Some scattered notes on Marx’s unpublished Introduction to his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, part of a short list of stuff on the reading agenda. Turns out I’ve already made notes on this text on this blog at least once, here. I’d also read it several times before but I didn’t remember it by name or that it was both the intro to the Grundrisse and the scrapped intro to A Contribution. That reminds me. The Grundrisse is often referred to as a draft of Capital. I think it’s actually a draft of the Contribution, which was a published work. The G dates from 1857 or so, the C dates from 1859. In the early to mid 1860s Marx has another set of manuscripts (in v30 and I think 33 of the Collected Works but I’m not 100% sure, from 1864 or so) prior to finishing v1 of Capital, which was published in (I think) 1867. I think Enrique Dussel comments on this somewhere, on the number of drafts Marx wrote. I’ll have to look that up.
Anyhow -
Marx criticizes Rousseau, Ricardo, and others for taking as a historical starting point what is a historical product, the individual envisioned by classical political economy, summed up in the Robinson Crusoe story. Marx writes that this move, taking that which is produced historically as natural, “because for them this (…) was the natural” is a “delusion [which] has been characteristic of every new epoch hitherto.” (Page 18, M-E Collected Works v28.)
Marx writes that the human being is a zoon politikon, a political animal, “not only a social animal but an animal that isolate itself only in society.” Marx draws an analogy which prefigures Wittgenstein’s attack on the notion of a private language. “Production by an isolated individual outside society (…) is just as preposterous as the development of language without individuals who live together and speak to one another.” The argument is that the ‘Robinsonade’ type story can’t serve as any kind of historical explanation because Crusoe was a social and thus collective being who then was put in an accidental condition of noncontact with the rest of society. He was “already dynamically in possession of the social forces” and then “accidentally cast into the wilderness.” He can not then figure as an explanation as to where the social forces came from because he as a figure presupposes precisely that which he is purported to explain. (18.) As Marx writes later, “[t]he concrete is concrete because it is a synthesis of many determinations, thus a unity of the diverse. In thinking, it therefore appears as a process of summing-up, as a result, not as the starting point” (38. A count-as-one?)
[note to self, look up the Aristotle reference, the footnote says its book I of the Politics. Also look up the Wittgenstein, also what’s his name’s criticisms of the private language argument.]
There is no such thing as production in general. That’s “an abstraction.” It is “a reasonable abstraction” in the sense of something with which we can think, but there is no general production in the world to which one could indicate. There are only concrete cases of production, production “diverges into different determinations.” (There are beings, not being.) “The most modern epoch and the most ancient will have certain determinations in common. Without them production is inconceivable.” But, “[s]ome features are found in all epochs, others are common to a few epochs.” “The determinations which apply to production in general” must not “obscure the essential difference” between different concrete productions. (23.)
These bits sum up the problem I’ve developed with Negri et al and the narrative of real subsumption of labor, wherein all lifetime is taken to be implicated in capitalist production. That point seems to me to be an innovation at the level of general determinations, true of at least the entirety of the era of capitalist production, and perhaps to other eras as well. This innovation is mistaken for a characteristic of the concrete labors in the present, such as when creative workers come up with ideas off the clock which are then used to produce value. It seems true to me that time off the clock is productive, such that there is not a one-to-one correspondence between the waged/unwaged distinction and the productive/unproductive distinction. This is true of the present. It is also true of the past. Refusal to address this on the part of Negri et al limits the utility of their work, as it mistakes a general determination of capitalist as such - one which to which Negri is relatively newly attentive - for a determination specific to the present instantiation of capitalist production.
Addressing this as a general determination would allow for addressing the ways in which this generality “diverges into different determinations” including the concrete forms of unwaged labor across different spaces, times, strata. Staying at the level of generality is what gives Negri’s work on this a rather ethereal (immaterial!) quality. That is to say, “there are determinations which are common to all stages of production and are fixed by reasoning as general; (…) general conditions of all production, however, are nothing but these abstract moments, which do not define any of the actual historical stages of production.” (26.) Immaterial labor and the productive of nonwaged time then are not sufficient to define an era called real subsumption, postfordism, etc, since these are general conditions. Rather, the change of epoch announced (or, the changes which are clumsily addressed via the announcement of a new epoch), if such a change exists, is indexed to a redistribution - a new concrete instantiation - of the general determinations of unwaged production, participation of life in labor, etc.
