Hi everyone, I hope you are all well. I just started a reading group with a few friends and we decided to briefly venture into the Grundrisse as part of our study of Das Kapital. Ngl, the first paragraph one-shot me cold, so I would like to know if anyone can help me decipher this section. I'm using the Marx-Engels reader 2nd ed by Robert C. Tucker. The paragraph goes;
Once production founded on capital is presupposed-money has become transformed into capital actually only at the end of the first production p rocess, which resulted in its reproduction and in the new production of surplus capital I; surplus capital I, however, is itself posited, realized as surplus capital, only when it has p roduced surplus capital II, i .e . as soon as those p resuppositions o f money, while i t is in the process of passing over into capital, which still lie outside the movement of real capital have vanished, and when capital ha s therefore itself posited, a n d posited i n accordance with its immanent essence, the conditions which form its point of departure in production- [ then] the condition that the capitalist, in order to posit himself as capital, must bring values into circulation which he created with his own labour-or by some other means, excepting only already available, previous wage labou r-belongs among the antediluvian conditions of capital, belongs to its historic presuppositions, which, precisely as such historic presuppositions, are past and gone, and hence belong to the history of its formation, but i n no way to its contemporary history, i .e. not to the real system of the mode of production ruled by it. Page 250 - 251
I’m pretty sure many of the members here have read the Grundrisse. Can someone provide me with a short summary of the same? Thanks.
Specifically in 'Fragment On Machines', he really lays out his expectations for capitalism to replace labor with machines, and in doing so, change the relations of production, thus creating a potential post-work future. His level of foresight was and remains to be incredible.
If yes , can anyone provide me with a short summary of the work ?
İşçi tek başına bir hiçtir. Eğer emek-işgucunu üretim kaynaklarına sahip sermayedar ile buluşturmaz ise hiç olarak kalacaktır. O halde emek-işgücü sahibi işçi bunu satacaktir. Yoksa bir hiç olarak yok olacaktır. Bunun karşılığında ise ücret alacaktır. Ürün üzerinde hakkı yoktur. O sermayedar sayesinde vardır. Sermayedarin üretim araçları olmasa ve sermayedar işçiyi işe almasa aç kalacaktır. Bu nedenle mülkiyet hakkı ürün üzerinde olamaz. Nasıl ki çiftçiye tohum satan adamın çiftçinin üreteceği 40 kat üründe ertesi sene 400 kat üründe herhangi bir hakkı yoktur, çünki malını satmış parasını almıştır, işçi de tek başına hiç olan emek-işgücü nü satmış karşılığında ücretini almış olduğundan üretilen ürün üzerinde hiç bir hakkı yoktur. Ücretine razı olacaktır.
Kapitalist in işçi, üretim araçlarının maliki ve sermayedara bakışı böyle.
Şimdi burda akıla gelen şu: işçi, emek-işgücü nü satmaz ise bir hiçtir diyen kapitalist model, işçi olmasa üretim araçları ve sermaye ne işe yarayacak?
Kapitalist diyor ki işçiden çok ne var sen çalışmazsan başkası çalışır. Zaten bir çok işsiz ortalıkta dolanıyor.
İşte marxsin notlarından bir seçme.
Eğer işçi, emek-işgücü örgütlü olur ise kapitalist model somüremezin fikirsel altyapısı.
(Easier than Capital tbh)
Hello. I've started reading Grundrisse with my brother and he is too busy to continue after doing a close reading of the introduction. Is there anyone who may be wanting to read this text with me via online meetings?
We were following along with Harvey's lectures.
I got to Chapter 14 of Capital (vol 1) and while I like it, I wonder if Grundrisse would be better to read first, especially because I've heard that it focuses more on the humanist elements of Marxist theory, something that I'm pretty interested in.
Although on its importance I may have other opinions
Im Internet find i nix, werd sonst morgen im Stadtarchiv mal anrufen und dort probieren oder jemand weiß vielleicht a bessere Anlaufstelle?
What's the difference between the two? Should I read one or both of them?
This study from the University of Oxford predicts that "around 47 percent of total US employment is in the high risk category. We refer to these as jobs at risk – i.e. jobs we expect could be automated relatively soon, perhaps over the next decade or two."
Snippets from The Grundrisse:
>Thus, the specific mode of working here appears directly as becoming transferred from the worker to capital in the form of the machine, and his own labour capacity devalued thereby. Hence the workers’ struggle against machinery. What was the living worker’s activity becomes the activity of the machine. Thus the appropriation of labour by capital confronts the worker in a coarsely sensuous form; capital absorbs labour into itself – ‘as though its body were by love possessed’.
>[...]
>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.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch14.htm
Grundrisse published 1939, German Ideology (1932), Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (1927). Not sure if there's other major works of Marx that were unpublished in the time of Lenin.
Did the lack of these work impair Lenin's interpretation of Marxism, did it weaken it or did it have little effect?
I'm reading through David Harvey's The Limits to Capital for the first time, and I'm having trouble grappling with a passage he quotes from The Grundrisse in the first chapter. I only have an incomplete translation of The Grundrisse, so unfortunately I cannot examine it much further. Any clarification that would help me grapple with this passage would be much appreciated.
Harvey quotes The Grundrisse in the paragraph addressing the need for the production of new consumption as a necessary aspect of capital accumulation, and how Marx identified three ways in which this new consumption can be produced.
>"firstly: quantitative expansion of existing consumption; secondly: creation of new needs by propagating existing ones in a wide circle; thirdly: production of new needs and discovery and creation of new use values." Note: my italics (see below)
>(Grundrisse, p. 408)
The first one I believe I understand without any problems. What already is in production is just quantitatively expanded to satisfy already existing social needs. I am having trouble understanding the second and third cases Marx is writing about. So far I've developed two tracks of thought in regards to both of them, but both suffer from being incomplete or not really being able to recognize the distinction between the two Marx is trying to make.
The first relies on trying to differentiate the two by focusing on the language Marx used. I've italicized what I think is important in this regard in the quote above. I take it that the "creation of new needs" means the creation of new social needs (demand) by consumers, and the "production of new needs" being the production of the new commodities that were created in the former. However, the way in which Harvey writes leads me to believe that consumption is actually physical, not something that can just be desired (which is how I interpret the second instance). Marx is talking about three different types of consumption production that are possible, not a three step process to produce more consumption.
In response to the flaw of my first approach I tried examining the statement in a more simpler, material sort of way. However, when I tried looking at it from this perspective I either ended up not being able to distinguish what was different between the second instance of consumption production and the third, or I was not able to fully understand what Marx meant in the third instance. I looked at it like this:
To ma
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