisive for the understanding of reality, while the logical made it possible to conceive history as something other than a flat chronology of events.86
The method developed by Marx had provided him with tools not only to understand the differences among all the modes in which production had manifested itself in history, but also to discern in the present the tendencies prefiguring a new mode of production and therefore confounding all those who had proclaimed the inalterability of capitalism. His own research, including in epistemology, never had an exclusively theoretical motive; it was always driven by the need to interpret the world in order to engage better in the political struggle.
The last important reflections elaborated by Marx – starting from a few considerations on the relationship between Greek art and modern society – focused on the ‘uneven relationship [ungleiche Verhältniß] between material production and artistic development’.87 Far from affirming the kind of rigid parallelism between production and forms of consciousness that many ostensible Marxists later postulated, Marx stressed that there was no direct relationship between social-economic development and artistic production.
Reworking certain ideas in The Historical View of the Literature of the South of Europe (1813) by Leonard Simonde de Sismondi, which he had read and excerpted in a notebook of 1852, he now wrote: ‘In the case of the arts, it is well known that certain periods of their flowering are out of all proportion to the general development of society, hence also to the material foundation [materiellen Grundlage], the skeletal structure […] of its organization.’ He also pointed out that certain art forms – the epic, for instance – ‘are possible only at an undeveloped stage of artistic development. If this is the case with the relation between different kinds of art within the realm of the arts, it is already less puzzling that it is the case in the relation of the entire realm to the general development of society.’88 Greek art presupposed Greek mythology, that is, an ‘unconsciously artistic’ representation of social forms. But, in an advanced society such as that of the modern age, in which people conceive of nature rationally, not as an external power standing over and against them, mythology loses its raison d’être and the epic can no longer be repeated: ‘Is Achilles possible with powder and lead? Or the Iliad with the printing press […]? Do not the song and the saga and the muse necessarily come to an end with the printer’s bar, hence do not the necessary conditions of epic poetry vanish?’89
Marx had an anti-dogmatic approach as to how the forms of material production are related to intellectual creations and behaviour. His awareness of their ‘uneven development’ involved rejection of any schematic procedure that posited a uniform relationship among the various spheres of the social totality.90 Even the well-known thesis in the ‘Preface’ to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, published two years after Marx wrote the ‘Introduction’ – ‘the mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life’91 – should not be interpreted in a determinist sense;92 it should be clearly distinguished from the narrow and predictable reading of ‘Marxism-Leninism’, in which the superstructural phenomena of society are merely a reflection of the material existence of human beings.93
Apart from the methodological considerations in the ‘Introduction’, Marx divided the Grundrisse into two parts: the ‘Chapter on Money’, which deals with money and value, and the ‘Chapter on Capital’, which centres on the process of production and circulation of capital and addresses such key themes as the concept of surplus-value and the economic formations which preceded the capitalist mode of production. His immense effort did not, however, allow him to complete the work. In late February 1858 he wrote to Lassalle:
I have in fact been at work on the final stages for some months. But the thing is proceeding very slowly because no sooner does one set about finally disposing of subjects to which one has devoted years of study than they start revealing new aspects and demand to be thought out further. […] The work I am presently concerned with is a Critique of Economic Categories or, if you like, a critical exposé of the system of the bourgeois economy. It is at once an exposé and, by the same token, a critique of the system. I have very little idea how many sheets the whole thing will amount to. […] Now that I am at last ready to set to work after 15 years of study, I have an uncomfortable feeling that turbulent movements from without will probably interfere after all.94
Attention to the main economic and political events of the time was a constant in Marx’s life. In the autumn of 1857, Engels was still evaluating events with optimism: ‘The American crash is superb and will last for a long time. […] Commerce will again be going downhill for the next three or four years. Now we have a chance.’95 Thus, he was encouraging Marx: ‘In 1848 we were saying: now our moment is coming, and in a certain sense it was, but this time it is coming completely and it is a case of life or death.’96 On the other hand, without harbouring any doubts about the imminence of the revolution, they both hoped that it would not erupt before the whole of Europe had been invested by the crisis, and so the auspices for the ‘year of strife’ were postponed to 1858.97
As reported in a letter from Jenny von Westphalen to Conrad Schramm [1822–1858], a family friend, the general crisis had its positive effects on Marx: ‘You can imagine how high up the Moor is. He has recovered all his wonted facility and capacity for work, as well as the liveliness and buoyancy of spirit.’98 In fact, Marx began a period of intense intellectual activity, dividing his labours between the articles for the New-York Tribune, the work for The New American Cyclopædia, the unfinished project to write a pamphlet on the current crisis and, obviously, the Grundrisse. However, despite his renewed energies, all these undertakings proved excessive and Engels’s aid became once more indispensable. By the beginning of 1858, following his full recovery from the disease he had suffered, Marx asked him to return to work on the encyclopaedia entries:
Sometimes it seems to me that if you could manage to do a few sections every couple of days, it could perhaps act as a check on your drunkenness that, from what I know of Manchester and at the present excited times, seems to me inevitable and far from good for you. […] Because I really need to finish off my other works, that are taking up all my time, even if the house should come falling on my head!99
Engels accepted Marx’s energetic exhortation and reassured him that, after the holidays, he ‘experienced the need of a quieter and more active life’.100 Nonetheless, Marx’s greatest problem was still lack of time, and he repeatedly complained to his friend that ‘whenever I’m at the [British] Museum, there are so many things I need to look up that it’s closing time (now 4 o’clock) before I have so much as looked round. Then there’s the journey there. So much time lost.’101 Moreover, in addition to practical difficulties, there were theoretical ones: ‘I have been […] so damnably held up by errors in calculation that, in despair, I have applied myself to a revision of algebra. Arithmetic has always been my enemy, but by making a detour via algebra, I shall quickly get back into the way of things.’102 Finally, his scrupulousness contributed to slowing the writing of the Grundrisse, as he demanded of himself that he keep on searching for new confirmations to test the validity of his theses. In February, he explained the state of his research to Ferdinand Lassalle thus:
Now I want to tell you how my Economics is getting on. The work is written. I have in fact had the final text in hand for some months. But the thing is proceeding very slowly, because no sooner does one set about finally disposing of subjects that have been the main object of years of study, than they start revealing new aspects and demand to be thought out further.
