Marx’s Introduction
Pages 83–111
What is here presented as the “Introduction” to the Grundrisse is, in fact, a separate and earlier text that only loosely connects to the main body of the manuscripts. As Martin Nicolaus, the editor and translator of the text, records (53–5), Marx apparently had some serious reservations about the manner of presentation of the “Introduction,” and it is fairly clear that the materials have a somewhat tenuous relation to the main part of the work, even as they help frame and interpret the main text in important if not foundational ways. The “Introduction” helps us understand how Marx was positioning himself vis-à-vis the classical political economy that was the object of his critique. His discontents may also have derived from the fact that he had not yet freed himself enough from the propositions of classical political economy to construct his own independent perspectives. In the same way that he interrupts the flow of his argument in the main body of the Grundrisse with the observation that his formulations need revision because they are too idealist and, by implication, Hegelian (151), so he may have felt that this introduction was too Ricardian. The Grundrisse is, in many ways, Marx’s coming to terms with the thought of both Hegel and Ricardo. The “Introduction,” as I see it, reflects Marx’s thinking at a certain stage of his “becoming” the fierce critic of capital that he ultimately became.
The “Introduction” has four parts. He begins with a brief critical commentary on the role of the individual in liberal theory. The second, and, by far, the most prominent and challenging part deals with “production in general” and the inner relations between production, distribution, consumption and exchange within what he terms the “totality” of capital. The third part entails a brief discussion on the method of political economy. The last two pages open up a laundry list of matters to be considered, culminating with some interesting observations on the relationship between ancient and modern modes of art and thought.
THE CRITIQUE OF LIBERAL INDIVIDUALISM
Marx announces his initial focus to be “material production.” The starting point is “individuals producing in society—hence socially determined individual production” (83). This immediately poses the question of how individuals came to play such a crucial role in shaping what capital is about. Marx dismisses “the unimaginative conceits of the eighteenth-century Robinsonades” before going on to consider Rousseau’s account in The Social Contract, “which brings naturally independent, autonomous subjects into relation and connection by contract.”
This question of how to understand the role of the individual in relation to society in general and to private property and competitive entrepreneurialism in particular recurs throughout the Grundrisse. We will frequently return to it. Here Marx opens with a critique rendered much more explicit in Volume I of Capital.1 There, Marx derides the way in which so many of the eighteenth-century political economists based their theorizing on the imaginary of rational economic man (homo economicus) as depicted in Daniel Defoe’s story of shipwreck and survival in the novel Robinson Crusoe (published in 1719). Defoe made it seem as if any rational individual when precipitated alone into a situation close to nature would “naturally” organize his productive life according to the principles of double-entry bookkeeping. Crusoe, having “learned from experience, and having saved a watch, ledger, ink and pen from the shipwreck, he soon begins, like a good Englishman, to keep a set of books,” as he puts it in Volume I of Capital.1 Not for the first time, we see capital and the individual as products of nature, when, for Marx, they are social and historical products.
The importance of Robinson Crusoe as a text was not only that it gave bourgeois political economists an imaginary basis for their theorizing but that it was a very popular story consumed by literate peoples everywhere (I read it as a child!). It gave popular support to the naturalness of economic calculation and entrepreneurial action at the same time as the introduction of Man Friday naturalized and endorsed colonial paternalism and the importance of racial distinctions. The way forward was to unite the brains of the white inhabitants of the temperate regions with the brawn of the black people of the tropics. I have long thought, however, that the bourgeois political economists chose the wrong Defoe story. Had they used Moll Flanders, they would there have found a character whose life reads like the wayward history of commodity capital in perpetual circulation. Flanders, who is a charming thief, seductress and liar, goes from riches to debtors’ prison, from Britain to Virginia, all the time speculating with respect to her own desires as well as to those of others. One high point of the story comes when Flanders, on the point of penury, launches a last-gasp effort to rescue her financial fortunes by renting a horse and carriage, a mass of expensive jewellery and fashionable clothing to attend a country-house ball, where she so successfully seduces a young aristocrat that they get married that very night. On waking in the local inn the following morning, they discover that neither of them has a penny to their names. When the shock wears off, they both see the humor of their situation and part on good terms. This is a wonderful exposé of the flippant emptiness of what commodity capital is all too often about, including the constant toying with wayward human desires. This contrasts with Crusoe’s serious and stolid attempt to reconstruct the conditions of industrial capital in isolation on his island, protected from any market discipline apart from his ledger. (Incidentally, Defoe’s novel Captain Singleton has a lot to say about piracy, globalization and primitive accumulation across Africa and the Indian Ocean, while his Journal of the Plague Year makes for interesting reading in the year of Covid-19!)
The political economy of the eighteenth century sought to naturalize the individual entrepreneur. Rousseau, in his Contrat social, endorsed this view. The “noble savage” or the social individual endowed with inalienable rights (sometimes construed as God-given) supported by private property, is seen as the “natural” basis upon which political economic institutions and theory should be constructed. The freedom of the sovereign individual lies at the basis of liberal theory. But for Rousseau, that dangerous and potentially unruly freedom is severely limited by the social contract. Marx turns this the other way around. “In this society of free competition, 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” (83). The original “natural” unit (if ever there was one) was not the individual but the kinship group, the band, the tribe or some other form of collective organization in which a tacit contract ruled (and he will later go into detail on such forms—see pages 471–514). In Marx’s view, it took a certain kind of market exchange society to “dissolve” collective forms and create a situation in which the individual could act as an entrepreneur and claim the sovereign rights of private property for himself or herself. The individual and individualism, therefore, are by-products of the rise of a certain kind of society based on monetized market exchange, private property and capital accumulation. This is politically important. Current right-wing popular political thinking (in the USA in particular) is based on the sacrosanct qualities of individual freedom and liberty, as natural or God-given absolute rights that cannot be overridden by the state or any other form of collective power (there is nothing binding about any social contract). Marxism, or any socialist line of thought derivative of Marx, is therefore seen as the mortal enemy of individual liberty and freedom. Marx’s response is to pose two questions. If capital did come into being as the “natural” consequence of such inalienable individual rights, then why do we live in a society characterized by wage slavery, the impoverishment of the mass of the people and the total and accepted violation of these supposed “inalienable” rights by capital on a daily basis (particularly in the labor process)? Second, if, as Marx puts it in Volume III of Capital, the realm of true freedom can only begin when the realm of necessity is left behind (or in President Roosevelt’s formulation, “necessitous people are not free”), then why do those who so loudly proclaim their belief in individual liberty and freedom so fiercely resist all collective attempts to construct a world in which the necessity that curbs that freedom is eradicated? This second question enfolds the more particular paradox in which capital, through its remarkable pursuit of new technologies, develops the productive forces required to abolish the realm of necessity, while avidly denying the use of them to create a world of universal equality and well-being. This refusal to extend the realm of human liberty and freedom to all, even as the means to do so lie readily to hand, is a blot on human history. Marx wholeheartedly supports the quest to extend the realms of individual liberty and freedom to all. But he insists that the conditions in which these virtues can flourish have yet to be realized. It is pure fiction and fantasy (of the Robinson Crusoe sort) to say that the freedom of the sovereign individual existed at the creation.