More on general determinations - every instrument of labor is a product of past labor, and all labor presupposes an instrument of labor. Taken at its word, this implies an infinite regress. There is also a point of purchase here for what is I think one of the points that people like Deleuze for, the breakdown of the artificial/natural divide. If we say labor can only happen as the result of past labor, and we say that it is the case that labor does happen, then the result seems to be a claim that labor has always-already been happening. That’s clumsy. What I mean is, there is no place in history which can be identified as the beginning of labor. Labor is the product of labor: labor is artifact and artificer. I don’t have the Spinoza chops to address this but I’m curious if a parallel could be drawn to Spinoza’s natura naturata and natura naturans. Labor as tautology?
I like the unfolding and refolding of production, distribution, exchange, and consumption, their mutual identity and their differences. Marx writes that consumption “falls properly outside the sphere of political economy, except insofar as it in turn reacts on the point of departure thus once again initiating the whole process.” (27.) The outside of political economy, individual consumption, is actually a quite managed sphere. Crazes about temperance and decency, Ford’s attention to the morals of his employees, the phenomenon of the company store, etc all could be looked at here. [Note to self: look up and quote Marx’s remarks on Postlthwayt in Capital v1, the productivity of the british worker due to the british worker’s leisure.] This outside, which is not an outside if it re-enters as production, is a location for what some folks have addressed under the term biopolitics.
Another Aristotle thing to look up, actuality and potentiality, and compare with Agamben. Marx writes that a railway without trains/travelers “is only a railway potentially, in reality.” (29.) This suggests that when Marx writes “real” he means “actual”, thus the contrast is with “potential” not with “fake.” [Note to self: find these passages in German and see what the terms are.]
“[C]onsumption creats the need for new production, and therefore the ideal, intrinsically actuating reason reason for production, which is the presupposition of production. (…) No production without need.” Presumably “actuating” can be considered synonymous with “real-making”, given the potential/real distinction Marx makes. This bit could be compared with Kant via the following equivances: need=actualizing reason; need=urge or desire; desire=will; need/desire=subjective=aesthetic in at least one sense in Kant.
“Consumptive production (…) figures as reproduction”, which means the consumed item doesn’t actually drop out at all. For instance the means of subsistence consumed by the worker serves to restore labor power, which is then plugged back into production. Not all such consumption is productive, however, in the sense of value production - if I am too hungover to work well, I am less productive. Consumptive production is the reproduction of the means of production. Productive consumption is the consumption of means of production in the process of producing new products. (30.)
The treatment of consumption parallels that of distribution. The most important type of distribution is that “of the members of society among the various types of production, (the subsuming of individuals under definite relations of production.” (33-34.) The distribution of products results from this distribution, which Marx takes to be within and determining of “the structure of production.” (35.) “[D]istribution of the agents of production (…) is itself a moment of production.” (36.) “To examine production separately from this distribution, which is included in it, is obviously idle abstraction.” (34.) Class analysis is required.
This is excellent: “to consider society as a single subject is wrong; a speculative approach.” (31.) This is a point of purchase for the Tronti style reading, one-sidedness, what Cleaver calls a political reading of Marx. Again, “[p]opulation is an abstraction if, for instance, one disregards the classes of which it is composed. These classes in turn remain an empty phrase if one does not know the elements on which they are based, e.g. wage labour, capital, etc.” (37.)
There are interest comments on war, which I will have to compare with the stuff Craig pointed out to me a while ago in the Nomos of the Earth on land appropriation when I finally get back to reading Schmitt again. “Conquests may lead to either of three results.” (34.)
Result 1: “The conquering people imposes its own mode of production upon the conquered” (34, note that Marx here violates his rule of not treating society as a single subject.)
Result 2: The conquering force “allows the old mode of production to continue and contents itself with tribute” (34-35, I believe this is akin to Luxemburg’s account of how capitalism needs a spatially located noncapitalist mode of production to interact with.)
Result 3: “[I]nteraction takes place, giving rise to something new, a synthesis”. (35.)