In the same letter, Marx regretted once again the condition to which he was doomed. Being forced to spend a large part of the day on newspaper articles, he wrote: ‘I am not master of my time but rather its slave. Only the nights are left for my own work, which in turn is often disrupted by bilious attacks or recurrences of liver trouble.’103
In fact, illness had violently befallen him again. In January 1858, he communicated to Engels that he had been in cure for three weeks: ‘I had exaggerated working at night – only keeping myself going with lemonades and a large quantity of tobacco’.104 In March, he was ‘very sickly again’ with his liver: ‘the prolonged work by night and, by day, the numerous petty discomforts resulting from the economical conditions of my domesticity have recently been cause of frequent relapses’.105 In April, he claimed again: ‘I’ve felt so ill with my bilious complaint this week, that I am incapable of thinking, reading, writing or, indeed, doing anything save the articles for the [New-York] Tribune. These, of course, cannot be allowed to lapse since I must draw on the curs as soon as possible to avoid bankruptcy.’106
At this stage of his life, Marx had completely given up politically organized affiliations and private relations: in letters to his few remaining friend, he disclosed that ‘I live like a hermit’,107 and ‘I seldom see my few acquaintances nor, on the whole, is this any great loss’.108 Aside from Engels’s continuous encouragement, the recession and its expansion world-wide also fed his hopes and goaded him into carrying on working: ‘take[n] all in all, the crisis has been burrowing away like a good old mole’.109 The correspondence with Engels documents the enthusiasm sparked in him by the progression of events. In January, having read the news from Paris in the Manchester Guardian, he exclaimed: ‘everything seems to be going better than expected’,110 and at the end of March, commenting on recent developments, he added: ‘in France the bedlam continues most satisfactorily. It is unlikely that conditions will be peaceful beyond the summer.’111 While a few months earlier, he had pessimistically stated that:
After what has happened over the last ten years, any thinking being’s contempt for the masses as for individuals must have increased to such a degree that ‘odi profanum vulgus et arceo’112 has almost become an imposed maxim. Nonetheless, all these are themselves philistine states of mind, that will be swept away by the first storm.113
In May, he claimed with some satisfaction that ‘on the whole the present moment of time is a pleasing one. History is apparently about to take again a new start, and the signs of dissolution everywhere are delightful for every mind not bent upon the conservation of things as they are.’114
Similarly, Engels reported to Marx with great fervour that on the day of the execution of Felice Orsini [1819–1858], the Italian democrat who had tried to assassinate Napoleon III [1808–1873], a major working class protest took place in Paris: ‘at a time of great turmoil it is good to see such a roll-call take place and hear 100,000 men reply “present!”’.115 In view of possible revolutionary developments, he also studied the sizeable number of French troops and warned Marx that to win it would have been necessary to form secret societies in the army, or, as in 1848, for the bourgeoisie to stand against Bonaparte. Finally, he predicted that the secession of Hungary and Italy and the Slavic insurrections would have violently hit Austria, the old reactionary bastion, and that, in addition to this, a generalized counter attack would have spread the crisis to every large city and industrial district. In other words, he was certain that ‘after all, it’s going to be a hard struggle’.116 Led by his optimism, Engels resumed his horse riding, this time with a further aim; as he wrote to Marx: ‘Yesterday, I took my horse over a bank and hedge five feet and several inches high: the highest I have ever jumped […] when we go back to Germany we will certainly have a thing or two to show the Prussian cavalry. Those gentlemen will find it difficult to keep up with me.’117 The reply was of smug satisfaction: ‘I congratulate you upon your equestrian performances. But don’t take too many breakneck jumps, as there will be soon more important occasion for risking one’s neck. I don’t believe that cavalry is the speciality in which you will be of the greatest service to Germany.’118
On the contrary, Marx’s life met with further complications. In March, Lassalle informed him that the editor Franz Duncker [1813–1879] from Berlin had agreed to publish his work in instalments, but the good news paradoxically turned into another destabilising factor. A new cause of concern added to the others – anxiety – as recounted in the umpteenth medical bulletin addressed to Engels, this time written by Jenny von Westphalen: ‘His bile and liver are again in a state of rebellion. […] The worsening of his condition is largely attributable to mental unrest and agitation which now, after the conclusion of the contract with the publishers are greater than ever and increasing daily, since he finds it utterly impossible to bring the work to a close.’119 For the whole of April, Marx was hit by the most virulent bile pain he had ever suffered and could not work at all. He concentrated exclusively on the few articles for the New-York Tribune; these were indispensable for his survival, and he had to dictate them to his wife, who was fulfilling ‘the function of secretary’.120 As soon as he was able to hold a pen again, he informed Engels that his silence was only due to his ‘inability to write’. This was manifest ‘not only in the literary, but in the literal sense of the word’. He also claimed that ‘the persistent urge to get down to work coupled with the inability to do so contributed to aggravate the disease’. His condition was still very bad:
I am not capable of working. If I write for a couple of hours, I have to lie down in pain for a couple of days. I expect, damn it, that this state of affairs will come to an end next week. It couldn’t have come at a worst time. Obviously during the winter I overdid my nocturnal labours. Hinc illae lacrimae.121
Marx tried to fight his illness, but, after taking large amounts of medicines without drawing any benefit from them, he resigned himself to follow the doctor’s advice to change scene for a week and ‘refrain from all intellectual labour for a while’.122 So he decided to visit Engels, to whom he announced: ‘I’ve let my duty go hang’.123 Naturally, during his twenty days in Manchester, he carried on working: he wrote the ‘Chapter on Capital’ and the last pages of the Grundrisse.
Once back in London, Marx should have edited the text in order to send it to the publishers, but, although he was already late, he still delayed its draft. His critical nature won over his practical needs again. As he informed Engels:
During my absence a book by Maclaren covering the entire history of currency came out in London, which, to judge by the excerpts in The Economist, is first-rate. The book isn’t in the library yet […]. Obviously I must read it before writing mine. So I sent my wife to the publisher in the City, but to our dismay we discovered that it costs 9/6d, more than the whole of our fighting funds. Hence I would be most grateful if you could send me a mail order for that amount. There probably won’t be anything that’s new to me in the book, but after all the fuss The Economist has made about it, and the excerpts I myself have read, my theoretical conscience won’t allow me to proceed without having looked at it.124
This vignette is very telling. The ‘dangerousness’ of the reviews in The Economist for family peace; sending his wife Jenny to the City on a mission to deal with theoretical doubts; the fact that his savings was not enough even to buy a book; the usual pleas to his friend in Manchester that required immediate attention: what can better describe the life of Marx in those years and particularly what his ‘theoretical conscience’ was capable of?
In addition to his complex temperament, ill health and poverty – his usual ‘enemies’ – contributed to delay the completion of his work even further. His physical condition worsened again, as reported to Engels: ‘the disease from which I was suffering before leaving Manchester again became chronic, persisting throughout the summer, so that any kind of writing costs me a tremendous effort’.125 Moreover, those months were marked by unbearable economic concerns that forced him constantly to live with the ‘spectre of an inevitable final catastrophe’.126 Seized by desperation again, in July, Marx sent a letter to Engels that really testifies to the extreme situation he was living in:
It behoves us to put our heads together to see if some way cannot be found out of the present situation, for it has become absolutely untenable. It has already resulted in my being completely disabled from doing any work, partly because I have to waste most of my best time running round in fruitless attempts to raise money, and partly because the strength of my abstraction – due rather, perhaps, to my being physically run down – is no longer a match for domestic miseries. My wife is a nervous wreck because of this misery. […] Thus the whole business turns on the fact that what little comes in is never earmarked for the coming month, nor is it ever more than just sufficient to reduce debts […] so that this misery is only postponed by four weeks which have to be got through in one way or another. […] not even the auction of my household goods would suffice to satisfy the creditors in the vicinity and ensure an unhampered removal to some hidey-hole. The show of respectability which has so far been kept up has been the only means of avoiding a collapse. I for my part wouldn’t care a damn about living in Whitechapel [the neighbourhood in London where most of the working class lived at the time], provided I could again at last secure an hour’s peace in which to attend to my work. But in view of my wife’s condition just now such a metamorphosis might entail dangerous consequences, and it could hardly be suitable for growing girls. […] I would not with my worst enemy to have to wade through the quagmire in which I’ve been trapped for the past eight weeks, fuming the while over the innumerable vexations that are ruining my intellect and destroying my capacity for work.127
Yet, despite his extremely destitute state, Marx did not let the precariousness of his situation triumph over him and, concerning his intention to complete his work, he commented to his friend Joseph Weydemeyer: ‘I must pursue my goal at all costs and not allow bourgeois society to turn me into a money-making machine’.128
Meanwhile, the economic crisis waned, and soon enough the market resumed its normal functioning.129 In fact, in August, a disheartened Marx turned to Engels: ‘over the past few weeks the world has grown damned optimistic again’;130 and Engels, reflecting on the way the overproduction of commodities had been absorbed, asserted: ‘never before has such heavy flooding drained away so rapidly’.131 The certainty that the revolution was around the corner, which inspired them throughout the autumn of 1856 and encouraged Marx to write the Grundrisse, was now giving way to the most bitter disillusionment: ‘there is no war. Everything is bourgeois.’132 While Engels raged against the ‘increasing embourgeoisement of the English proletariat’, a phenomenon that, in his opinion, was to lead the most exploitative country in the world to have a ‘bourgeois proletariat alongside the bourgeoisie’,133 Marx held onto every even slightly significant event, until the end: ‘despite the optimistic turn taken by world trade […], it is some consolation at least that the revolution has begun in Russia, for I regard the convocation of “notables” to Petersburg as such a beginning’. His hopes were also set on Germany: ‘in Prussia things are worse than they were in 1847’, as well as on the Czech bourgeoisie’s struggle for national independence: ‘exceptional movements are on foot amongst the Slavs, especially in Bohemia, which, though counter-revolutionary, yet provide ferment for the movement’. Finally, as if betrayed, he scathingly asserted: ‘It will do the French no harm to see that, even without them, the world moved.’134