Marx comments on only certain aspects of this whole argument in the “Introduction.” He writes, for example, that “only in the eighteenth century, in ‘civil society,’ do the various forms of social connectedness confront the individual as a mere means towards his private purposes, as external necessity. But the epoch which produces this standpoint, that of the isolated individual, is also precisely that of the hitherto most developed social (from this standpoint, general) relations. The human being is in the most literal sense [a political animal], not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society” (84). Marx thus confirms the view that the individuation that makes entrepreneurialism possible is a social and historical product and not an attribute of some imagined natural order.
PRODUCTION IN GENERAL
When studying the Grundrisse, it is useful and important to collate all those passages where Marx comes back to the conditions required to extend human liberty and freedom. Here, however, Marx quickly switches his attention to production. He notes, contra the Crusoe story, that “production by an isolated individual outside society … is as much an absurdity as is the development of language without individuals living together and talking together” (84). But “whenever we speak of production … what is meant is always production at a definite stage of social development” (85). In the Grundrisse, it is “modern bourgeois production” that will be the main focus of attention. But it is also important to acknowledge that “all epochs have certain common traits, common characteristics.” We need to assess what all of these different societies have in common (85). Marx therefore proposes to look at “production in general” as a “rational abstraction in so far as it really brings out and fixes the common element and thus saves us repetition.”
This term “rational abstraction,” alongside with that of “concrete abstraction,” requires elucidation. For Marx, the concept of the commodity is a concrete abstraction. We see innumerable material exchanges involving the buying and selling of all manner of particular products. We cannot possibly consider the infinite number and variety of these material transactions, so we bring them all together and consider all of them as exemplary of the exchange of commodities. This is the concrete abstraction. We then build an economic theory on that basis. The basis is material (concrete), but the concept is abstract. Another level of abstraction—rational abstraction—arises out the interrogation of the theoretical content of commodity exchange. Value, for example, is a rational abstraction. It arises out of the study of commodity exchange as a concrete abstraction. The only rational answer to Marx’s question as to what makes diverse commodities commensurable is that they all must have something in common, i.e., they are all products of human labor. The inference that value must be a manifestation of social human labor is a rational abstraction. This is how Marx puts his historical materialist technique into practice. This mode of approach is omnipresent in the Grundrisse. It also ultimately helps explain Marx’s assertion that, within a capitalist mode of production, we are all of us concretely “ruled by abstractions,” (e.g., movements in the interest or profit rate).
In the case of production in general, the “common element sifted out by comparison, is itself segmented many times over and splits into different determinations. Some determinations belong to all epochs, others only to a few …” (85). Again, it is useful to understand Marx’s technique here. All forms of production relate, for example, to land, but the role and meaning of land varies (as we shall later see) from one situation or mode of production to another. The implication is that any macroeconomic transformation in the mode of production from, say, feudalism to capitalism, will entail a radical change in the role and meaning of, for example, land ownership and use. Furthermore, “if there is no production in general, then there is also no general production. Production is always a particular branch of production—e.g. agriculture, cattle raising, manufacturing, etc.—or it is a totality” (86). It is also produced through “a certain social body, a social subject” (such as the laborer) “which is active in a greater or sparser totality of branches of production.” The topics that need to be elaborated are: “Production in general. Particular branches of production. Totality of Production” (86).
It is here that Marx introduces us, for the first time, to the concept of a totality. This is a vital concept throughout the Grundrisse. Marx often frames his thinking in terms of the “totality” and its “moments.” But bourgeois theorists (such as Adam Smith) typically introduce their subject matter (the study of the moments of production, consumption, distribution and market exchange) by hammering the “essential moments of all production” into “flat tautologies” (86). This is the heart of Marx’s critique of classical political economy: it reduces the vibrant and fecund processes of even bourgeois economic life to the dead and lifeless qualities of the conjoining of static factors of production. This is then supplemented by the fact that “certain races, locations, climates, natural conditions such as harbours, soil fertility etc. are more advantageous to production than others.” Such contingent conditions are then flattened into yet another “tautology that wealth is more easily created where its elements are subjectively and objectively present to a greater degree” (87).
Marx will later seek to free political economy from all such tautological formulations (which continue to dominate in economics to this day) through the gentle application of dialectics and a version of process-based philosophy. But here he is more concerned to show that the economists’ real concern and aim is “to present production—see e.g. Mill—as distinct from distribution etc., as encased in eternal natural laws independent of history, at which opportunity bourgeois relations are then quietly smuggled in as inviolable natural laws on which society in the abstract is founded” (87). This is a far more pernicious way of naturalizing bourgeois production than the blatant manoeuvres of the Robinsonades. It is recognized, however, that society can “be considerably more arbitrary” with respect to distribution. Distributive socialism (of the Mill-ian or Ricardian socialist sort) is perfectly feasible under this formulation, but the socialization of production is impossible because it is part of the natural order governed by natural law. This “tearing apart” of “the real relation” between production and distribution is, for Marx, totally inadmissible. But this is what capital does.
“All production is appropriation of nature on the part of an individual within and through a specific form of society” (87). This brief mention of the “appropriation of nature” presages a long-running concern within the Grundrisse to understand what Marx later refers to as “the metabolic relation to nature.” But here he races past this issue to expose the way “it is a tautology to say that property (appropriation) is a precondition of production,” even as it is “ridiculous” to “leap from that to a specific form of property” such as “private property.” Communal forms of property have been far more common throughout human history. “Every form of production creates its own legal relations, form of government, etc.” (88). In short, “there are characteristics which all stages of production have in common, and which are established as general ones by the mind; but the so-called general preconditions of all production are nothing more than these abstract moments with which no real historical stage of production can be grasped.” How, then, are we to grasp the nature of capital as a totality?