“In all cases it is the mode production - whether that of the conquering people or of the conquered or that brought about by a merging of the two - that determines the new mode of distribution that is established. Although the latter appears as a presupposition of the new period of production, it is itself a product of production, not only of the historical evolution of production in general, but of a definite historical form of production.” (35.)
These are three modes of encounter, though not the only three. This should also be compared with Althusser’s remarks on philosophy as both polemical and a mode or form of production (as in the discussion of the three generalities). One philosophical mode of production encounters another and has one of those three results.
Also “as a result of war, an in the armies, etc., certain economic conditions, e.g. wage labour, machinery, etc., were evolved earlier than within civil society. The relation between productive power and conditions of communication is likewise particularly evident in the army.” (45.) Presumably “civil society” here is the same word as “bourgeois society” as elsewhere in Marx’s writing. This could also be compared with Schmitt (and Agamben) on war, sovereignty, decision. This is also in line with the remark [look up the exact words, in the section on primitive accumulation] that force is the ‘midwife’ of historical development and is itself an economic category or power, also the remarks on technology as generated in response to worker attacks on capital.
There’s a sort of duality here. On the one hand, economic changes are pioneered in the military realm - they exist earlier there and are then spread, this is potentially a very linear vision of history. On the other hand, the spread or production of modes of production based on conquest is - or at least is highly amenable to a reading this way - not at all linear, unless one assumed that a ‘higher’ mode of production automatically means greater military power.
“The influence of laws aimed at preserving existing relations of distribution, and hence their effect on production, have to be examined specially.” (35.) “[T]he really difficult point to be discussed here is how the relations of production as legal relations enter into uneven development. For example, the relation of Roman civil law (this applies in smaller measures to criminal and public law) to modern production.” (46. The reference to civil law reminds me, look up the German word for mayor, I think it’s something like ‘bergermeister” which I think means ‘master merchant’ or ‘master of merchants’. Look up also what the word ‘civil’ means, if its ‘bourgeois’.)
There’s much here on timelines, historical progression or sequencing. For instance, “common property” is said to be earlier than private property, and “continues to play a significant role for a long time.” (25.)
“[T]he structure and the relations of production of all previous forms of society [or rather] the ruins and components of which were used in the creation of bourgeois society. Some of these remains are still dragged along within bourgeois society unassimilated (….) [B]ourgeois society (…) contains relations of earlier forms of society often only in very stunted shape or as mere travesties, e.g. communal property. (…) What is called historical development rests, in general, on the fact that the latest form regards the earlier ones as stages leading towards itself”. (42.) Althusser’s accounts of the history of philosophy and the production of science form out of ideology parallels this.
Marx adds later that it would be “wrong to present the economic categories successively in the order in which they played the determining role in history. Their order of succession is determined rather by their mutual relation in modern bourgeois society (….) The point at issue is not the place the economic relations took relative to each other in the succession of various forms of society in the course of history (…) but their position within modern bourgeois society.” Althusser comments on this in Reading Capital at some point. I know I made notes on this once before, I think in connect to my notes on Heller, but fucked if I can find them. I think I pasted all the Heller stuff into those two posts, and had only a line or two left on Althusser and so didn’t save the file. Stupid… In any case, Althusser cites this passage (Reading Capital p98) to argue against “the model of a continuous and homogeneous time which takes the place of immediate existence” (99. I’m going to paste in a long quote from Reading Capital below, from p99-101, following on from and developing this point.)
“This conception” - the flawed conception of history - “appears to be an inevitable development. But vindication of chance. How. (Of freedom, etc., as well.) (Influence of the means of communication. World history did not exist always; history as world history is a result.)” (46.)
Next reading, Lenin’s notes on Hegel, which I’m sure I haven’t read.
* * *
Quote from Reading Capital (part 2).
“[W]e can argue from the specific structure of the Marxist whole that it is no longer possible to think the process of the development of the different levels of the whole in the same historical time. Each of these different ‘levels’ does not have the same type of historical existence. On the contrary, we have to assign to each level a peculiar time, relatively autonomous and hence relatively independent, even in its dependence, of the ‘times’ of the other levels. We can and must say: for each mode of production there is a peculiar time and history, punctuated in a specific way by the development of the productive forces; the relations of production have their peculiar time and history, punctuated in a specific way; the political superstructure has its own history . . . ; philosophy has its own time and history . . . ; aesthetic productions have their own time and history . . . ; scientific formations have their own time and history, etc.