However, Marx had to resign himself to the evidence: the crisis had not provoked the social and political effects that he and Engels had forecast with so much certainty. Nonetheless, he was still firmly convinced that it was only a matter of time before the revolution in Europe erupted and that the issue, if any, was what world scenarios the economic change would have provoked. Thus, he wrote to Engels, giving a sort of political evaluation of the most recent events and a reflection on future prospects:
We can’t deny that bourgeois society has for the second time experienced its sixteenth century, a sixteenth century which, I hope, will sound its death knell just as the first flattered it in its lifetime. The real task of bourgeois society is the creation of the world market, or at least of its general framework, and of the production based on the market. Since the world is round, it seems to me that the colonisation of California and Australia and the opening up of China and Japan would seem to have completed this process. The difficult question for us is this: on the continent the revolution is imminent and will immediately assume a socialist character. Will it not necessarily be crushed in this little corner of the earth, since the movement of bourgeois society is still in the ascendant over a far greater area?135
These thoughts include two of the most significant of Marx’s predictions: a right one that led him to intuit, better than any of his contemporaries, the world scale of the development of capitalism; and a wrong one, linked to the belief in the inevitability of the proletarian revolution in Europe.
The letters to Engels contain Marx’s sharp criticism of all those who were his political adversaries in the progressive camp. Many were targeted alongside one of his favourites, Proudhon, the main figure of the dominant form of socialism in France, whom Marx regarded as the ‘false brother’ communism needed to rid itself of.136 Marx often entertained a relationship of rivalry with Lassalle, for instance, and when he received Lassalle’s latest book Heraclitus, the Dark Philosopher (1858), he termed it as a ‘very silly concoction’.137 In September 1858, Giuseppe Mazzini published his new manifesto in the journal Pensiero ed Azione [Thought and Action], but Marx, who had no doubts about him, asserted: ‘still the same old jackass’.138 Instead of analysing the reasons for the defeat of 1848–49, Mazzini ‘busies himself with advertising nostrums for the cure of […] the political palsy’ of the revolutionary migration.139 He railed against Julius Fröbel [1805–1893], a member of the Frankfurt council in 1848–49 and typical representative of the German democrats, who had fled abroad and later distanced himself from political life: ‘once they have found their bread and cheese, all these scoundrels require is some blasé pretext to bid farewell to the struggle’.140 Finally, as ironic as ever, he derided the ‘revolutionary activity’ of Karl Blind [1826–1907], one of the leaders of the German émigrés in London:
He gets a couple of acquaintances in Hamburg to send letters (written by himself) to English newspapers in which mention is made of the stir created by his anonymous pamphlets. Then his friends report on German newspapers what a fuss was made by the English ones. That, you see, is what being a man of action means.141
Marx’s political engagement was of a different nature. While never desisting from fighting against bourgeois society, he also kept his awareness of his main role in this struggle, which was that of developing a critique of the capitalist mode of production through a rigorous study of political economy and ongoing analysis of economic events. For this reason, during the ‘lows’ of the class struggle, he decided to use his powers in the best possible way by keeping at a distance from the useless conspiracies and personal intrigues to which political competition was reduced at the time: ‘since the Cologne trial [the one against the communists of 1853], I have withdrawn completely into my study. My time was too precious to be wasted in fruitless endeavour and petty squabbles.’142 As a matter of fact, despite the flood of troubles, Marx continued to work, and – after he had carefully worked up the ‘Chapter on Money’ between August and October 1858 into the manuscript Original Text of the Second and the Beginning of the Third Chapter of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy – in 1859 he published his A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, a short book with no public resonance for which the Grundrisse had been the initial testing ground.
Marx ended the year 1858 similarly to previous ones, as his wife Jenny recounts: ‘1858 was neither a good nor a bad year for us; it was one where days went by, one completely like the next. Eating and drinking, writing articles, reading newspapers and going for walks: this was our whole life.’143 Day after day, month after month, year after year, Marx kept working on his oeuvre. He was guided in the burdensome labour of drafting the Grundrisse by his great determination and strength of personality, and also by the unshakeable certainty that his existence belonged to the movement for the emancipation of millions of women and men.
1Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 26 September 1856, in MECW, vol. 40, p. 70.
2Friedrich Engels to Karl Marx, 26 September 1856, in MECW, vol. 40, p. 72.
3Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 8 December 1857, in MECW, vol. 40, p. 257. The title later given to these manuscripts was inspired by this letter.
4Ibid.
5It should be stressed that the first part of Notebook I, which contains Marx’s critical analysis of Of the Reform of Banks by Alfred Darimon [1819–1902], was written in the months of January and February 1857, not (as the editors of the Grundrisse thought) in October. See Inna Ossobowa, ‘Über einige Probleme der ökonomischen Studien von Marx im Jahre 1857 vom Standpunkt des Historikers’, Beiträge zur Marx-Engels-Forschung, 1990, n. 29, pp. 147–61.
6See the recently published volume MEGA2, IV/14.
7See Michael Krätke, ‘Marx’s “Books of Crisis” of 1857–8’, in Marcello Musto (ed.), Karl Marx’s Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy 150 Years Later. London/New York: Routledge, 2008, pp. 169–75.
8Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 18 December 1857, in MECW, vol. 40, p. 224. A few days later, Marx communicated his plans to Lassalle: ‘The present commercial crisis has impelled me to set to work seriously on my outlines of political economy, and also to prepare something on the present crisis’, Karl Marx to Ferdinand Lassalle, 21 December 1857, in MECW, vol. 40, p. 226.
9In a letter to Ferdinand Lassalle on 12 November 1858, Marx wrote that ‘economics as a science in the German sense of the word has yet to be tackled’, in MECW, vol. 40, p. 355.
10The voluminous critical literature on the ‘Introduction’ is one token of its importance. Since its first publication in 1903, all the main critical interpretations, intellectual biographies, and introductions to Marx’s thought have taken account of it, and it has been the object of numerous articles and commentaries. Among the latter, see in particular Terrell Carver, Karl Marx: Texts on Method. Oxford: Blackwell, 1975, pp. 88–158; and Marcello Musto, ‘History, production and method in the “1857 Introduction”’, in Musto (ed.), Karl Marx’s Grundrisse. Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy 150 Years Later, pp. 3–32.
11Karl Marx, Grundrisse. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1993, p. 69.
12Marx, Grundrisse, p. 83.
13See Ian Watt, ‘Robinson Crusoe as a Myth’, Essays in Criticism, vol. I (1951), n. 2, p. 112.
14Marx, Grundrisse, p. 83.
15Ibid., p. 496.
16Ibid., p. 472.
17Ibid., p. 471.
18Ibid., pp. 471–513. Marx dealt with these themes in detail in the section of the Grundrisse devoted to ‘Forms which Precede Capitalist Production’.
19Ibid., p. 486.
20Ibid., p. 84. This conception of an Aristotelian matrix – the family preceding the birth of the village – recurs in Capital, volume I, but Marx was said later to have moved away from it. Friedrich Engels pointed out in a note to the third German edition of 1883: ‘[s]ubsequent very searching study of the primitive conditions of man led the author [i.e. Marx] to the conclusion that it was not the family that originally developed into the tribe, but that, on the contrary, the tribe was the primitive and spontaneously developed form of human association, on the basis of blood relationship, that out of the first incipient loosening of the tribal bonds, the many and various forms of the family were afterwards developed’, Karl Marx, Capital, Volume III, in MECW, vol. 37, p. 356. Engels was referring to the studies of ancient history made by himself at the time and by Marx during the final years of his life (for an extensive discussion of Marx’s anthropological notebooks see Musto, The Last Marx (1881–1883): An Intellectual Biography, ch. 1).
21Marx, Capital, Volume I, p. 88.
22Ibid., p. 357. Ten years earlier, in the ‘Introduction’, Marx had already argued: ‘it is simply wrong to place exchange at the centre of communal society as the original, constituent element. It originally appears, rather, in the connection of the different communities with one another, not in the relations between the members of a single community’, Marx, Grundrisse, p. 103.
23Marx, Grundrisse, p. 162. This mutual dependence should not be confused with that which establishes itself among individuals in the capitalist mode of production: the former is the product of nature, the latter of history. In capitalism, individual independence is combined with a social dependence expressed in the division of labour, see Marx, Original Text of the Second and the Beginning of the Third Chapter of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, in MECW, vol. 29, p. 465. At this stage of production, the social character of activity presents itself not as a simple relationship of individuals to one another ‘but as their subordination to relations which subsist independently of them and which arise out of collisions between mutually indifferent individuals. The general exchange of activities and products, which has become a vital condition for each individual – their mutual interconnection – here appears as something alien to them, autonomous, as a thing’, Marx, Grundrisse, p. 157.
24Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, vol. 1. London: Methuen, 1961, p. 19.
25See David Ricardo, The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation. London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1973, p. 15. Cf. Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, in MECW, vol. 29, p. 300.
26Marx, Grundrisse, p. 83.
27The economist who, in Marx’s view, had avoided this naive assumption was James Steuart. Marx commented on numerous passages from Steuart’s main work – An Inquiry into the Principles of Political Economy – in a notebook that he filled with extracts from it in the spring of 1851, see Karl Marx, ‘Exzerpte aus James Steuart: An inquiry into the principles of political economy’, in MEGA2, vol. IV/8.
