Martin Nicolaus, The Unknown Marx, 1968 ✓

The bold generalizations made in the Preface could be traced back to equally bold but equally general statements in The Poverty of Philosophy and in the Manifesto; the volumes of Capital contain some echoes, again polemical and general.

Under what historical circumstances can money become the abstraction of exchange-values, and exchange-values become the abstraction of all forms of exchange? What social preconditions must exist in order that money may function as a nexus between individuals engaged in exchange-relations? What are the social and political consequences of this form of the exchange-relation? What larger forms of social organization correspond to this molecular constellation of individuals engaged in private transactions? These are the problems with which Marx is concerned…

The dissolution of all products and activities into exchange values presupposes both the dissolution of all established personal (historical) relations of dependence in production, and the all-round dependence of producers upon one another. The production of each individual producer is dependent upon the production of all the others, as also the transformation of his product into means of subsistence for himself has become dependent upon the consumption of all the others. […] What Adam Smith in the true 18th-century manner placed in pre-history, what he assumed to have preceded history [Smith 1835:130], is rather its product.

Relationships of personal dependence (which originally arise quite spontaneously) are the first forms of society, in which human productivity develops only to a limited extent and at isolated points. Personal independence based upon dependence mediated by things is the second great form, and only in it is a system of general social exchange of matter, a system of universal relations, universal requirements and universal capacities, formed. Free individuality, based on the universal development of the individuals and the subordination of their communal, social productivity, which is their social possession [Vermögen], is the third stage. The second stage creates the conditions for the third.

In the specific case of the ‘exchange’ between labour and wages, however, the use to which the buyer of labour puts his purchase is of the utmost importance to him not only in his private capacity, but in his capacity as homo oeconomicus. The capitalist gives wages (exchange-value) for the use of labour (for its use-value) only in order to convert this use-value into further exchange-value.

Rather, he necessarily impoverishes himself, […], in that the creative power of his labour establishes itself as the power of capital, and confronts him as an alien power.

[…]

All advances of civilisation, therefore, or in other words all expansion of the social productive forces, or, if you want, of the productive forces of labour itself — as they result from science, inventions, division and combination of labour, improved means of communication, creation of the world market, machinery, etc. — do not enrich the worker but capital; hence they only further enlarge the power dominating over labour;…

We may proceed now to examine to what extent the text of the Grundrisse justifies the sweeping claims made for Marx’s new scientific achievements in his 1859 Preface. In particular we will be interested in knowing whether the Grundrisse provides further elucidation of the famous passage in the Preface about revolution: ‘At a certain stage of their development, the material forces of production in society come into conflict with the existing relations of production, or — what is only a legal expression of the same thing — with the property relations within which they had been at work before. From forms which developed the forces of production, these relations now turn into their fetters. Then comes the period of social revolution.’

While there are echoes of this passage in some of the earlier works as well as on one occasion in Capital, they remain on a level of generality so high as to be virtually useless.

These necessary limits are:

(1) necessary labour as the limit on the exchange value of living labour capacity or on the wages of the industrial population;

(2) surplus value as the limit on surplus labour time; and, with respect to relative surplus labour time, as the limit on the development of the productive forces;

(3) what is the same, transformation into money, exchange value in general as the limit on production; or exchange based on value, or value based on exchange, as the limit on production. It is:

(4) again identical as the restriction of the production of use values by exchange value; or that real wealth has to assume a specific form distinct from itself, i.e. a form not absolutely identical with itself, if it is to become an object of production at all.

While a proper analysis of the implications of these rather cryptic theses would require a book, it is immediately apparent that these four ‘limits’ represent no more than different aspects of the contradiction between ‘forces of production’ and ‘social relations of production’. The task of maintaining the enormous powers of surplus-value extraction within the limits set by the necessity of converting this surplus value into exchange value becomes increasingly difficult as the capitalist system moves into its developed stages.

By striving to reduce labour time to a minimum, while, on the other hand, positing labour time as the sole measure and source of wealth, capital itself is a contradiction-in-process. It therefore diminishes labour time in the form of necessary labour time in order to increase it in the form of superfluous⁴ labour time; it thus posits superfluous labour time to an increasing degree as a condition — question de vie et de mort — for necessary labour time.