Grundrisse 1. Introduction. Ideology. Projection. Point of Departure.

Independent Individuals. Eighteenth-century Ideas

I’m currently reading the Grundrisse. More abstract and difficult then Das Kapital, Grundrisse is a collection of Marx’s personal notebooks during his analysis and study of political economy. Its less forgiving than DK, more obtuse. At times, the sentences aren’t even complete. It wasn’t meant for publishing. So why read it?

I’ve read Das Kapital. It’s a tome, a work that requires continued and lifelong study. You need to return to it continually. Like a bible, you’re never really done with it. Marx’s Grundrisse is unique in that it offers insight in how Marx came to his conclusions. It offers a glance into his mind as he prepared his seminal work. There remains a lot to gain from it.

I’ll be posting my notes and thoughts on the Grundrisse semi-regularly.

Grundrisse: Introduction

Marx begins by making fun of bourgeois economists. In his typically vitriolic (although never thoughtless) fashion, he lays out their own ideas better then they themselves understand them, only to utterly destroy them.

The object before us, to begin with, material production...Individuals producing in society – hence socially determined individual production – is, of course, the point of departure.

Point of departure here refers to the beginning of the analysis. When you want to understand society, revolution, exploitation, human suffering, where do you begin? What is the point of departure of your analysis, and what is the method of your analysis? For Marx, its production. There were also bourgeois economists who began with the same footing, even today. But their analysis is faulty and one-sided, or, worse, simple apologies for capitalism.

There are a number of ideological systems, all of which have a “point of departure” (even if their adherents don’t understand it). For many atheists, their point of departure is religion. For Christians, perhaps, it could be the word of God, or the bible. I would argue that, for some anarchists, the point of departure is the concept of “liberty”, or, the “individual”. This is a fact they share in common with bourgeois enlightenment theory.

Marx attacks just that when discussing Robinson Crusoe.

The individual and isolated hunter and fisherman, with whom Smith and Ricardo begin, belongs among the unimaginative conceits of the eighteenth-century Robinsonades, [1] which in no way express merely a reaction against over-sophistication and a return to a misunderstood natural life, as cultural historians imagine. As little as Rousseau’s contrat social, which brings naturally independent, autonomous subjects into relation and connection by contract, rests on such naturalism.

Smith and Ricardo still stand with both feet on the shoulders of the eighteenth-century prophets, in whose imaginations this eighteenth-century individual – the product on one side of the dissolution of the feudal forms of society, on the other side of the new forces of production developed since the sixteenth century – appears as an ideal, whose existence they project into the past.

He’s not just being a literary critic. Smith and Ricardo both use Robinson Crusoe as an example of a kind of primary, first step in understanding “Man”. Marx is trying to say that they both are simply projecting their own concept of an individual, as formed through history, into an imaginary “first person”. Their point of departure, despite their attempt to start at a simple, natural position, is in fact a projection of their own ideas on to nature. It’s not free from ideology, from their own presuppositions, their own bourgeois concepts.

This illusion has been common to each new epoch to this day.

Bourgeois economists always project themselves onto the past, onto nature. Whether aware of it or not, the consequence remains the same: naturalizing and immortalizing the present day social relations. Much the same as feudal kings would claim their rule was a result of divine right, bourgeois economists immortalize “Man” or “human” or whatever title they bestow upon social production as their own form. They want to make the world as it as a the only logical, natural one. Politicians continue this, as do really all elements of society. The world as it exists, despite it being utterly sociopathic in its disregard for human suffering and inequality, is always taken for granted. The project of keeping the world as it is, of maintaining its ultimate function, continues unabated. And what is that function?

Capital accumulating itself, maintaining itself, realizing itself, as capital.

Bourgeois economists are simply just the apologists of the kings court.