Study of his life nd work maximilien Rubel and Margaret Manale

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ment and is inexorably bound to the social circumstances. To imagine that production might exist outside society ‘is as great an absurdity as the idea of the development of language without individuals being together' (ibid., p. 6). Marx goes even further, stating that:

Man is in the most literal sense of the word a zoon politikon, not only a social animal, but an animal which can develop as a separate individual only in society (ibid., p. 6),

Social, and therefore economic, activity is traditionally divided into four departments: production, consumption, distribution and exchange. Marx’s approach to these departments can be distinguished from that of his predecessors in so far as he distinguished¹ for each the historical from the universal qualities, i.e. those qualities which remain true under all social conditions and those which are subject to change. Further, Marx pointed out the social nature of distribution as the two-fold mediator between production and consumption. The means of production are distributed among the members of society and determine accordingly their share in the total social product; secondly, the means of production are distributed as well among the various branches of economic activity. Marx’s method of political economy, therefore, demands that, to understand the socio- historical nature of each economic department or category, the social interactions between these categories be constantly kept in mind.

Productivity, a function of man’s social relations and social power, has according to Marx three stages of development. At the first stage it is a function of personal dependency between men, e.g., master to slave. On a higher level, personal dependency is replaced by material dependency; finally at the last stage the means of production have become objects of communal control, Permitting henceforth free individual activity and universal development of the individual capacities.

The key to universal development for Marx is ‘time’. When society is organised so that production has become community Production, time will continue to be an essential determining factor, but will, however, no longer be a measure of exchange ^yalue. Given the latter, ‘an objective meditation is required', that ^B money as something distinct from the product. Given com-


144 Karl Marx, 1857-1863

munal production, on the other hand, time is the measure of social usefulness:

The less time society requires in order to produce wheat, cattle, etc., the more time it gains for other forms of production, material and intellectual. As with the single individual, the universality of its development, its enjoyment and its activity depend on its saving time (ibid. p. 89).

The general indifference as to the particular kind of labour performed in modern society implied for Marx that labour had reached a high level of technical development independent of the individual working man: ‘This state of affairs has found its highest development in the most modern bourgeois societies, the United States’, where individuals attach no great personal importance to the tasks they carry out, regarding them merely as means for creating wealth (ibid., p. 25). Thus a particular form of production, namely that of bourgeois society, must be studied at its most highly developed level, where the greatest degree of abstraction and generality may be formulated, enabling one to understand the abstract categories and workings of production as common to all levels of production hitherto:

The anatomy of the human being is the key to the anatomy of the ape. But the intimations of a higher animal in the lower ones can be understood only if the animal of the higher order is already known (ibid., p. 26).

Beginning then with an analysis of the concepts essential to an understanding of bourgeois society, Marx examined the phenomenon of capital, chief source of value in this the most highly developed system of production. Where capital has established itself as objectified wealth, as a productive force, the individual’s labour, which is his creative power, is consumed not in a process of self-enrichment but in enriching capital. Production serves therefore neither the universal development of man nor of society but the one-sided development of wealth.

Marx later abandoned these introductory pages, which he felt went too far in revealing to the reader the conclusions yet to be proved, replacing them in 1859 with the Preface to the Critique of Political Economy. He concluded the general introduction with a lengthy passage on the relations between the


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level of production in a given society and its artistic achievements, remarking that the perfection of a work of art is not a function of the material development of the society in which it is created. However, this level of material development is responsible for the unique environment from which the artist draws his inspiration. For example, ‘Greek art could in no event originate in a society which excludes any mythological explanation of nature, any mythological attitude towards it, or which requires of the artist an imagination free from mythology’ (ibid. p. 31). The ‘charm’ and attraction of such a work of art for us today, Marx concluded, was in no way contradicted by the primitive order of the artist’s society.

Towards the end of the year Marx reported to Engels that he was working on a summary of his economic studies ‘in order to have at least the outlines clear before the deluge’ (Dec. 8) and to get rid of what had become for him a veritable ‘nightmare’. On December 21 Marx answered Lassalle’s letter of April 26, mentioning that the present economic crisis had spurred him on to advance the state of his writings on the principles of economics, but that hours of journalistic writing and illness had limited both time and energy available for this task. He thanked Lassalle for the latter’s recent publication on Heraklit der Dunkle, a figure who had always inspired him with ‘great tenderness’ and who after Aristotle was his favourite among the ancient thinkers.

Marx’s last journalistic contributions of this year contained much information on the uprising in India among the Sepoys and on the financial crisis which presently beset England and the Continent. He was especially concerned with the effects of the crisis in France, where the state was intimately associated with the security markets. He saw little chance that the Bonaparte regime would survive the coming year.

1858 ‘Accompanied by lemonade on the one hand and an immense amount of tobacco on the other,’ Marx continued Working on his economic principles at night until illness and fatigue forced him to break off his writing in April. His investigations on capital involved much arithmetical calculation, always ^anathema for Marx, and he began therefore to study algebra ^ln R°pes of overcoming the difficulties (cf. letters to Engels, fan. ¹¹ and 16). By mere chance he had come upon Hegel’s Logic




in 1857 and was inspired to use Hegel’s method in treating political economy. He informed Engels of his ‘discovery’, saying:

If there is ever time for such work again, I should quite like to write two or three printer’s sheets which would enable the ordinary mind to understand the rational element in the method discovered, yet at the same mystified, by Hegel (Jan. 16).

As with so many of his plans, however, Marx never realised this intention.

