On the relationship between money and capital in Grundrisse
Joachim Bischoff and Christoph Lieber
Grasping the interconnectedness of the totality
In his outline of a critique of political economy, Marx states that he is to articu- late the ‘self-criticism of bourgeois society’ (Marx 1973: 106). He claims, that is, to combine an understanding of the historical dynamic of the basic economic structures of the capitalist mode of production with an understanding of the way that they unfold on the surface of society. Thus he effectively claims to account for the total social process, in an analysis encapsulated in the concept of
‘modern bourgeois society’. In his rough draft of 1857–8, capitalism is con- ceived of not as an inalterably crystallized structure, but as an ‘organic system’
(Marx 1973: 278).
The problematic underlying Marx’s mode of enquiry and mode of exposition is directly bound up with the conception of capitalism just evoked. Whence the special relevance of Marx’s rough draft to the history of his theory: the Grund- risse offers insights into the way he deciphers the historically self-totalizing capitalist mode of production from the standpoint of value theory, and of the way he goes about reconstructing it. In the Marxian texts posterior to the Grund- rissein which this critique of political economy is pursued, the various levels of the determination of socio-economic forms are ever more finely differentiated and analysed. The fact that Marx’s rough draft is, in contrast, a kind of prelimi- nary sketch makes it easier to grasp the interconnectedness of the whole.
Whence our central thesis about the Grundrisse: Marx’s sketch makes it pos- sible to arrive at a notion of bourgeois society as a totality.
Marx would later say about the critique of political economy that ‘the basis, the starting-point for the physiology of the bourgeois system – for the under- standing of its internal organic coherence and its life-process – is the determina- tion of value by labour-time’ (Marx 1989: 391). The physiological metaphor reflects the projected structure of his analysis, which sets out to reconstruct the internal interrelations of the bourgeois–capitalist world system. To understand this particular economic form of society as a self-reproducing, evolving process, it is necessary to grasp the material life-process. Here one must not be led astray by surface appearances; one has to delve beneath the surface to expose the anatomy or physiology of bourgeois society. At the surface level, the existing
world of commodities with its autonomous forms of wealth – wage labour, capital, and ground rent – appears, under the conditions of competition, as the multiplicity of market processes. Marx, however, proposes to reconstruct the various phenomenal forms and the movement on the surface of capitalist society as an organic, internal totality by setting out from value and the objective form in which this social labour appears. He contends that a grasp of the anatomy and phenomenal life-process at the surface also holds the key to the anatomy of pre- capitalist social formations. Thus he affirms that ‘political economy perceives, discovers the root of the historical struggle and development’ (Marx 1989: 392).
Proceeding from the hypothesis that value is determined by labour-time to a reconstruction of the economic categories in a systematic structure thus pre- supposes a lengthy research process, both in society and also individually. His task would have been an easy one if it could be taken for granted that the key category of ‘value’ constitutes, as it were, a universal starting point. But one of the most important results of the Grundrisse, as Marx saw it, was his realization that ‘the economic concept of value does not occur in antiquity . . . the concept of value is entirely peculiar to the most modern economy’ (Marx 1973: 776). This leads on to the conclusion that the fundamental task ‘for critique’ is ‘to take a science to the point at which it admits of a dialectical presentation’ (Marx and Engels 1983: 261). Only after repeatedly approaching the question of how to present the categories in the Grundrissedoes Marx conclude that ‘the first cat- egory in which bourgeois wealth presents itself is that of the commodity’ (Marx 1973: 881), and that it is possible to grasp determinate economic relationships – exchange value, value, the value form – in the material body of the commodity.
It then becomes possible to derive, from determinations of the commodity, both money and simple commodity exchange. The problem for the exposition here is that ‘the process by which values within the money system are determined by labour time does not belong in the examination of money itself, and falls outside circulation; proceeds behind it as its effective base and presupposition’ (Marx 1973: 794).
In the Grundrisse Marx works out his point of departure (the commodity as the elementary form of bourgeois wealth) by reducing the many interconnec- tions among the economic categories. Yet he is at pains to keep the social back- ground visible throughout. ‘It will be necessary later’, he admonishes himself,
‘to correct the idealist manner of the presentation, which makes it seem as if it were merely a matter of conceptual determinations and of the dialectic of these concepts’ (Marx 1973: 151).
The production of wealth and relations of domination
At the centre of Marx’s reduction of the circular movement of the categories stands, above all, the theory of surplus value, the conception of the capitalist production process as a process of labour, valorization and exploitation. Grasp- ing the system of exploitation as a whole calls – like the mode of exposition developed by Marx – for intense conceptual effort. It is a well documented
historical fact that, long before capitalism, societies produced surplus products on the basis of surplus labour. The production of this wealth is bound up with prevailing relations of domination. The hierarchical forms and structures required by production (patriarchal relations, slavery, serfdom and so on) deter- mine the forms of labour and the appropriation of surplus product or surplus labour. Capitalism relegates these forms of domination to the margins and, with capital as a set of objective social relations resting on the exchange of commodi- ties and money, engenders a specific relation of domination rooted in the separa- tion of civil society from state–political society. This transformation allows insights into the structures of earlier historical processes. The imperative need to generate surplus labour – on the basis of a thoroughly transformed dynamic of the development of needs and the social division of labour – leads to the creation of an excess product and the freeing up of socially available labour time. The resulting form of interrelation between labour and surplus labour differs from that prevailing in ‘the earlier mode of production’, but it is a form
which heightens the continuity and intensity of labour; increase production, is more favourable to the development of variations in labour capacity and accordingly to the differentiation of modes of labour and gaining a living, and finally dissolves the relationship between the owner of the conditions of labour and the workers into a pure relation of purchase and sale, or a money relation, and eliminatesfrom the relation of exploitation all patri- archal, political or even religious admixtures.