In the Grundrisse, Marx seeks to answer this question in incremental steps. His method is to start with basic concrete abstractions, build in the rational abstractions that arise within a given mode of production (such as value theory) and gradually pin together a picture of the totality in motion and formation. That picture begins to take shape toward the end of the analysis. Marx scrupulously refrains from going beyond where he is at in this process of defining the rules of operation within the theoretical totality in formation. Again and again, we find him saying of some topic (e.g., the credit system or the circulation of fixed capital) “this does not belong here yet” or “we will deal with this later,” even as he is plainly seeking a framework for studying the totality of capital in all its fullness. On several occasions, however, he abandons all constraints and sets out a proposed plan for the study of the totality. Each plan is different. We have no way of knowing which one he might have followed had he had enough time to pursue any of them to their end point.
I propose, however, to reverse Marx’s general approach here. I present a picture of the framework that Marx more or less completed in his political economic studies of capital (Figure 2). This picture of capital flows provides an initial map, and hence a way of locating where we are as we move through the text. There is always a “forest for the trees” problem in reading Marx. The map depicts the totality of capital (the forest) and it then provides a framework in which to understand how Marx is depicting the interrelations between the moments (the trees). Capital is defined as value in motion, and it is through this motion that all the moments are linked together. The diagram is a map of the primary flows of value within the totality.
At the base of the diagram, we see money capital, which is money being used as capital. The presumption is that the money form is well established and is already being used to circulate commodities, to measure value and so on. Not all money is capital, but capital cannot exist without at some point taking on the money form. In the next step, the capitalists use their money to buy commodities of an equivalent value in the marketplace. There are two kinds of commodities: means of production of all sorts (such as machinery and raw materials) and labor power (the capacity to labor). The implication is that commodity and labor markets are also already well-established. As owners of means of production and of labor power, capitalists bring these two factors of production together in the third step, a labor process under their command, in order to create a new commodity. This labor process is organized by capital to preserve the value of the labor power and the value of the means of production (thus creating a commodity equivalent to the original money value) while also adding a surplus-value. This is the moment of production. The surplus-value is derived from the laborer working beyond the time required to reproduce the value of their own labor power. The surplus-value is congealed initially within the value of the new commodity. In the next step, that commodity is taken to market, where its value is realized and monetized through sale. The capitalist, says Marx in Volume I of Capital, “stares in astonishment” because the money received is greater than the money initially laid out. The surplus-value is realized as money profit. This is the moment of realization. Once it is in the hands of the users, the commodity either disappears in the physical act of consumption or is recycled into the production process when purchased as means of production by other producers.
But there are many claimants to the monetary value reproduced and gained in production. Some of the money passes over to the workers as wages. Some is taken by the state in the form of taxes (though Marx surprisingly says very little about this). Some goes to the bankers who might have lent some of the money at the outset. Some goes to merchants who specialize in the selling of commodities. Some goes to landlords who charge a rent for the use of the land (or access to the raw materials embedded therein). And some remains for the capitalist producers, who set up the whole productive circulation in the first place. Taken all together, this is the moment of distribution.
But what do all these claimants do with the money they get? Quite a bit of it goes to support their consumption, which forms much of the demand to buy commodities in the market (final consumption). Some of it flows back into the money capital form for what Marx calls “productive consumption” (reinvestment). Before doing so, surplus moneys are typically brought together by the banks and financial institutions who direct much of it toward performing the role of money capital once more. This initiates the circulation of interest-bearing capital. And so the cycle begins again, though this time containing a division between money capital plain and simple and interest-bearing capital lent to entrepreneurs to get the cycle going or keeping it running smoothly (as in times of distress). But because surplus-value and profit are key features, the cycle becomes a spiral of never-ending growth (accumulation) through the circulation and production of capital. The spiral form takes over.
This spiral of capital, while abstractly presented, is grounded in the material world. At the base of Figure 2 we depict the grounding of capital accumulation in the physical material world of nature. The metabolic relation to nature is a critical feature in the evolution of the totality. It sets up certain conditions of possibility for different forms of human activity. We know the natural world is itself in constant flux and that it contributes directly to production through its fecundity and rich diversity. It is also constantly being modified by human action. In some presentations, therefore, an important distinction is made between first nature (original and unmodified) and second nature (the product of human action in the building of physical infrastructures, urbanization, the carving out of fields, the drainage of swamps, etc.). Problems in the metabolic relation to nature and in the construction of second nature frequently arise (e.g., pollution and climate change or virus pandemics) and are not easily resolved. Value flows within the totality are not, therefore, independent of the restraints of this material world. Nor do the flows of value occur without having major impacts upon that material world.
The same can be said of the human nature and culture that is systematically used, shaped, appropriated, and incorporated in the continuous flows of value. Capital accumulation is materially embedded in this world of immense human diversity. Capital appropriates and, in many instances, preys upon preexisting differentiations and divisions at the same time that it produces new differentiations in the divisions of labor according to its own technological requirements. Capital is always busily at work perpetually modifying the conditions of possibility for further capital accumulation. The growth of knowledge, science and human skills and the proliferation of human wants, needs and desires (many of which are directly produced by capital itself) often butt up against unintended consequences and runaway crises of confidence and fears, as humanity has to grapple with both the defects and the triumphs of its own products and its own often problematic evolution. As Marx will note, it is not only transformations in the metabolic relation with nature but transformations in human nature that are at stake. The history of capital is tightly bound up with the production of new wants, needs and desires, even as capital mercilessly caters to and manipulates them.
The totality of value flows that produce capital accumulation is embedded in a wider totality that encompasses all of humanity’s activities as well as global ecological transformations. In the same way that Marx works through his theory of capital in terms of inner relations between production, consumption, realization, distribution, and reinvestment, so a theory of capitalism (a term that Marx rarely if ever uses) might usefully be deployed to describe the interrelationalities of culture, nature, economy and politics in a far broader conception of how society works. The Grundrisse provides glimpses of what such a broader conception might look like. In particular, the several outlines that Marx provides for his projected further work lay a topical basis accompanied by some provocative glimpses as to what a theory of capitalism as a totality (as opposed to capital as a totality) might look like.
Finally, we need to integrate into the picture the previously neglected question of social reproduction. This, since the feminist interventions of the 1970s, has become a critical feature in how we understand the evolutionary dynamics of capitalism as well as of capital. Of all the contingent features that set boundaries to the conditions of possibility for endless capital accumulation, social reproduction exhibits the most intimate internal relation with the theory of capital as Marx defines it. Social reproduction not only covers the crucial features of the biological and social reproduction of the laborer and, hence, of labor power. It also encompasses the production of ways of daily life, the cultural dynamics of consumption, and social institutions such as the family, communal and political forms, gender relations, collective forms of consumption, institutions of governmentality and the organized articulation of spiritual and political values. Much of this is only touched upon in the Grundrisse, but Marx (and we) cannot avoid confronting such topics, even if only to lay them to one side (as Marx for the most part specifically does) for purposes of the analysis of capital.