28Marx, Grundrisse, p. 84. Elsewhere in the Grundrisse Marx stated that ‘an isolated individual could no more have property in land and soil than he could speak’, ibid., p. 485; and that ‘language as the product of an individual is an impossibility. But the same holds for property’, ibid., p. 490.
29Ibid., p. 83.
30Ibid., p. 84.
31Ibid., p. 83.
32In his editorial commentary on the ‘Introduction’, Terrell Carver points out – see Carver, pp. 93–5 – that Marx’s remarks concerning Bastiat’s use of Robinson Crusoe do not correspond to what the author actually says. For, according to Bastiat, ‘Daniel Defoe would have deprived his novel of every trace of verisimilitude if […] he had not made necessary social concessions by allowing his hero to save from the shipwreck a few indispensable objects, such as provisions, gunpowder, a rifle, an axe, a knife, rope, boards, iron, etc. – decisive evidence that society is man’s necessary milieu, since even a novelist cannot make him live outside it. And note that Robinson Crusoe took with him into solitude another social treasure worth a thousand times more […] I mean his ideas, his memories, his experience, and especially his language’, Frédéric Bastiat, Economic Harmonies. Princeton: D. van Nostrand Co. Inc., 1964, p. 64. Nevertheless, Bastiat displays a lack of historical sense in other parts of his work, where the actions of the individual seem dictated by rational economic calculation and are presented in accordance with the splits peculiar to capitalist society: ‘An individual in isolation, provided he could survive for any length of time, would be at once capitalist, entrepreneur, workman, producer and consumer’, ibid., p. 174. And so Crusoe once again becomes the economists’ prosaic stereotype: ‘Our Robinson Crusoe will not, therefore, set about making the tool unless he can foresee, when the work is done, a definite saving of his labour in relation to his satisfaction, or an increase in satisfactions for the same amount of labour’, ibid., p. 175. Most probably these were the assertions that attracted Marx’s attention.
33Marx, Grundrisse, p. 85.
34Karl Korsch, Karl Marx. London: Chapman & Hall, 1938, p. 78f.
35Marx, Grundrisse, p. 85.
36John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy, vol. I. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965, p. 55. The more elaborate exposition of this idea is to be found in John Stuart Mill, ibid., p. 55f.
37Marx, Grundrisse, p. 591.
38Ibid., p. 249. In fact, Marx had already criticized the economists’ lack of historical sense in The Poverty of Philosophy: ‘Economists have a singular method of procedure. There are only two kinds of institutions for them, artificial and natural. The institutions of feudalism are artificial institutions, those of the bourgeoisie are natural institutions. In this they resemble the theologians, who likewise establish two kinds of religion. Every religion which is not theirs is an invention of men, while their own is an emanation from God. When the economists say that present-day relations – the relations of bourgeois production – are natural, they imply that these are the relations in which wealth is created and productive forces developed in conformity with the laws of nature. These relations therefore are themselves natural laws independent of the influence of time. They are eternal laws which must always govern society. Thus there has been history, but there is no longer any’, in MECW, vol. 6, p. 174.
39Marx, Grundrisse, p. 460.
40Ibid.
41Ibid., p. 675.
42Ibid., p. 278.
43Ibid., p. 489.
44Ibid., p. 239.
45Ibid., p. 535.
46Ibid., p. 156.
47Ibid., p. 248.
48Marx, Capital, Volume III, p. 240.
49Marx, Grundrisse, p. 832.
50Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 20 January 1857, in MECW, vol. 40, p. 93.
51Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 2 April 1858, in MECW, vol. 40, p. 303.
52Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 18 March 1857, in MECW, vol. 40, p. 106.
53Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 23 January 1857, in MECW, vol. 40, p. 99.
54Karl Marx to Joseph Weydemeyer, 1 February 1859, in MECW, vol. 40, p. 374.
55Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 31 October 1857, in MECW, vol. 40, p. 198.
56Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 8 December 1857, in MECW, vol. 40, p. 214.
57Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 13 November 1857, in MECW, vol. 40, p. 199.
58Friedrich Engels to Karl Marx, 22 April 1857, in MECW, vol. 40, p. 122.
59Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 22 February 1858, in MECW, vol. 40, p. 272. Although they included some interesting remarks, the articles for the encyclopaedia were defined by Engels as ‘purely commercial work […] that can safely remain buried’. Friedrich Engels to Hermann Schlüter, 29 January 1891, in MECW, vol. 49, p. 113.
60Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 8 December 1857, p. 214.
61Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 28 January 1858, in MECW, vol. 40, p. 255.
62Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 22 February 1858, p. 273.
63Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 22 May 1857, in MECW, vol. 40, p. 132.
64Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 8 July 1857, in MECW, vol. 40, p. 143.
65Friedrich Engels to Karl Marx, 11 July 1857, in MECW, vol. 40, p. 143.
66Marx had already dealt at length with India in 1853. See Irfan Habib, ‘Marx’s Perception of India’, and Prabhat Patnaik, ‘Appreciation: the Other Marx’, in Iqbal Husain (ed.), Karl Marx, on India. New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2006, pp. xix–liv and lv–lxviii. See also Aijaz Ahmad, ‘Marx on India: a Clarification’, in In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures. London: Verso, 1992, pp. 221–42.
67Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 14 January 1858, in MECW, vol. 40, p. 249 (this letter is mistakenly dated 16 January 1858).
68Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 15 August 1857, in MECW, vol. 40, p. 152.
69Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 14 January 1858, p. 249.
70Marx, Grundrisse, p. 86.
71Ibid., p. 100.
72Ibid., pp. 100–1.
73The intepretations of Evald Ilyenkov, Louis Althusser, Antonio Negri and Galvano Della Volpe, for example, fall into the error of equating this with Marx’s method. See Ilyenkov, Dialectics of the Abstract & the Concrete in Marx’s Capital. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1982, p. 100; Louis Althusser and Étienne Balibar, Reading Capital. London: Verso, 1979, pp. 87–8; Antonio Negri, Marx beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse. New York: Autonomedia, 1991, p. 47; Galvano Della Volpe, Rousseau e Marx. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1979, p. 191. For a critique of Della Volpe, see Cesare Luporini, ‘Il circolo concreto-astratto-concreto’, in Franco Cassano (ed.), Marxismo e filosofia in Italia (1958–1971). Bari: De Donato, 1973, pp. 226–39.
74Marx, Grundrisse, p. 101.
75Mario Dal Pra, La dialettica in Marx. Bari: Laterza, 1965, p. 461.
76Marx, Grundrisse, pp. 101–2. In reality, however, Marx’s interpretation does not do justice to Hegel’s philosophy. A number of passages in the latter’s work show that, unlike the transcendental idealism of Johann Gottlieb Fichte [1762–1814] and the objective idealism of Friedrich Schelling, his thought did not confuse the movement of knowledge with the order of nature, the subject with the object. See Judith Jánoska, Martin Bondeli, Konrad Kindle and Marc Hofer, Das ‘Methodenkapitel’ von Karl Marx. Basel: Schwabe & Co., 1994, pp. 115–19; and Musto, ‘Introduction’, in Musto (ed.), Karl Marx’s Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy 150 Years Later, pp. 17–18.
77Marx, Grundrisse, p. 105.
78Ibid., p. 105.
79Ibid., p. 106.
80Stuart Hall, ‘Marx’s notes on method: A “reading” of the “1857 Introduction”’, Cultural Studies, vol. 17 (2003), n. 2, p. 133. Hall rightly notes that the theory developed by Marx represented a break with historicism, though not a break with historicity.
81Marx, Grundrisse, p. 105.
82Marx, Grundrisse, p. 107.
83Marx, Capital, Volume III, p. 804.
84Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, p. 172.
85Althusser and Balibar, Reading Capital, pp. 47–8, 87.
86The complexity of the method synthesized by Marx is apparent in the fact that it was misrepresented not only by many students of his work but also by Friedrich Engels. Not apparently having read the theses in the 1857 ‘Introduction’, Engels wrote in 1859, in a review of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, that once Marx had elaborated his method he could have undertaken the critique of political economy ‘in two ways – historically or logically’. But, as ‘history often moves in leaps and bounds and in zigzags, and as this would have [had] to be followed throughout, […] the logical method of approach was the only adequate one’. Engels wrongly concluded, however, that this was ‘indeed nothing but the historical method, only stripped of the historical form and of interfering contingencies. The point where this history begins must also be the starting-point of the train of thought, and its further progress will be simply the reflection, in abstract and theoretically consistent form, of the course of history’, Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, in MECW, vol. 29, p. 475. In short, Engels held that there was a parallelism between history and logic, which Marx had decisively rejected in the ‘Introduction’. Having been attributed to Marx by Engels, that position later became still more barren and schematic in the Marxist-Leninist interpretation.
87Marx, Grundrisse, p. 109.
88Ibid., p. 110.
89Ibid., p. 111. Friedrich Theodor Vischer [1807–1887], in his Aesthetics, or the Science of the Beautiful (1846–1857), discussed the power of capitalism to dissolve myths. Marx drew inspiration from this work and summarized parts of it in his notebooks, scarcely three months before he wrote the ‘Introduction’. But the approaches of the two authors could not have been more different: Vischer treated capitalism as an unalterable reality and deplored in romantic style the aesthetic impoverishment of culture that it brought about; whereas Marx, though constantly fighting for the overcoming of capitalism, emphasized that both materially and ideologically it represented a more advanced reality than previous modes of production, cf. Georg Lukács, ‘Karl Marx und Friedrich Theodor Vischer’, in Beiträge zur Geschichte der Ästhetik. Berlin: Aufbau Verlag, 1956, pp. 267–8.
90Marx, Grundrisse, p. 109.
91Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, in MECW, vol. 29, p. 263.
92Evidence of this is the fact that, when Marx quoted this statement in a note to the 1872–5 French edition of Capital, he preferred to use the verb dominer for the German bedingen (more usually translated as ‘déterminer’ or ‘conditionner’): ‘Le mode de production de la vie matérielle domine [dominates] en général le développement de la vie sociale, politique et intellectuelle’, see Karl Marx, ‘Le Capital’, MEGA2 II/7, p. 62. His aim in doing this was precisely to avoid the risk of positing a mechanical relationship between the two aspects, cf. Maximilien Rubel, Karl Marx. Essai de biographie intellectuelle. Paris: Rivière, 1971, p. 298.