(Marx 1994: 431) The argument does not purport to show that traditional forms of domination and subordination were dissolved and then lapsed into insignificance; rather, the objective is to grasp the specific form of the socialization of labour in bourgeois society. This, in turn, grounds a systematic discussion of the historical process and a conceptualization of various relations of domination and oppression.
Bourgeois society is based on separation from the political sphere and the state.
This indeed is a condition very different from that in which the individual or the individual member of a family or clan (later, community) directly and naturally reproduces himself, or in which his production activity and his share in production are bound to a specific form of labour and of product.
(Marx 1973: 157) The material social life-process appears for itself, while the structures of dependency in the capital–wage labour relation seem to spring from nature or to be an objective expression of the forms of social labour. The capitalist’s domi- nation of the wage-labourer appears as an objective constraint, and the nature of objectified labour imposes the subordination of the living capacity for labour;
this structure is simultaneously the ‘elaboration and emergence of the general foundation of the relations of personal dependence’. Capitalist commodity
production makes possible an appropriation of pre-capitalist history and is, at the same time, an ‘epoch-making mode of exploitation, which in the course of its historical development revolutionizes the entire economic structure of society by its organization of the labour process and its gigantic extension of technique, and towers incomparably above all earlier epochs’ (Marx 1997: 43).
The fundamental difficulty when it comes to apprehending or intellectually reconstructing the internal interrelations of the economic categories or the hidden structure of the bourgeois economic system stems from the fact that abstract determinations such as value, labour and so on only become possible with bourgeois society, on the one hand, but, on the other, are expressions of general determinations valid for pre-bourgeois societies as well. One must, after all, steer clear of the mistaken notion that the internal connections between the categories are at all points identical with the real historical process. Marx sum- marizes this crucial result of his research in the Grundrisse in a letter to his friend and political comrade Engels: value is the concept that holds the key to the hidden internal structure of bourgeois society. ‘Value “as such” ’, he writes,
has no substance other than actual labour. This definition of value . . . is simply bourgeois wealth in its most abstract form. As such, it already pre- supposes 1. the transcending of indigenous communism (India, etc.) 2. of all undeveloped, pre-bourgeois modes of production, which are not in every respect governed by exchange. Although an abstraction, it is an historical abstraction and hence feasible only when grounded on a specific economic development of society.
(Marx and Engels 1983: 298) Regarding labour as a historically specific abstraction paves the way to compre- hension of the economic categories, since the various derivative and combined forms of social wealth are here bracketed out, revealing the source of wealth and thus of surplus labour to be ‘labour as such’ (Marx 1973: 103). ‘This economic relation’, Marx says of wage labour,
therefore develops more purely and adequately in proportion as labour loses all the characteristics of art; as its particular skill becomes something more and more abstract and irrelevant. . . . Here it can be seen once again that the particular specificity of the relation of production, of the category . . . becomes real only with the development of a particular material mode of production and of a particular stage in the development of the industrial productive forces
(Marx 1973: 297) This would seem to mandate the conclusion that an examination of the internal physiology or anatomy of the economic structure of bourgeois society should set out directly from the category of social labour. Marx rejects this fallacy, because social labour, precisely, does not appear as the elementary form of bourgeois
wealth. What appears in its place is its objective inversion; in other words, social labour presents itself, so to speak, as a natural attribute of the commodity and other ossified forms of social wealth.
To develop the concept of capital it is necessary to begin not with labour but with value, and, precisely, with exchange value in an already developed movement of circulation. It is just as impossible to make the transition directly from labour to capital as it is to go from the different human races directly to the banker, or from nature to the steam engine.
(Marx 1973: 259) The inversion of subject and object, the transformation of subjective interrela- tions into a web of seemingly natural relations between things, dominates the whole of the bourgeois life-process; if it is to be comprehended and criticized, the starting point has to be the determination of value by labour-time.
This dovetailing of the different levels of the problem, analysed by Marx in the Grundrisse, has long engendered debates and misunderstandings ranged under the rubrics ‘dialectical and historical materialism’. Marx’s fundamental thesis has it that the central categories grounding an understanding of capital and, as well, of the general preconditions of capitalist production – value, money and so on – can be elaborated only on the basis of a determinate level of development of capitalist society. Yet these abstract moments do not, by them- selves, make it possible to grasp a real, historical stage of production (see Marx 1973: 88).