Figure 2 is a picture, a mental reconstruction of a totality in which capital (value) circulates through different moments before coming back to its moment of origin (as money capital). At that point, the circulation process begins again. Production, consumption, distribution, reinvestment and exchange are distinctive moments within that totality. But classical political economy lacked and continues to lack to this day an adequate conception of totality. It typically views each one of these moments as autonomous and independent (flattened tautologies), whereas Marx views them as autonomous and independent but subsumed within a network of inner relations between all the moments within the totality. The phrase “autonomous and independent but subsumed within” will frequently be appealed to in the subsequent analysis. I am often asked what it means. The best answer I have is that it is like raising a teenager: they perpetually insist, assert and practice their autonomy and independence, while being confined within the household economy for daily sustenance—and when things go wrong, as they invariably do, they race on home seeking parental protection. This is a good description of how the bankers behaved in 2007–8. They insisted on deregulation, on their infallible autonomy and independence, but when the crash came the paternalistic protection of the state was crucial to their survival. The whole world woke up to the threat of moral hazard.
None of the moments within the totality of capital can, in Marx’s view, be understood independently of the relations prevailing between them. Production presumes consumption and realization. It likewise presumes (or, to use Marx’s favorite word, “posits”) distribution. The material base of the internal relations lies in the continuous flow of value through and across the different moments. This conception of the totality and its moments pervades the Grundrisse. But it often lies in the background as a tacit assumption rather than as an explicit formulation. It is left up to the reader, when reading this or that part of the text, to keep the framework of the totality in mind. It is for this reason that I present the structure of the totality at the outset.
On occasion, however, Marx does remind us of its importance. On page 278, for example, he writes,
while in the completed bourgeois system, every economic relation presupposes every other in its bourgeois economic form and everything posited is thus also a presupposition, this is the case with every organic system. This organic system itself, as a totality, has its presuppositions, and its development to its totality consists precisely in subordinating all elements of society to itself, or in creating out of it the organs which it still lacks. This is historically how it becomes a totality. The process of becoming this totality forms a moment of its process, of its development.
The totality is thus neither fixed nor static but in constant development and evolution. It is perpetually in “the process of becoming.” How and why, we might now ask, did the world’s central banks and international financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the Bank of International Settlements come to play the role they now have? Marx’s method opens up the possibility of asking such questions and locating the answers in the framework of a much more sophisticated theory of an evolving totality. The geographical field and terrain that capital flow operates across and upon is also in perpetual flux. This, however, is a matter that we will take up in more detail later.
PRODUCTION, CONSUMPTION AND DISTRIBUTION
In the “Introduction,” Marx looks at the basic economic categories through the lens of classical political economy. “It is necessary,” he writes, “to focus on the various categories which the economists line up” next to production (88). “Production creates the objects which correspond to the given needs; distribution divides them up according to social laws; exchange further parcels out the already divided shares in accord with individual needs; and finally, in consumption, the product steps outside this social movement and becomes a direct object and servant of individual need, and satisfies it in being consumed” (88). Commodities, economically speaking, disappear as use-values in the act of final consumption, though their monetized value marches on. In this system, “production appears as the point of departure, consumption as the conclusion, distribution and exchange as the middle, which is however itself twofold, since distribution is determined by society and exchange by individuals … Thus production, distribution, exchange and consumption form a regular syllogism; production is the generality, distribution and exchange the particularity, and consumption the singularity in which the whole is joined together” (89).
In reflecting on the qualities of this syllogism, Marx admits there is “a coherence,” but characterizes it as “a shallow one.” He then repeats Mill’s formulation: “Production is determined by general natural laws, distribution by social accident … Exchange stands between the two as formal social movement; and the concluding act, consumption … actually belongs outside economics except insofar as it reacts in turn upon the point of departure and initiates the whole process anew” (89). Bourgeois critics of this formulation typically complain at the privileging of production over all else, but in so doing they view production and distribution as “autonomous and independent neighbours” with the result that “these moments were not grasped in their unity.” This prompts Marx to comment on the way in which the rupture between production and distribution “made its way not from reality into the textbooks, but rather from the textbooks into reality” (90). It was, he says, “as if the task were the dialectic balancing of concepts, and not the grasping of real relations!” Given the heavy reliance on the dialectical balancing of concepts throughout much of the Grundrisse, we plainly ought to keep Marx’s warning very much in mind. At the end of the day, it is the understanding of the real relations that matters.
Classical political economy depicts relationships between the different moments and recognizes there is some way in which “the whole is joined together.” But Marx picks apart the “shallow” and “flattened” qualities of the syllogism that prevails within bourgeois economic reason and mourns the lack of an adequate ecological and organic framework to capture the internal relations within the totality. As we see from Figure 2, production is not production without flowing into consumption. Consumption does not work for long without adequate distribution. If distribution is blocked, then nothing else works. The question of whether production is more important in this flow than consumption or distribution is not, in Marx’s view, a valid question. It would be like asking, are your liver or your lungs or your brain more important to your life than your heart?
The first step in Marx’s inquiry is to examine bourgeois conceptions of the relations between consumption and production. There are two forms of consumption. There is final consumption, where the product is eaten, worn or otherwise used up. The other is the production of means of production, which flow back into the system as productive consumption (90). This distinction between final and productive consumption is important. For instance, in the crash of 2007–8 final consumption was severely curtailed in the United States. Chinese export industries lost much of their market and were in deep trouble. Millions of workers were thrown out of work and the Communist Party had to face up to the threat of massive unrest. The Chinese government launched a huge program of investment in infrastructures. They built railroads, they built highways. They invested in new plant and equipment. They built whole new cities and urbanized at an astonishing pace. They countered the lack of final consumption by a massive increase in productive consumption. By this strategy, the Chinese created perhaps as many as 30 million jobs in a couple of years. Their rising demand for raw materials coincidentally saved much of the global economy (Australia, Chile, some African countries) from prolonged and deep recession. When capital flows get blocked down one path, then they can move to another.