Each of these peculiar histories is punctuated with peculiar rhythms and can only be known on condition that we have defined the concept of the specificity of its historical temporality and its punctuations (continuous development, revolutions, breaks, etc.). The fact that each of these times and each of these histories is relatively autonomous does not make them so many domains which are independent of the whole: the specificity of each of these times and of each of these histories — in other words, their relative autonomy and independence — is based on a certain type of articulation in the whole, and therefore on a certain type of dependence with respect to the whole. The history of philosophy, for example, is not an independent history by divine right: the right of this history to exist as a specific history is determined by the articulating relations, i.e., relations of relative effectivity, which exist within the whole. The specificity of these times and histories is therefore differential, since it is based on the differential relations between the different levels within the whole: the mode and degree of independence of each time and history is therefore necessarily determined by the mode and degree of dependence of each level within the set of articulations of the whole. The conception of the ‘relative’ independence of a history and of a level can therefore never be reduced to the positive affirmation of an independence in vacuo, nor even to the mere negation of a dependence in itself; the conception of this ‘relative’ independence defines its ‘relativity’, i.e., the type of dependence that produces and establishes this mode of ‘relative’ independence as its necessary result; at the level of the articulation of component structures in the whole, it defines that type of dependence which produces relative independence and whose effects we can observe in the histories of the different ‘levels’.
This is the principle on which is based the possibility and necessity of different histories corresponding respectively to each of the ‘levels’. This principle justifies our speaking of an economic history, a political history, a history of religions, a history of ideologies, a history of philosophy, a history of art and a history of the sciences, without thereby evading, but on the contrary, necessarily accepting, the relative independence of each of these histories in the specific dependence which articulates each of the different levels of the social whole with the others. That is why, if we have the right to constitute these different histories, which are merely differential histories, we cannot be satisfied, as the best historians so often are today, by observing the existence of different times and rhythms, without relating them to the concept of their difference, i.e., to the typical dependence which establishes them in the articulation of the levels of the whole. It is not enough, therefore, to say, as modern historians do, that there are different periodizations for different times, that each time has its own rhythms, some short, some long; we must also think these differences in rhythm and punctuation in their foundation, in the type of articulation, displacement and torsion which harmonizes these different times with one another. To go even further, I should say that we cannot restrict ourselves to reflecting the existence of visible and measurable times in this way; we must, of absolute necessity, pose the question of the mode of existence of invisible times, of the invisible rhythms and punctuations concealed beneath the surface of each visible time. Merely reading Capital shows that Marx was highly sensitive to this requirement It shows, for example, that the time of economic production is a specific time (differing according to the mode of production), but also that, as a specific time, it is a complex and non-linear time — a time of times, a complex time that cannot be read in the continuity of the time of life or clocks, but has to be constructed out of the peculiar structures of production. The time of the capitalist economic production that Marx analysed must be constructed in its concept. The concept of this time must be constructed out of the reality of the different rhythms which punctuate the different operations of production, circulation and distribution: out of the concepts of these different operations, e.g., the difference between production time and labour time, the difference between the different cycles of production (the turnover of fixed capital, of circulating capital, of variable capital, monetary turnover, turnover of commercial capital and of finance capital, etc.). In the capitalist mode of production, therefore, the time of economic production has absolutely nothing to do with the obviousness of everyday practice’s ideological time: of course, it is rooted in certain determinate sites, in biological time (certain limits in the alternation of labour and rest for human and animal labour power; certain rhythms for agricultural production) but in essence it is not at all identified with this biological time, and in no sense is it a time that can be read immediately in the flow of any given process. It is an invisible time, essentially illegible, as invisible and as opaque as the reality of the total capitalist production process itself. This time, as a complex ‘intersection’ of the different times, rhythms, turnovers, etc., that we have just discussed, is only accessible in its concept, which, like every concept is never immediately ‘given’, never legible in visible reality: like every concept this concept must be produced, constructed.
The same could be said of political time and ideological time, of the time of the theoretical (philosophy) and of the time of the scientific, let alone the time of art.