The Grundrisse as a Research Manuscript 

Capital in general and many Capitals

Michael R. Krätke 

Marx’ ambition in Grundrisse
Written in 1857/58 – during the first great world crisis (affecting not only the few industrial / industrializing countries but also the “rest of the world”)
Marx’ ambition: refutation of Say’s law, overcoming the fallacies of the “general glut debate”
Discovering the law / inner necessity of crisis in modern capitalism
 Discovering / explaining the long term tendencies of capitalism (its historical laws of development)

Credit and Crisis 
 What is the final goal of Marx’ analysis?
 To explain why and how capitalism is a self-destructive social system – undermining itself, destroying necessary preconditions which it can not reproduce / replace
 To explain the limits of credit (which is a device to overcome many of the restrictions imposed upon capital)
 To explain how and why the credit system in the end accelerates and aggravates the crises of capitalism

Why Credit? 
 Credit as a social device – rising from the exchange process
 Credit presupposes capital – Capital presupposes credit
 Credit links together money as money and money as capital
 Credit provides the base for new forms of associated capital (the highest form, according to Marx)
 Credit facilitates / accelerates the process of accumulation
 Credit provides the most sophisticated form of social regulation of relations of production and exchange which are compatibel with capitalism (and already point beyond the capitalist mode of production, according to Marx)

Why Crisis? 
  The double meaning of crisis – both a symptom of the obsolescence of capitalism / and an element that slows down the decay of capitalism (enables fresh starts again and again – just because of the destruction of large portions of value and capital)
  The dynamics of crisis – as a crucial phase in a longer process / as a decisive period of the trade cycle, industrial cycle
  The different “forms of crisis” (among others: monetary crisis, credit crisis, financial crisis, industrial crisis …)
   The long term tendency of crisis – to become world-wide, to become more and more severe

The range and scope of Marx’ theory of crisis 
 Crisis means the “explosion” of all contradictions of the capitalist mode of production
 Crises are inevitable / necessary in capitalism as a temporary means to create new opportunities for capitalist development
 A multifaceted phenomenon – the general crisis comprises several particular crises
 Explanation has to be complex as well
 Accordingly, there seem to be several Marxian “theories” of crisis (in fact, there are several causal chains that Marx follows and combines)

General conclusion – the meaning of the Grundrisse
 The Grundrisse are not the “better or richer version”  of Capital
 They are just one stage in the long learning process of its author (learning how to build the critical theory) – althoug a very important one
 The Grundrisse are a first big step towards Capital, no more, no less

Conclusion – Lessons that Marx drew 
 Writing “A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy” (1858, published in 1859)
 Two versions (fragmentary “Urtext” and text as published in 1859
 Lesson A: “The dialectical mode of exposition / presentation is only right, if one is aware of its limits” (Urtext)
 Lesson B: Analysis of the commodity (form) and the exchange relation (process) is indispensable to develop the concept of money

Michael R. Krätke 

Changing Worlds of Labour - Karl Marx and Beyond 

Marx' theory or theories of crisis 

Capitalism and its crises 

Finance Capital - 100 years after Hilferding

THE ONLY DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE VALUE OF MY FREE TIME 

AND MY WORK TIME, IS I GET PAID A LITTLE FOR MY WORK TIME

THE REVOLUTIONARY STRUGGLE 
IS FOR FREE TIME FOR ALL

AND THE ABOLITION OF THE WAGE SYSTEM

The creation of a large quantity of disposable time apart from necessary labour time for society generally and each of its members (i.e. room for the development of the individuals’ full productive forces, hence those of society also), this creation of not-labour time appears in the stage of capital, as of all earlier ones, as not-labour time, free time, for a few. What capital adds is that it increases the surplus labour time of the mass by all the means of art and science, because its wealth consists directly in the appropriation of surplus labour time; since value directly its purpose, not use value. It is thus, despite itself, instrumental in creating the means of social disposable time, in order to reduce labour time for the whole society to a diminishing minimum, and thus to free everyone’s time for their own development. But its tendency always, on the one side, to create disposable time, on the other, to convert it into surplus labour. If it succeeds too well at the first, then it suffers from surplus production, and then necessary labour is interrupted, because no surplus labour can be realized by capital. 

The more this contradiction develops, the more does it become evident that the growth of the forces of production can no longer be bound up with the appropriation of alien labour, but that the mass of workers must themselves appropriate their own surplus labour. Once they have done so – and disposable time thereby ceases to have an antithetical existence – then, on one side, necessary labour time will be measured by the needs of the social individual, and, on the other, the development of the power of social production will grow so rapidly that, even though production is now calculated for the wealth of all, disposable time will grow for all.

For real wealth is the developed productive power of all individuals. The measure of wealth is then not any longer, in any way, labour time, but rather disposable time. 

Labour time as the measure of value posits wealth itself as founded on poverty, and disposable time as existing in and because of the antithesis to surplus labour time; or, the positing of an individual’s entire time as labour time, and his degradation therefore to mere worker, subsumption under labour.  The most developed machinery thus forces the worker to work longer than the savage does, or than he himself did with the simplest, crudest tools.

 KARL MARX, GRUNDRISSE

FORDISM AND POST FORDISM IN THE GRUNDRISSE

Contradiction between the foundation of bourgeois production 

(value as measure) and its development. Machines etc.