Behind this lies the contradictory unity between consumption and production. Consumption proper “is also immediately production” in the same way that production “is also immediately consumption. Each is immediately its opposite” (91). Stated this way, the relation between production and consumption appears as a tautology. But on closer inspection we see that “the product only obtains its last finish in consumption. A railway on which no trains run, hence which is not used up, not consumed, is a railway only [potentially], and not in reality. Without production, no consumption; but also, without consumption, no production; since production would then be purposeless” (91). Consumption often “creates the need for new production, that is it creates the ideal, internally impelling cause for production.” But also “production produces consumption (1) by creating the material for it; (2) by determining the manner of consumption; and (3) by creating the products, initially posed by it as objects, in the form of a need felt by the consumer” (92). Capital actively produces the wants, needs and desires of consumers, but at the same time the independent and autonomous movements among consumers pressure production responses.
Marx converges on what he calls the three-fold identity between production and consumption (93).
(1) “Immediate identity: Production is consumption, consumption is production.” The most obvious example is when I eat the omelette I have just produced or wear the dress I just made. In a peasant society, the collective consumes what it produces. (2) In the second case however, “one appears as a means for the other, is mediated by the other: this is expressed as their mutual dependence; a movement which relates them to one another, makes them appear indispensable to one another, but still leaves them external to each other. Production creates the material, as external object, for consumption; consumption creates the need, as internal object, as aim, for production. Without production no consumption; without consumption no production.” This is a convoluted way of describing a situation in which I produce an omelette or a dress for another to meet their need. Peasant communes may trade surpluses with one another, perhaps on a regular and repeated basis.
(3) The third point is more difficult: “Not only is production immediately consumption and consumption immediately production, not only is production a means for consumption and consumption the aim of production … but also, each of them, apart from being immediately the other, and apart from mediating the other, in addition to this creates the other in completing itself and creates itself as the other” (93). A common value circulates through the production and consumption of omelettes and dresses. The independence and autonomy of production and consumption are asserted and assured but the circulation of value and surplus-value requires that both the quantity and quality of consumption (e.g., the state of wants, needs and desires backed by ability to pay) accommodate or “be adequate to” the realization of the produced value in the market. But here “consumption accomplishes the act of production only in completing the product as product by dissolving it, by consuming its independently material form.” The dissolution of the use-value of the product through consumption invites repetition and it is this repetition that defines what it means to be a producer (93). “On the other side, production produces consumption by creating the specific manner of consumption; and, further, by creating the stimulus of consumption, the ability to consume, as a need.” Market exchange separates production from consumption but then brings them back together in a contradictory unity.
“This last identity,” Marx goes on to note, is “frequently cited in economics in the relation of demand and supply, of objects and needs, of socially created and natural needs. Thereupon, nothing simpler for a Hegelian than to posit production and consumption as identical. And this has been done not only by socialist belle tristes but by prosaic economists themselves, e.g. Say,” who was an expert in reducing complex relations to “flat tautologies” (93–4). The chief tautology that haunted economic analysis for more than a century was in fact Say’s law. This “law,” which Ricardo endorsed, states that since every purchase is a sale and every sale is a purchase, there can never be a surplus of purchases or sales. They are always in equilibrium. If this is so, then there can never be a general economic crisis of overproduction or underconsumption, though there may be over- or under-consumption in particular sectors. Say’s law dominated economic theory from Ricardo right the way through to the 1930s, when it was plainly nonsensical to say there cannot be a general crisis of underconsumption because everyone was obviously living in one. Keynes attacked Say’s law frontally and it was abandoned in the 1930s. The simplest argument Marx advances against it is that when money (a potential store of value) mediates the exchange process, the sale of a commodity for money does not mandate that the money be used to buy a commodity. Situations arise in which economic agents have good reasons to hold money (a form of social power). In so doing, they may create a crisis condition which looks like an overproduction of commodities or an overaccumulation of capital. A version of Say’s law was resurrected in recent times in the marketing of financial services. Since every credit is a debt and every debt is a credit, there cannot be an excess of either debts or credits. This version of the so-called “efficient-market hypothesis” caused a lot of trouble in 2008, when the credit markets did not in fact clear.
Most normal, rational, thinking persons would surely at this point feel frustrated and impatient with this endless elaboration of possible relations between foundational categories. To this, Marx might well reply that this is the kind of muddle that gets created in a classical political economy that insists on the categories of production, consumption, realization and distribution as autonomous and independent “thing-like” categories before trying to analyze and enumerate the relations that may exist between and within them. Marx takes the “flattened tautologies” of bourgeois economics and tries to instill them with active life and meaning through the circulation of value within the totality. The subsumption within the totality is what is missing from bourgeois political economy. What matters is the flow of value as it courses through the different moments of production, consumption, realization and distribution. These categories do not exist independently of each other. Production and consumption are conceptualized “as moments of one process” (94). So, while Marx concedes, in line with classical political economy, that “production is the real point of departure and hence also the predominant moment” it rests on “consumption as urgency, as need, [which] is itself an intrinsic moment of productive activity.” Production “is the point of departure for realization and hence also its predominant moment; it is the act through which the whole process again runs its course. The individual produces an object and, by consuming it returns … as a productive and self-producing individual. Consumption thus appears as a moment of production” (94).
At this point, Marx does not know exactly what the totality looks like. This is what he wants to uncover. He then turns to look at distribution and production in the same way. “Distribution steps between the producer and the products, hence between production and consumption, to determine with social laws what the producer’s share will be in the world of products.” But this then poses the question: “Does distribution stand at the side of and outside of production as an autonomous sphere?” (94).
He prefaces his search for an answer with a commentary on how the economists typically posit everything doubly. “For example, ground rent, wages, interest and profit figure under distribution, while land, labour and capital figure under production as agents of production” (95). Capital is likewise posited doubly as an “agent of production” and “source of income.” “Interest and profit thus also figure as such in production … They are modes of distribution whose presupposition is capital as agent of production. They are, likewise, modes of reproduction of capital.” The result is that “the relations and modes of distribution thus appear merely as the obverse of the agents of production.” It then appears (which does not mean that it is) as if “the structure of distribution is completely determined by the structure of production.” It was this that led Ricardo to conceive of “the forms of distribution as the most specific expression into which the agents of production of a given society are cast” (96).
