Marx’s sketch of post-capitalist society in the Grundrisse
Iring Fetscher
Introduction
One of the difficulties in understanding Marx, one that Hannah Arendt encoun- tered, stems from the lack of clarity in his concept of labour. In my view, the passages on labour in the Grundrissecan help us overcome the difficulty. In his early writings, Marx emphatically declares that ‘the self-creation of man’ should be understood the way it is in Hegel, ‘as a process’: ‘objectification as loss of object, as alienation and as suppression of this alienation’. This shows, he says, that Hegel has correctly conceived ‘the essence of labour’, and, in consequence,
‘objective man – true, because real man – as the outcome of man’s ownlabour’
(Marx 1975: 332–3).1 This emphasis on the significance of labour for the essence of ‘true, real man’ stands in a problematic relationship to an often quoted formulation in Capital, which, however, deserves to be read more care- fully than it usually is. In Capital, volume III, Marx affirms that
the actual wealth of society, and the possibility of constantly expanding its reproduction process, therefore, do not depend upon the duration of surplus- labour, but upon its productivity . . . the realm of freedom actually begins only where labour which is determined by necessity and mundane consider- ations ceases; thus in the very nature of things it lies beyond the sphere of actual material production.
(Marx 1998: 807) In all social orders, people have to earn their livelihood by working:
Freedom in this field can only consist in socialised man, the associated pro- ducers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature; and achieving this with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favourable to, and worthy of, their human nature. But it nonetheless still remains a realm of necessity. Beyond it begins that development of human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can blossom forth only with this realm
of necessity as its basis. The shortening of the working-day is its basic prerequisite.
(Marx 1998: 807) Labour, we are here told, is ‘necessity and external expediency’; the ‘realm of freedom’ lies beyond it. In the Grundrisse, we find formulations which suggest, at the very least, that there can one day be a form of productive activity no longer governed by ‘necessity and external expediency’. Marx accordingly iden- tifies the ‘abolition of labour’ as the true goal of revolution, a goal he says Charles Fourier, despite his many shortcomings, quite rightly saw. Marx’s critique of Adam Smith’s conception of labour makes the nature of his own hopes clear. For Smith, labour necessarily implies drudgery, so that
‘tranquillity’ appears as the adequate state, as identical with ‘freedom’ and
‘happiness’. Smith fails to see ‘that the individual in his normal state of health, strength, activity, skill, facility’ [these are Smith’s terms] also needs a normal portion of work, and of the suspension of tranquillity.2Certainly, labour obtains its measure from the outside, through the aim to be attained and the obstacles to be overcome in attaining it. But Smith has no inkling whatever that this overcoming of obstacles is in itself a liberating activity – and that, further, the external aims become stripped of the semblance of merely external natural urgencies, and become posited as aims which the individual himself posits – hence as self-realization, objectification of the subject, hence real freedom, whose action is, precisely, labour. He is right, of course, that, in its historic form as slave-labour, serf-labour, and wage- labour, labour always appears as repulsive, always as external forced labour; and not-labour, by contrast, as ‘freedom, and happiness’. This hold doubly [for as long as workers have] not yet created the subjective and objective conditions . . . in which labour becomes attractive work, the indi- vidual’s self-realization.
(Marx 1973: 611) The distinction between the unfree nature of labour in every social order to date and a conceivably free form of productive work conducive to self- fulfilment would be easier to grasp if Marx had chosen a term other than Arbeit to describe such productive activity. ‘Attractive work’, precisely, denotes the kind of activity, bound up with satisfaction and a consciousness of freedom, which has historically been reserved for a privileged minority (artists and schol- ars, for example), yet can eventually become a reality for all the members of an emancipated society (such, at any rate, is Marx’s hope), thanks to the high labour productivity engendered by the historical constraints of the capitalist mode of production.
Capitalism’s preparation of the groundwork for the emancipated society
It is the historical merit of the capitalist mode of production to have brought about the productivity that is the prerequisite for an emancipated society through the development of industry and the attendant application of natural science to productive techniques. Only in passing does Marx mention the fact that the pro- portion of individuals freed from menial labour and made available for science and artistic activity has risen under capitalism. In Theories of Surplus Value, he highlights an insight of James Mill’s. Mill, he says, grasped the importance of a middle class freed from toil:
Man’s perfectibilité, or the power of advancing continually from one degree of knowledge, and of happiness, to another, seem, in a great measure, to depend upon the existence of a class of men which have their time at their command; that is, who are rich enough to be freed from all solicitude with respect to the means of living in a certain state of enjoyment. It is by this class of men that knowledge is cultivated and enlarged; it is also by this class that it is diffused; it is this class of men whose children receive the best education, and are prepared for all the higher and more delicate func- tions of society, as legislators, judges, administrators, teachers, inventors in all the arts, and superintendents in all the more important works, by which the dominion of the human species is extended over the powers of nature.