But to the degree that large industry develops, the creation of real wealth comes to depend less on labour time and on the amount of labour employed than on the power of the agencies set in motion during labour time, whose 'powerful effectiveness' is itself in turn out of all proportion to the direct labour time spent on their production, but depends rather on the general state of science and on the progress of technology, or the application of this science to production. (The development of this science, especially natural science, and all others with the latter, is itself in turn related to the development of material production.) Agriculture, e.g., becomes merely the application of the science of material metabolism, its regulation for the greatest advantage of the entire body of society. Real wealth manifests itself, rather -- and large industry reveals this -- in the monstrous disproportion between the labour time applied, and its product, as well as in the qualitative imbalance between labour, reduced to a pure abstraction, and the power of the production process it superintends. Labour no longer appears so much to be included within the production process; rather, the human being comes to relate more as watchman and regulator to the production process itself.

(What holds for machinery holds likewise for the combination of human activities and the development of human intercourse.) No longer does the worker insert a modified natural thing [Naturgegenstand] as middle link between the object [Objekt] and himself; rather, he inserts the process of nature, transformed into an industrial process, as a means between himself and inorganic nature, mastering it. He steps to the side of the production process instead of being its chief actor. In this transformation, it is neither the direct human labour he himself performs, nor the time during which he works, but rather the appropriation of his own general productive power, his understanding of nature and his mastery over it by virtue of his presence as a social body -- it is, in a word, the development of the social individual which appears as the great foundation-stone of production and of wealth. 

The theft of alien labour time, on which the present wealth is based, appears a miserable foundation in face of this new one, created by large-scale industry itself. As soon as labour in the direct form has ceased to be the great well-spring of wealth, labour time ceases and must cease to be its measure, and hence exchange value [must cease to be the measure] of use value. The surplus labour of the mass has ceased to be the condition for the development of general wealth, just as the non-labour of the few, for the development of the general powers of the human head. With that, production based on exchange value breaks down, and the direct, material production process is stripped of the form of penury and antithesis. The free development of individualities, and hence not the reduction of necessary labour time so as to posit surplus labour, but rather the general reduction of the necessary labour of society to a minimum, which then corresponds to the artistic, scientific etc. development of the individuals in the time set free, and with the means created, for all of them.

Capital itself is the moving contradiction, [in] that it presses to reduce labour time to a minimum, while it posits labour time, on the other side, as sole measure and source of wealth. Hence it diminishes labour time in the necessary form so as to increase it in the superfluous form; hence posits the superfluous in growing measure as a condition -- question of life or death -- for the necessary. On the one side, then, it calls to life all the powers of science and of nature, as of social combination and of social intercourse, in order to make the creation of wealth independent (relatively) of the labour time employed on it. On the other side, it wants to use labour time as the measuring rod for the giant social forces thereby created, and to confine them within the limits required to maintain the already created value as value.

Forces of production and social relations -- two different sides of the development of the social individual -- appear to capital as mere means, and are merely means for it to produce on its limited foundation. In fact, however, they are the material conditions to blow this foundation sky-high. 'Truly wealthy a nation, when the working day is 6 rather than 12 hours. Wealth is not command over surplus labour time' (real wealth), 'but rather, disposable time outside that needed in direct production, for every individual and the whole society.' (The Source and Remedy etc. 1821, p. 6.)

Nature builds no machines, no locomotives, railways, electric telegraphs, self-acting mules etc. These are products of human industry; natural material transformed into organs of the human will over nature, or of human participation in nature. They are organs of the human brain, created by the human hand; the power of knowledge, objectified. The development of fixed capital indicates to what degree general social knowledge has become a direct force of production, and to what degree, hence, the conditions of the process of social life itself have come under the control of the general intellect and been transformed in accordance with it. To what degree the powers of social production have been produced, not only in the form of knowledge, but also as immediate organs of social practice, of the real life process.

 POST MODERN ALCHEMY

GRUNDRISSE  NOTEBOOK VI

February 1858, continued

Surplus value. Production time. Circulation time. Turnover time

Change of form and of matter in the circulation of capital.-- C-M-C. M-C-M.

A change of form [Formwechsel] and a change of matter [Stoffwechsel] take place simultaneously in the circulation of capital. We must begin here not with the presupposition of M, but with the production process. In production, as regards the material side, the instrument is used up and the raw material is worked up. The result is the product -- a newly created use value, different from its elemental presuppositions. As regards the material side, a product is created only in the production process. This is the first and essential material change. On the market, in the exchange for money, the product is expelled from the circulation of capital and falls prey to consumption, becomes object of consumption, whether for the final satisfaction of an individual need or as raw material for another capital. In the exchange of the commodity for money, the material and the formal changes coincide; for, in money, precisely the content itself is part of the economic form. The retransformation of money into commodity is here, however, at the same time present in the retransformation of capital into the material conditions of production. The reproduction of a specific use value takes place, just as well as of value as such. But, just as the material element here was posited, from the outset, at its entry into circulation, as a product, so the commodity in turn was posited as a condition of production at the end of it. To the extent that money figures here as medium of circulation, it does so indeed only as mediation of production, on one side with consumption, in the exchange where capital discharges value in the form of the product, and as mediation, on the other side, between production and production, where capital discharges itself in the form of money and draws the commodity in the form of the condition of production into its circulation. Regarded from the material side of capital, money appears merely as a medium of circulation; from the formal side, as the nominal measure of its realization, and, for a specific phase, as value-for-itself; capital is therefore C-M-M-C just as much as it is M-C- C-M, and this in such a way, specifically, that both forms of simple circulation here continue to be determinants, since M-M is money, which creates money, and C-C a commodity whose use value is both reproduced and increased. In regard to money circulation, which appears here as being absorbed into and determined by the circulation of capital, we want only to remark in passing -- for the matter can be thoroughly treated only after the many capitals have been examined in their action and reaction upon one another -- that money is obviously posited in different aspects here.