To the single individual, distribution is a social law determining their position in society. “As regards whole societies, distribution seems to precede production and to determine it in yet another respect.” For example, “a conquering people divides the land” and “imposes a certain distribution and form of property.” Or, to take another example, “a people rises in revolution and smashes the great landed estates into small parcels, and, hence, by this new distribution, gives production a new character.” The distribution of the means of production and initial divisions of labor are precursors. “To examine production while disregarding this internal distribution within it is obviously an empty abstraction; while conversely, the distribution of products follows by itself from this distribution which forms an original moment of production” (96). This “again shows the ineptitude of those economists who portray production as an eternal truth while banishing history to the realm of distribution … If it is said that, since production must begin with a certain distribution of the instruments of production, it follows that distribution at least in this sense precedes and forms the presupposition of production, then the reply must be that production does indeed have its determinants and preconditions which form its moments” (97).
These questions “all reduce themselves in the last instance to the role played by general-historical relations in production, and their relation to the movement of history generally. The question evidently belongs within the treatment and investigation of production itself,” which means a return, of course, to the principles of historical materialism. This return is briefly foreshadowed by a paragraph or two on the history of conquest, colonialism (in Ireland and India), the Mongol invasions and the like, all of which radically transformed production and distribution relations.
Exchange, for its part, “is merely a moment mediating between production and its production-determined distribution on one side and consumption on the other, but, in so far as the latter appears as a moment of production, to that extent is exchange obviously included as a moment within the latter.” But there is no exchange without the division of labor, and its intensity depends on the degree of development of production (99).
“The conclusion we reach,” and here Marx summarizes as succinctly as he can, “is not that production, distribution, exchange and consumption are identical, but that they all form the members of a totality, distinctions within a unity. Production predominates not only over itself, in the antithetical definition of production, but over the other moments as well. The process always returns to production to begin anew” (99). If you look at Figure 2, you will see the eternal return to production. Production dominates over itself in the sense that the production of surplus-value predominates over the production of material commodities.
That exchange and consumption cannot be predominant is self-evident. Likewise distribution as distribution of products; while as distribution of the agents of production it is itself a moment of production. A definite production thus determines a definite consumption, distribution and exchange as well as definite relations between these different moments. Admittedly, however, in its one-sided form, production is itself determined by the other moments. For example, if the market, i.e. the sphere of exchange, expands, then production grows in quantity and the divisions between its different branches become deeper. A change in distribution changes production, e.g concentration of capital, different distribution of population between town or country, etc. Finally, the needs of consumption determine production. Mutual interaction takes place between the different moments. This is the case with every organic whole. (99–100)
When you approach the economy from the standpoint of this totality of moments, then you start to see things in a very particular light. If I impressionistically summarize what has happened here, then it would be Marx measuring the achievements of the bourgeois economists, which, he concedes, were substantial, against a theoretical stance which privileges processes, relationalities, flows and contradictory tensions, all operating within a framework of a historically constituted totality comprising the different moments of production, consumption, realization, distribution and exchange. The reduction of the rich and contradictory complexity of capital’s economy to the flat tautologies of Adam Smith and Ricardo was, in Marx’s view, a profound error, compounded by the characterization of production as natural and therefore immune to social control or amelioration. Echoes of the privileging of production in classical political economy can be found in Marx. That is where surplus-value and the production and reproduction of capital find their origin. But if the organic ecosystemic metaphor holds, the production of capital and surplus-value, along with the capitalist, is nothing outside of the totality of the circulation process that supports it.
I understand that the language and the conceptual moves performed here are somewhat unusual and hard to grasp on a first reading. But we live in a world driven by the circulation and accumulation of capital. To be sure, it is a messy, complex but incisive world, as we soon discover in our attempts to live a decent life within its purview. What Marx seems intent on inventing is a messy, complex but incisive mode of analysis that mirrors the real world unfolding around us. The clean analytics to which classical and neoclassical political economy aspire might be reassuring to those steeped in Cartesian or positivist ways of thought. But their notorious failures when confronted with crisis and other inconvenient conditions, such as those of 2007–8, to say nothing of 2020, suggest that some alternative conceptual model must be uncovered. And this is what animates Marx in his inquiries. His method may appear unduly complex, but then that method mirrors the qualities of the world we have to understand. It is the incisive vector within the totality of moments that we seek to uncover.
THE METHOD OF POLITICAL ECONOMY
The third part of Marx’s “Introduction” concerns the method of political economy. It is rare for Marx to write about methods. Most of us learn Marx’s method by following and observing his practices. So we need to pay close attention to what he has to say right here, even though it is the method of political economy rather than his own method that is the primary focus of attention. Fortunately for us, the critique of the former reveals much about the latter.
The political economists typically start with “the real and the concrete” conditions prevailing in a country, such as the population and its characteristics. While this appears adequate, Marx demurs on the grounds that “population is an abstraction if I leave out, for example, the classes of which it is composed. These classes in turn are an empty phrase if I am not familiar with the elements on which they rest. E.g. wage labour, capital, etc. These latter in turn presuppose exchange, division of labour,” and so on. “If I were to begin with the population,” Marx asserts, “this would be a chaotic conception of the whole” (100). Plainly, our intellectual and mental landscape is littered with “chaotic conceptions” from which we derive equally chaotic understandings and political strategies. Marx is at war with such chaotic conceptions. We should be as well. But if perchance we did commence at the starting point of a chaotic conception such as population, we would then “move analytically towards ever more simple concepts, from the imagined concrete towards ever thinner abstractions” until we arrive at “the simplest determinations. From there the journey would have to be retraced” until we “finally arrived at the population again, but this time not as the chaotic conception as a whole, but as a rich totality of many determinations and relations” (100). It is “this rich totality” with its “many determinations and relations” that Marx seeks to understand.