Marx reported regularly to Engels on the progress he was making in elaborating his theoretical viewpoints and mentioned on January 16 having ‘jettisoned completely the whole theory of profit as it has existed up till now'. He discovered that the source of profit was ‘free labour’ performed by the working man who sold his labour power in exchange for the means of subsistence and reproduction. In the voluminous notes Marx made daring this period, reference is often simply to ‘labour’. As he progressed in his writing, however, he began to differentiate ‘labour’—that which is realised in the production process—from ‘labour capacity’ [Arbeitsvermdgen or Arbeitsfdhigkeit], being what the worker exchanges for wages. The exchange value of the individual worker’s labour capacity is determined like every other commodity by the actual labour time necessary to produce or reproduce it, i.e. by the amount of time which went into the production of all the things necessary to assure the worker’s existence. The owner of the means of production, however, acquires the use of the worker's labour capacity for a certain fixed working day which exceeds in hours the actual time required to pay for the worker’s maintenance and reproduction. Therefore ‘Wage Labour is always composed of paid and unpaid labour’ (Grundrisse, p. 468). The labour which the working man furnishes has thus a certain exchange value, represented by the wages he receives, which does not correspond to its use value. Moreover for the worker himself labour has only exchange value and not use value and therefore ‘does not exist for him as the productive force of wealth, as the means or activity of enrichment' (ibid., p. 214). Only for capital does the worker’s labour have use value, becoming activity which increases wealth. The result of capital's exploitation of labour is ‘profit’, which MarX classes under the general heading of ‘surplus value’ [Mefirwertl- Because of this unique relation between labour’s exchange


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value and its use value, the rate of profit of the owner of the means of production varies in direct proportion to the amount of living labour involved in the production of a given commodity. Since capital tends to encourage the replacement of men by machines, production costs fall, more objects way be manufactured and the capitalist thus receives a greater quantity of profit, i.e. a greater absolute profit. However, since according to Marx profit is created as surplus value only through human labour, the act of reducing human participation in production actually reduces the relative profit rate and this, then, ultimately leads to economic crises.

At this stage it may then be said that living labour power or labour capacity is no longer the principle source of wealth; labour time has ceased to be the measure of value and ‘the surplus labour of the masses has ceased to be a condition for the development of wealth in general’ (ibid., p. 593). The measure of wealth is now the ‘disposable time’ for society as a whole and for each individual to develop freely, realising his own capacities:

With that the production based on exchange value collapses ... individuals are then in a position to develop freely. Necessary labour time is not reduced in order to create surplus labour, but the necessary labour of society in general is reduced to a minimum. Correspondingly, the individual members of society have at their disposal the time and the means to pursue their artistic, scientific, etc., development (ibid., p. 593).

Marx made several references to the plan of his ‘Economics’ in corresponding with both Engels and Lassalle. On February 22 he revealed to Lassalle the plan worked out in his notebooks in the chapter on ‘Capital’:

The whole thing is divided into 6 books: (1) Capital (contains introductory chapters). (2) Landed property. (3) Wage labour.

(4) The State. (5) International Trade. (6) The World Market.

The work was to be a ‘critical presentation of the system of bourgeois economy', i.e. his descriptive analysis of the present system was to be based on a critical orientation to this system, bfarx mentioned his interest in writing two additional works, ^a critique and history of political economy and socialism along a historical sketch of economic categories and relations.

^ut for the moment he lacked the ‘time, the quiet and the means’




to elaborate this first work and condense it to the terse form which he would like to achieve before turning it over to a publisher.

Lassalle proved useful to Marx in finding a publisher for the forthcoming work, one who would be willing to print it in a series of consecutive booklets. Marx wrote Lassalle that he would even be willing to renounce payment on the first booklet, if only a publisher would accept his work (cf. letter of March

11. 
    . The publisher of Lassalle’s own book on Heraclitus declared himself willing to accept Marx’s venture and even to pay him a substantial fee.
    

The first pamphlet, or booklet, was intended as a theoretical foundation for the whole ‘Economics’ and would encompass value, money and capital in general. The first three booklets together would cover the economic principles, the last three the basic trends of his critique of bourgeois society. He estimated that all six booklets would make up 30-40 printer’s sheets (500- 600 pages) and that he could have the first instalment ready by the end of May (to Lassalle, March 11).

Shortly thereafter, Marx described in detail the break-down of the first of the six parts which he referred to as ‘books’. Book one was to consist of four sections: (1) capital in general; (2) competition; (3) credit; (4) share capital ‘as the most perfect form (providing the transition to communism)’ (April 2). The first pamphlet was to treat section 1 alone. He began explaining to Engels the transition from capital to landed property, from landed property to wage labour, which is the final, universal product of modern property relations. Marx’s account of the contents of this first pamphlet was abruptly interrupted as a sudden attack of hepatitis put an end to his writing. His health worsened in the course of April, and Jenny Marx assumed her husband's correspondence. Writing to Lassalle, she revealed the psychological aspect of this illness:

Mental unrest and turbulence due to his inability to complete his work quickly and without interruptions naturally worsen his physical condition; the same applies to the onerous tasks necessary to earn his ‘daily bread' and they, of course, cannot be pushed aside (April 9)-

Engels came to Marx’s aid in May, giving him the opportunity to come to Manchester, where he could ride on horseback, engag^e in various sports and recover from the weeks of illness and




pressures of family life under such adverse conditions. As he remarked in an earlier letter to his friend:

There is no greater folly whatsoever for people with aspirations of universal dimensions than to marry and thus betray themselves to the