(Marx 1989b: 287) Marx expects, however, in contrast to Mill, that scientific education, hitherto reserved for a privileged social minority, will come within reach of virtually everyone in the foreseeable future. Yet, in those of his writings which seek to heighten the political motivation of the working class, he makes no mention of the fact that the social class which enjoys the freedom to engage in science, research, engineering, and the arts has grown in the course of capitalist development.3
Making more free time available to everyone is merely the first condition for emancipation from the constraint of labour and the alienation bred by compul- sory work. Two further crucial conditions must be met:
1 as many members of society as possible must become familiar with science;
and
2 an end must be put to the isolation of individuals from the creative collect- ive subject which alone is capable of coming to dominate the material con- ditions of human existence, rather than being dominated by them in the form of a totality subsumed by capital.
This emancipation has a technical aspect as well, embodied in the automated factory. With automation,
labour no longer appears so much to be included within the production process; rather, the human being comes to relate more as watchman and regulator to the production process itself. (What holds for machinery holds likewise for the combination of human activities and the development of human intercourse.) No longer does the worker insert a modified natural thing as middle link between the object and himself; rather, he inserts the process of nature, transformed into an industrial process, as a means between himself and inorganic nature, mastering it. He steps to the side of the production process instead of being its chief actor. In this trans- formation, it is neither the direct human labour he himself performs, nor the time during which he works, but rather the appropriation of his own general productive power, his understanding of nature and his mastery over it by virtue of his presence as a social body – it is, in a word, the development of the social individual which appears as the great foundation-stone of produc- tion and of wealth.
(Marx 1973: 705) As early as 1857–8, Marx took it for granted that the conditions for the trans- ition from the capitalist mode of production to a superior (emancipated) produc- tive mode already obtained. Thus he declares in the Grundrissethat
the surplus labour of the masshas ceased to be the condition for the devel- opment of general wealth, just as the non-labour of the few, for the develop- ment of the general powers of the human head. With that, production based on exchange value breaks down, and the direct, material production process is stripped of the form of penury and antithesis. 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.
(Marx 1973: 705–6) With that, the contradiction immanent in the capitalist mode of production is superseded. It resides in the fact that while labour time is reduced by the indus- trial production energetically developed under capitalism, the working class’s surplus-labour time must (at least relatively) simultaneously increase so as to maintain the rate of surplus value (and the profit rate). All industrial means of production, including the automated factory, have hitherto been subsumed by capital; yet they are always only ‘natural material transformed into organs of the human will over nature, or of human participation in nature. They are organs of the human brain, created by the human hand; the power of knowledge, objecti- fied’ (Marx 1973: 706).
From a humane point of view, the capitalist mode of production has made a genuine contribution to the wealth of human society. It is traceable to capital-
ism’s constant tendency to shorten labour-time with the help of mechanical and automated productive processes. This remains true even if capitalism constantly strives to increase real labour-time so as to increase surplus value. Thus we find Marx repeatedly emphasizing that
real economy – saving – consists of the saving of labour time (minimum, and minimization, of productions costs); but this saving identical with development of the productive force. Hence in no way abstinence from con- sumption, but rather the development of power, of capabilities of produc- tion, and hence both of the capabilities as well as the means of consumption. The capability to consume is a condition of consumption, hence its primary means, and this capability is the development of an indi- vidual potential, a force of production. The saving of labour time [is] equal to an increase of free time, i.e. time for the full development of the indi- vidual, which in turn reacts back upon the productive power of labour as itself the greatest productive power.
(Marx 1973: 711) From the standpoint of the capitalist mode of production, this means ‘produc- tion of fixed capital’. In the final analysis, however, fixed capital, which consists of machines and the people who use them, is identical with ‘man himself’. Deci- sive here is the further course of Marx’s argument, which points to a different kind of connection between labour and free time than the one argued in the third volume of Capital: ‘it goes without saying, by the way, that direct labour time itself cannot remain in the abstract antithesis to free time in which it appears from the perspective of bourgeois economy’ (Marx 1973: 712). Labour is trans- formed – on the sole condition, to be sure, that the united producers take posses- sion of the means of production and organize their relations to each another and to (automated) machinery themselves. In the passage just quoted, Marx already looks ahead to the transformation that labour will undergo in emancipated con- ditions. Of course, it
cannot become play, as Fourier would like, although it remains his great contribution to have expressed the suspension not of distribution, but of the mode of production itself, in a higher form, as the ultimate object. Free time – which is both ideal time and time for higher activity – has naturally trans- formed its possessor into a different subject, and he then enters into the direct production process as this different subject. This process is then both discipline, as regards the human being in the process of becoming; and, at the same time, practice, experimental science, materially creative and objec- tifying science, as regards the human being who has become, in whose head exists the accumulated knowledge of society. For both, in so far as labour requires practical use of the hands and free bodily movement, as in agricul- ture, at the same time exercise.