93The worst and most widely disseminated interpretation of this kind is Joseph Stalin’s in Dialectical and Historical Materialism: ‘the material world represents objective reality [… and] the spiritual life of society is a reflection of this objective reality’; and ‘whatever is the being of a society, whatever are the conditions of material life of a society, such are the ideas, theories, political views and political institutions of that society’, Joseph Stalin, Dialectical and Historical Materialism. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1941, p. 15.
94Karl Marx to Ferdinand Lassalle, 22 February 1858, in MECW, vol. 40, pp. 270–1.
95Friedrich Engels to Karl Marx, 29 October 1857, in MECW, vol. 40, p. 195.
96Friedrich Engels to Karl Marx, 15 November 1857, in MECW, vol. 40, p. 200.
97Friedrich Engels to Karl Marx, 31 December 1857, in MECW, vol. 40, p. 236.
98Jenny Marx to Conrad Schramm, 8 December 1857, in MECW, vol. 40, p. 566.
99Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 5 January 1858, in MECW, vol. 40, p. 238.
100Friedrich Engels to Karl Marx, 6 January 1858, in MECW, vol. 40, p. 239.
101Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 1 February 1858, in MECW, vol. 40, p. 258.
102Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 11 January 1858, in MECW, vol. 40, p. 244.
103Karl Marx to Ferdinand Lassalle, 22 February 1858, p. 268.
104Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 14 January 1858, p. 247.
105Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 29 March 1858, in MECW, vol. 40, p. 295.
106Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 2 April 1858, p. 296.
107Karl Marx to Ferdinand Lassalle, 21 December 1857, p. 255.
108Karl Marx to Conrad Schramm, 8 December 1857, p. 217.
109Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 22 February 1858, p. 274.
110Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 23 January 1858, in MECW, vol. 40, p. 252.
111Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 29 March 1858, p. 296.
112Translation: ‘I hate and shun the vulgar crowd’: David Mulroy, Horace’s Odes and Epodes. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994, p. 127.
113Karl Marx to Ferdinand Lassalle, 22 February 1858, p. 268.
114Karl Marx to Ferdinand Lassalle, 31 May 1858, in MECW, vol. 40, p. 323.
115Friedrich Engels to Karl Marx, 17 March 1858, in MECW, vol. 40, pp. 289–90.
116Friedrich Engels to Karl Marx, 17 March 1858, p. 289.
117Friedrich Engels to Karl Marx, 11 February 1858, in MECW, vol. 40, p. 265.
118Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 14 February 1858, in MECW, vol. 40, p. 266.
119Jenny Marx to Friedrich Engels, 9 April 1858, in MECW, vol. 40, p. 569.
120Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 23 April 1857, in MECW, vol. 40, p. 125.
121Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 29 April 1858, in MECW, vol. 40, p. 309. Translation: ‘Hence, those tears’. Terence, Andria, Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 2002, p. 99.
122Karl Marx to Ferdinand Lassalle, 31 May 1858, p. 321.
123Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 1 May 1858, in MECW, vol. 40, p. 312.
124Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 31 May 1858, p. 317.
125Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 21 September 1858, in MECW, vol. 40, p. 341.
126Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 15 July 1858, in MECW, vol. 40, p. 328.
127Ibid. pp. 328–31.
128Karl Marx to Joseph Weydemeyer, 1 February 1859, p. 374.
129On the main events of the 1857 crisis, see James Sloan Gibbons, The Banks of New-York, Their Dealers, Their Clearing-House, and the Panic of 1857. New York: Appleton & Co., 1859, esp. pp. 343–99; D. Morier Evans, The History of the Commercial Crisis, 1857–58. New York: Burt Franklin, 1860; Charles W. Calomiris and Larry Schweikart, ‘The Panic of 1857: Origins, Transmission, and Containment’, Journal of Economic History, vol. 51 (1991), n. 4, pp. 807–34.
130Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 13 August 1858, in MECW, vol. 40, p. 338
131Friedrich Engels to Karl Marx, 7 October 1858, in MECW, vol. 40, p. 343.
132Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 11 December 1858, in MECW, vol. 40, p. 360.
133Friedrich Engels to Karl Marx, 7 October 1858, p. 343.
134Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 8 October 1858, in MECW, vol. 40, p. 345.
135Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 8 October 1858, p. 347.
136Karl Marx to Joseph Weydemeyer, 1 February 1859, p. 374.
137Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 1 February 1858, p. 258.
138Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 8 October 1858, p. 346.
139Karl Marx, ‘Mazzini’s new manifesto’, in MECW, vol. 16, p. 37.
140Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 24 November 1858, in MECW, vol. 40, p. 356.
141Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 2 November 1858, in MECW, vol. 40, p. 351.
142Karl Marx to Joseph Weydemeyer, 1 February 1859, p. 374.
143Jenny Marx, in Institut für Marxismus-Leninismus (ed.), Mohr und General. Erinnerungen an Marx und Engels. Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1964, p. 224.