Political economy, one of the sciences of bourgeois society, has to do with specific social forms of wealth and the forms of its production. These general determinations, common to all levels of production, were of scientific interest
in the first beginnings of the science, when the social forms of bourgeois production had still laboriously to be peeled out of the material, and, with great effort, to be established as independent objects of study. In fact, however, the use value of the commodity is a given presupposition – the material basis in which a specific economic relation presents itself. It is only this specific relation which stamps the use value as a commodity.
(Marx 1973: 881) The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as ‘an immense accumulation of commodities’; the individual commodity appears as its elementary form. Our investigation therefore begins with the analysis of the commodity.
(Marx 1996: 45, trans. modified) Because the commodity form of the product of labour or the value form of the commodity is the basis or simplest structure of bourgeois society, the critique of political economy has to begin with a critical analysis of this economic cell or
elementary form. In this simplest relation, it is already possible to discern the inver- sion that makes social relations appear as relations between things which ultimately hold sway over human beings. Without their own active involvement and aware- ness, people find the forms of the social creation of value in something that exists, ready-made, as an objective totality standing outside them and alongside them:
Men are . . . related to each other in their social process in a purely atomistic way. Hence their relations to each other in production assume a material character independent of their control and conscious individual action.
These facts manifest themselves at first by products as a general rule taking the form of commodities.
(Marx 1996: 103, trans. modified) When one sets out from the analysis of this particular social relation (commodity value) and its contradictions, it becomes possible to develop the category of money; from the analysis of money, or, rather, simple circulation as a surface feature of bourgeois society, it becomes possible to develop the determinations of the concept of capital.
The exact development of the concept of capital [is] necessary, since it is the fundamental concept of modern economics, just as capital itself, whose abstract, reflected image [is] its concept, [is] the foundation of bourgeois society. The sharp formulation of the basic presuppositions of the relation must bring out all the contradictions of bourgeois production, as well as the boundary where it drives beyond itself.
(Marx 1973: 331)
The bourgeois–capitalist law of appropriation
In the ‘Chapter on Money’, Marx begins with the idea that capital as a relation of production is subordinate to simple circulation:
In this first section, where exchange values, money, prices are looked at, commodities always appear as already present. The determination of forms is simple. We know that they express aspects of social production, but the latter itself is the precondition. However, they are not positedin this charac- ter (of being aspects of social production).
(Marx 1973: 227) At the same time, however, he wonders, as we have seen, whether the elemen- tary forms of value, precisely because of their elementary, general character, are not attributable to all modes of production, rather than being the specific, most abstract expression of capital alone. That is why the systematic presentation of the Grundrisse does not begin with the elementary form of bourgeois wealth strictu sensu. Similarly, the ‘Manifestation of the law of appropriation in simple
circulation’ (Marx 1987a: 461) is not as exactly conceived as it will be later.
Thus we find the following programmatic formulation in the passage that serves as a transition from the ‘Chapter on Money’ to the ‘Chapter on Capital’:
As we have seen, in simple circulation as such (exchange value in its move- ment), the action of the individuals on one another is, in its content, only a reciprocal, self-interested satisfaction of their needs; in its form, [it is]
exchange value among equals (equivalents). Property, too, is still posited here only as the appropriation of the product of labour by labour, and of the product of alien labour by one’s own labour, in so far as the product of one’s own labour is bought by alien labour. Property in alien labour is mediated by the equivalent of one’s own labour. This form of property – quite like freedom and equality – is posited in this simple relation. In the further development of exchange value this will be transformed, and it will ultimately be shown that private property in the product of one’s own labour is identical with the separation of labour and property, so that labour will create alien property and property will command alien labour.
(Marx 1973: 238) The notion that the first law of appropriation is identical with the second – even if this identity is taken to arise from the immanent development of value or its various forms – does not provide the basis for an adequate conception of the typical ‘dialectical reversal’ of the laws of appropriation of the bourgeois–capitalist mode of production. Marx has not quite seen through the deceptive appearance of the first law of appropriation, which emerges solely on the basis of the specifically capitalist mode of appropriation and itself reveals, if in mystified fashion, that that isits basis. The reason is that his point of depar- ture here is the propertyless individual who is transformed into a property-owner only as the consequence of a process of appropriation. Property grounded in one’s own labour is posited only when such property is shown to be the phe- nomenal form of an altogether different process, the capitalist production process, thus revealing that the identity presumed earlier was merely apparent.
This inadequate theorization of the historically specific character of the con- ditions of simple circulation breeds further misconceptions. Thus, in considering the transition to capital, Marx evokes the return of exchange value to its source, the activity which posits exchange values, as if this activity had already been an object of the foregoing discussion. Similarly, he evokes the positing of labour as wage labour, in consequence of which ‘labour has changed its relation to its objectivity’ (Marx 1973: 263), quite as if he had earlier assumed the existence of some other, non-alienating type of appropriation.
Marx manages to dispense with this set of problems in the course of writing his ‘rough draft’, but only after delving further into the interrelation between value and capital. It then emerges that value is a relation posited, in its social average, by capital itself, and that it shapes the whole process of reproduction.
Once it has been understood that the concept of value is, in every respect, a