(Marx 1973: 712)
Free, creative, active, socialized individuals
On condition that newly available free time is, with the end of the domination of capitalist property relations, no longer transformed into surplus-labour time for the making of surplus value and profit, every producer can use such time in realizing the all-round development of his (in the last analysis, intellectual) capabilities. The assumption that the ‘accumulated knowledge of society’ exists in the ‘head’ of
‘the human being who has become’ does not have a merely utopian ring. It can be understood only if it is presumed that each individual producer consciously sees himself or herself as an integral part of the association of all the producers. For as long as individual producers realize their particular labour in the form of indi- vidual products, it does not appear that the real producer is individual’s ‘combined social activity’. In the context of production based on an advanced division of labour, this relationship is invisible for each particular labourer. Citing passages from the anonymous book The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties, Deduced from Principles of Political Economy, In a Letter to Lord Russell (London, 1821), Marx finally sketches the transition to an emancipated relation- ship of associated producers to the production process. ‘In the production process of large-scale industry’, he says, there takes place, ‘on the one side’, ‘the conquest of the forces of nature by the social intellect’, objectified in ‘the productive power of the means of labour as developed into the automatic process’. On the other, ‘the labour of the individual in its direct presence [is] posited as suspended individual, i.e., as social, labour’. With that, he goes on, ‘the other basis of the mode of pro- duction[that is, the capitalist economy]falls away’ (Marx 1973: 709).
To give the reader an idea of what ‘really free working’ (it can no longer properly be called ‘labour’) might mean, Marx refers to the activity of musical composition, which, he declares, is by no means, as Fourier once said, ‘mere fun, mere amusement’, but, rather, ‘the most damned seriousness, the most intense exertion’. Such ‘free working’ presupposes, to be sure, that ‘the social character’ of material production ‘is posited’; that is to say, that the mode of cooperation has been established by the associated producers themselves, not imposed on them by the prevailing social system. Under these conditions, activ- ity is to have ‘a scientific and at the same time general character’. Human exer- tion will then by no means appear in the production process ‘in a merely natural, spontaneous form’, as ‘a specifically harnessed natural force, but as subject . . . as an activity regulating all the forces of nature’ (Marx 1973: 611–12). Begin- ning with the development of machine production and, later, automation, the capitalist mode of production brings the technical prerequisites for this emanci- pated activity of the associated producers into being. Here the difference between Marx and Fourier is patent. Fourier thought that the way to overcome drudgery was to distribute tasks to different individuals and groups with differ- ent inclinations, in such a way that the work of each would correspond to his or her spontaneous need for activity. Boys, for example, are well suited to working in dirt, and even like it; Fourier accordingly proposes to give them, among other tasks, that of sweeping the streets. Marx, in contrast, sets out from the premise
that every human being takes satisfaction in voluntary intellectual activity of the kind in which the division between mental and manual labour has been super- seded. The satisfaction here derives both from the activity as such and also from the solidarity among producers. The best concrete illustration of this emanci- pated mode of production, Marx suggests, is an orchestra in which each indi- vidual musician simultaneously sees himself as part of the whole – as co-producer of, say, the symphony being performed. The musician is aware, thanks to his musical comprehension of the score, that the music belongs, as it were, to him, just as the scientific bases of advanced automated production belong to all educated producers. The paradigm of the orchestra has to be taken with a pinch of salt; yet I think that it provides an avenue of approach to Marx’s vision in the Grundrisse, which might otherwise be dismissed as utopian.
One of the strengths of this vision of the future, in contrast to that elaborated by Marxian state capitalism, is that it is unbeholden to the goal of unlimited growth, which is irreconcilable with the existence of ecological limits. Furthermore, it shifts the accent from overcoming the constraints on growth set by the capitalist mode of production itself to a basic transformation of human activity and the achievement of satisfaction and happiness made possible by this transformation.
This is important in view of the by now obvious fact that globalized capitalism has succeeded in counteracting ‘the tendential decline in the profit rate’ over so long a term that its effects have to all intents and purposes been neutralized, even as the pressure to increase consumption created by advertising has led to a trivialization of existence and the progressive destruction of the natural bases of life.
In the ‘Chapter on Money’, Marx refers in passing to the development of pro- ductive modes from early, ancient forms through feudalism and capitalism to the emancipated society of the future, which can only emerge on the groundwork laid by the capitalist mode of production. In advanced capitalist society, there exists a
reciprocal dependence . . . expressed in the constant necessity for exchange, and in exchange value as the all-sided mediation. The economists express this as follows: Each pursues his private interest and only his private inter- est; and thereby serves the private interests of all, the general interest, without willing or knowing it. The real point is not that each individual’s pursuit of his private interest promotes the totality of private interests, the general interest. One could just as well deduce from this abstract phrase that each individual reciprocally blocks the assertion of the other’s interests, so that, instead of a general affirmation, this war of all against all produces a general negation. The point is rather that private interest is itself already a socially determined interest, which can be achieved only within the con- ditions laid down by society and with the means provided by society; hence it is bound to the reproduction of these conditions and means. It is the inter- est of private persons; but its content, as well as the form and means of its realization, is given by social conditions independent of all. The reciprocal and all-sided dependence of individuals who are indifferent to one another forms their social connection. This social bond is expressed in exchange