The earlier economists typically followed the first path of descent from the concrete to discover “through analysis of a small number of determinant, abstract, general relations such as division of labour, money, value, etc.” (100). These findings formed the basis of their economic systems, “which ascended from the simple relations, such as labour, division of labour, need, exchange value, to the level of the state, exchange between nations and the world market.” Marx concludes: “The latter [the ascent from the abstract to the concrete] is obviously the scientifically correct method. The concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse” (101). If the reader takes anything from reading the Grundrisse, let it be this general strategy. “Along the first path” (i.e., the descent from the concrete to the abstract), “the full conception was evaporated to yield an abstract determination; along the second, the abstract determination leads towards a reproduction of the concrete by way of thought” (101). Hegel wrongly concluded from this that the real was the product of thought, “whereas the method of rising from the abstract to the concrete … reproduces it as the concrete in the mind. But this is by no means the process by which the concrete comes into being.” Marx illustrates this research strategy with the example of “the simplest economic category, say e.g. exchange value.” This category presupposes the existence of “a population producing in specific relations; as well as a certain kind of family, or commune, or state, etc. It can never exist other than as an abstract, one-sided relation within an already given, concrete, living whole.” But as a philosophical category it “leads an antediluvian existence.” In the “philosophical consciousness” (and I assume he means Hegel here) for which the only reality is “conceptual thinking,” the “movement of the categories appears as the real act of production” whose “product is the world” until such time as it receives “a jolt from the outside” (i.e., reality breaks out). The result is yet another tautology such that the “concrete totality is a totality of thoughts,” which is not the product of the concepts themselves but of a process of the “working-up of observation and conception into concepts” (101):
The totality as it appears in the head, as a totality of thoughts, is a product of a thinking head, which appropriates the world in the only way it can, a way different from the artistic, religious, practical and mental appropriation of this world. The real subject [concrete reality] retains its autonomous existence outside the head just as before; namely as long as the head’s conduct is merely speculative, merely theoretical. Hence, in the theoretical method, too, the [active] subject, society, must always be kept in mind as the presupposition. (101–2)
We have to recognize, however, that the general and simpler categories often “have an independent historical and natural existence pre-dating the more concrete ones.” For example, Hegel’s Philosophy of Right opens with “possession” as the simplest juridical relation, but there are many different situations where “possession” takes on specific meanings. It is also the case that money existed historically before capital, banks and wage labor. “The path of abstract thought, rising from the simple to the combined, [could] correspond to the real historical process” (102). But that process has varied significantly over time and place, before arriving at the point of its distinctive bourgeois form. For example, money did not exist in precolonial Peru even though there was a sophisticated economy with divisions of labor, cooperation and exchange relations. “Further, although money everywhere plays a role from very early on, it is nevertheless a predominant element, in antiquity, only within the confines of certain one-sidedly developed nations, trading nations. And even in the most advanced parts of the ancient world, among the Greeks and the Romans, the full development of money, which is presupposed in modern bourgeois society, appears only in the period of their dissolution” (103). “This very simple category, then, makes a historic appearance in its full intensity only in the most developed conditions of society.”
Labor, likewise, appears as a very simple if “immeasurably old” category that has a variety of meanings in relation to different social conditions. Only in the hands of Adam Smith did it begin to take on its modern bourgeois meaning:
With the abstract universality of wealth-creating activity we now have the universality of the object defined as wealth, the product as such or again labour as such, but labour as past, objectified labour … Indifference towards any specific kind of labour presupposes a very developed totality of real kinds of labour, of which no single one is any longer predominant. As a rule, the most general abstractions arise only in the midst of the richest possible concrete development. (104)
This general principle is foundational for understanding those abstractions which will root his own political economy. It is, for example, only “in the midst of the richest possible concrete development” that “one thing” can appear “as common to many, to all. Then it ceases to be thinkable in a particular form alone.” This will later become the foundation for Marx’s conception of value (a concept waiting to be articulated). “This abstraction of labour as such is not merely the mental product of a concrete totality of labours. Indifference towards specific labours corresponds to a form of society in which individuals can with ease transfer from one labour to another, and where the specific kind is a matter of chance for them, hence of indifference” (104). Here we have “the point of departure of modern economics.” It is here that “the simplest abstraction” which “expresses an immeasurably ancient relation valid in all forms of society, nevertheless achieves practical truth as an abstraction only as a category of the most modern society” such as that in the United States. “This example of labour shows strikingly how even the most abstract categories, despite their validity—precisely because of their abstractness—for all epochs, are nevertheless, in the specific character of this abstraction, themselves likewise a product of historic relations, and possess their full validity only for and within these relations” (105).
Marx’s method here matches in certain ways the principles that pervade contemporary work on artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence (AI) works best and indeed wholly rests on massive data sets. The more massive the data sets, the more accurate AI becomes. The competitive advantage that China possesses in this regard is self-evident. What AI is doing is abstracting relationalities from the “richest concrete determinations” with information technologies that were unthinkable in Marx’s time. Yet Marx was dedicated to abstracting the laws of motion of capital from the richest concrete determinations deriving from individualized market exchange.
In the history of capital, Marx argues, the sort of totality represented in the three volumes of Capital may be a product of his thinking. But it is also a product of the historical process whereby the totality comes into being. For example, this system and the theory it engenders could not work unless there was free exchange. It is a system that will only work alongside the creation of private property rights, exchange relations, monetary forms and all the rest of it. The totality of capital comes into being. It does not preexist. Nor is it a product of thought. But what the thinking head tries to do is to come to terms with what the emergent totality encompasses and to uncover its laws of motion and development. This is the key point of Marxist political economy. Marx seeks to reconstruct in thought the totality that is being constructed through daily life and daily practices in the market, through commodity exchange, through production and consumption activities, and above all through surplus-value production.
A dialectical process attempts to capture the relation between how something is being represented as a totality and the social processes that are producing, sustaining or dissolving that totality. It is not as if the totality is something solid, fixed and determinate. It is perpetually in the process of modification and transformation. As it is being transformed, so the conceptual apparatus that we use to represent it must also transform. Otherwise, we impose our concept of a totality on a situation where it is not working that way anymore. This is the kind of question which arises when it is said that “financialization changes everything.” Interest-bearing capital does not circulate in the same way as industrial capital. It does not have to go through production in order to claim its part of the surplus. Banks can lend to landowners to buy land. Banks can lend to merchant capitalists. Banks can lend to workers so that they have credit cards and they can get mortgages to buy a house or a loan to buy a car. Banks do not have to go through production in order to earn interest. The circulation process Marx analyzes always goes back through production. What happens when a large portion of capital does not flow back through production?
The totality, even in Marx’s time, is an incomplete theoretical representation, a simplified version. The task of economics and economic theory is to try to capture the totality and capture the nature of the relations (the laws of motion) between these different moments. In the historical succession of the economic categories, as in any other historical, social science, “it must not be forgotten that their subject—here, modern bourgeois society—is always what is given, in the head as well as in reality, and that these categories therefore express the forms of being, the characteristics of existence, … and that therefore this society by no means begins only at the point where one can speak of it as such” (106). It would seem, for example, that the most obvious starting point would be with landed property and ground rent because the earth is “the source of all production and all being.” But “nothing would be more erroneous,” Marx asserts. “In all forms of society there is one specific kind of production which predominates over the rest, whose relations thus assign rank and influence to the others” (106–7). The designations vary greatly (and Marx provides examples). But in bourgeois society, agriculture and the use of the earth “is entirely dominated by capital” and “capital is the all-dominating economic power” which forms both “the starting-point as well as the finishing-point, and must be dealt with before landed property.” It would “be infeasible and wrong to let the economic categories follow one another in the same sequence as that in which they were historically decisive. Their sequence is determined, rather, by their relation to one another … which is precisely the opposite of that which seems to be their natural order or which corresponds to historical development.” The same category can occupy divergent positions in different social stages (107).
