Karl Marx's Grundrisse

Foundations of the critique of political economy 150 years later
Edited by Marcello Musso
Routledge Frontiers of Political Economy, 2008

Foreword

Eric Hobsbawn, The odyssey of the publication of the Grundrisse, p. xx
J.V. Stalin's view was that draft manuscripts were of less importance than the three volumes of Capital, which reflected Marx's mature position and views.
p. xxi
However, unlike the Frühschriften of 1844, which disappeared from the official Marx corpus after their original appearance in MEGA (1932), they actually were published even at the peak of the Stalin era.
p. xxii
In the 1970s, when [the debates] were at their most intense, they also suffered from a generational or cultural handicap, namely the loss of most of the pioneer generation of Marxian textual scholars of monumental devotion and learning, of men like Ryazanov and Rosdolsky.

Prologue

We are the last to deny that capital contains contradictions. Our purpose, rather, is to develop them fully.
Marx, Grundrisse

PART I. Grundrisse: Critical Interpretations

1. History, production and method in the 1857 ‘Introduction’, Marcello Musto
 p. 8
Marx had already criticized the economists' lack of historical sense in The Poverty of Philosophy:
There are only two kinds of institutions for them, artificial and natural. The institutions of feudalism are artificial institutions, those of the bourgeoisie are natural institutions.
 p. 9
From a historical point of view, the profound difference between Marx and the classical economistsis that, in his view, ‘capital did not begin the world, but rather encountered production and products’.
2. The Concept of Value in Modern Economy. On the Relationship between Money and Capital in 'Grundrisse', Joachim Bischoff and Christoph Lieber
 p. 33
Capitalism is conceived of not as an inalterably crystallized structure, but as an ‘organic system’.
 p. 34
One of the most important results of the Grundrisse was Marx's realization that ‘the economic concept of value does not occur in antiquity ... the concept of value is entirely peculiar to the most modern economy’.
[...]
Only after repeatedly approaching the question of how to present the categories in the Grundrisse does Marx conclude that ‘the first category in which bourgeois wealth presents itself is that of the commodity’
3. Marx Conception of Alienation in 'Grundrisse', Terrell Carver
 Introduction, p. 48
‘Alienation’ or ‘estrangement’ [Entfremdung, Entäußerung, Veräußerung] was not a featured concept in Marxism, or in scholarship on Marx, before 1932.
 p. 50
The so-called ‘Early’ or ‘1884’ or ‘Paris’ or ‘Economic and Philosophic[al] Manuscripts’ [Ökonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte aus derm Jahre 1844], where the concept and vocabulary of alienation are extensively deployed, were first published in 1932.
4. The Discovery of the Category of Surplus value, Enrique Dusse
5. Historical Materialism in 'Forms which precede Capitalist Production', Ellen Meiksins Wood
6. Marx's 'Grundrisse' and the Ecological Contradictions of Capitalism, John Bellamy Foster
 Barriers and boundaries: capital's absolute limits, p. 102
The problem came dow to capitalism's tendency to provoke an irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism, a metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life itself.
Marx, Capital, vol. III, p. 799
7. Emancipated Individuals in an Emancipated Society. Marx's Sketch of Post-Capitalist Society in the 'Grundrisse', Iring Fetscher
 Introduction, p. 108
Labour becomes attractive work.
8. Rethinking 'Capital' in Light of the 'Grundrisse' Moishe Postone
 Traditional Marxism, p. 122
It has become evident, considered retrospectively, that the social/political/economic/cultural configuration of capital's hegemony has varied historically — from mercantilism through nineteenth-century liberal capitalism and twentieth-century state-centric Fordist capitalism to contemporary neo-liberal global capitalism.

PART II. Marx at the time of Grundrisse

9. Marx's life at the time of the 'Grundrisse'. Biographical notes on 1857-8, Marcello Musto
10. The First World Economic Crisis: Marx as an Economic Journalist, Michael R. Krätke
 The crisis of 1857-8 in the Grundrisse manuscript, p. 168
Nonetheless, the next crisis will come
11. Marx's 'Books of Crisis' of 1857-8, Michael R. Krätke

PART III. Dissemination and reception of Grundrisse in the world

12. Dissemination and reception of the Grundrisse in the world. Introduction, Marcello Musto
 1858-1953: 100 years of solitude, p. 179
Political conflicts within the Party hindered publication of the numerous important materials that Marx had left behind.
 p. 181
It is astonishing that a text such as the Grundrisse was published at all during the Stalin period, heretical as it surely was with regards to the then indisputable canons of diamat, Soviet-style ‘dialectical materialism&rsquo.
17. France, André Tosel
 p. 225
The interpretations developed in France were of a highly varied nature [Louis Althusser, Antonio Negri, Jean-Luc Petit, Lucien Sève, Michel Henry, Jacques Bidet, Henri Denis].
 p. 227
In addition, the Grundrisse was read and commented on by many other scholars in France; among them, in particular, is André Gorz.
Grundrisse,
Politics