This point then leads him to consider the ways in which, historically, many of these categories have been set up. The historical order in which these categories came into being is significant. Money, for example, precedes capitalism. Credit and debt precede capitalism. Land and property and extractions of surplus from land and property precede capitalism. Even wage-labor, as we shall see, precedes the rise of capital. But what happens, in the bourgeois form of capitalist society, is that all of those categories are given different and more flexible meanings as they are absorbed within a changing totality. And as the totality forms and evolves, so it reconfigures the moments and elements within it. We can reconstruct the “antediluvian” histories of the different categories which have long preexisted the advent of capital and which can carry over as feudal residuals within the hegemony of capital. But even those feudal residuals take on a different character. The credit and debt found in ancient Sumer or in the Roman Empire is completely different from the way in which debt, credit and the circulation of interest-bearing capital work in a bourgeois capitalist society. This is something that David Graeber fails to recognize in his otherwise fascinating Debt: The First Five Thousand Years. In ancient Sumer, there was no market in debt. Now we have hugely complicated debt markets and all sorts of financial products. Debt creation right now has a completely different configuration, and a different function, compared to debt creation in ancient Sumer. The same is true of land rent, which, within capitalism, becomes something radically different from that found in feudal times.
Marx’s warning bears repeating. It would be “infeasible and wrong to let the economic categories follow one another in the same sequence as that in which they were historically decisive.” The evolution of the meaning of categories is a matter of concern. While there is a giant leap from one mode of production to another, the meaning of the categories continues to evolve within the history of capital. For example, “the concept of national wealth creeps into the work of the economists of the seventeenth century—continuing partly with those of the eighteenth—in the form of the notion that wealth is created only to enrich the state, and that its power is proportionate to this wealth. This was the still unconsciously hypocritical form in which wealth and the production of wealth proclaimed themselves as the purpose of modern states, and regarded these states henceforth only as means for the production of wealth” (108). The relation between state and capital has also evolved, not necessarily in a linear fashion, and the dual and sometimes conflictual objectives of either enriching the state or enriching its dominant classes, or even, heaven forbid, its population as a whole, has been a fluctuating feature across the spectrum of capital’s history.
THE FIRST PLAN
We then come to another major feature of the Grundrisse. On page 108, Marx sets out the first of several study plans to guide his future investigations into the nature of capital. It consists of a list of topics, concepts and categories that will need to be studied:
The order obviously has to be (1) the general, abstract determinants which obtain in more or less all forms of society, but in the above-explained sense. (2) The categories which make up the inner structure of bourgeois society and on which the fundamental classes rest. Capital, wage labour, landed property. Their interrelation. Town and country. The three great social classes. Exchange between them. Circulation. Credit system (private). (3) Concentration of bourgeois society in the form of the state. Viewed in relation to itself. The “unproductive” classes. Taxes. State debt. Public credit. The population. The colonies. Emigration. (4) The international relation of production. International division of labour. International exchange. Export and import. Rate of exchange. (5) The world market and crises. (108)
What is interesting about this wide-ranging list is how little of it is covered in the mass of Marx’s political-economic writings (as opposed to his journalistic interventions, where his reading of parliamentary reports and the financial press, such as the Economist, featured large). While Marx asserts the existence of three great classes plus unspecified “unproductive classes,” his emphasis upon credit, banking, taxes, state debt and international trade emphasize features of distribution (e.g., merchant and finance capital) that are spottily covered in Marx’s works. Production, labor and money are not prominent topics except by implication in the first item. Above all, it is interesting to review this list of items in relation to a working concept of the totality. The theory of capital as a totality as represented in Figure 2 is, for example, far less expansive than would be required in this study plan.
This is, however, the first of several proposed plans. These were all reviewed in some detail by Roman Rosdolsky in The Making of Marx’s Capital. This text has an interesting history. Rosdolsky was a Ukrainian immigrant to the United States (arriving in 1947 after surviving several years in Nazi concentration camps). When in the New York Public Library, he came across a rare German published version of the Grundrisse and immediately recognized its importance. He undertook a detailed study of it (as an independent scholar with no academic affiliation) with special emphasis upon the different study plans in relation to Marx’s Capital. His book was published in German in 1968 (shortly after he died) and appeared in English 1977. The English version of the Grundrisse (1973) and Rosdolsky’s analysis of it (1977) had a huge impact upon me while writing The Limits to Capital (1982)—which was exactly the sort of impact of the Grundrisse that Rosdolsky had anticipated.
ART AND SOCIETY
The fourth section of Marx’s “Introduction” begins with a wish list of potentially important topics that are mentioned without being analyzed in any depth. Marx begins with war and the role of the army and the relation of productive force in relations of exchange in the military. He notes the contrast between historical materialism, which is a social construct, and naturalistic materialism. He introduces the key dialectic of the concepts of productive force and relations of production without elaboration. The question of uneven development is likewise introduced both geographically (e.g., Europe, with its feudal residuals, versus the United States) and sectorally (e.g., as legal relations). The question of communications is posed.
The last part is a charming excursus into the question of how art relates to the distinctive eras in human cultural and material development (110–11). “It is well-known, of course, that certain periods of artistic development go way beyond what might be expected from the general development of society, the organization of material production and the like. Nevertheless certain forms of art, such as the epic forms, can no longer be produced.”
Is the view of nature and of social relations on which the Greek imagination and Greek [mythology] is based possible with self-acting mule spindles and railways and locomotives and electrical telegraphs? What chance has Vulcan with Roberts & Co., Jupiter against the lightening-rod and Hermes against the Crédit Mobilier? All mythology overcomes and dominates and shapes the forces of nature in the imagination and by the imagination; it therefore vanishes with the advent of real mastery over them.
The difficulty lies, Marx asserts, “not in understanding that the Greek arts and epic are bound up with certain forms of social development … [but] that they still afford us artistic pleasure.” To this Marx opines that “a man cannot become a child again, or he becomes childish. But does he not find joy in the child’s naïveté, and must he himself not strive to reproduce its truth at a higher stage? Does not the true character of each epoch come alive in the nature of its children? Why should not the historic childhood of humanity, its most beautiful unfolding, as a stage never to return, exercise an eternal charm?” That is a question for the ages.