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Notes on “The Grundrisse” (1939/1993) by Karl Marx (2)

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“Notebook 2”

There is something special about money. The problem of money is that in itself it is something very abstract but also an object whose activity happens almost everywhere and in many different forms. Money is another commodity, but it is for certain that it is “the god among commodities” (221). The “Notebook 2” of the Grundrisse tries to explain money in capitalists societies. This explanation not only focuses in the many different ways that money is used, but also in the “particular” and specific way that makes money so special for capitalism. If money, as we read in the first pages of the notebook is so special, it is firstly because its possession “places [us] in exactly the same relationship towards wealth as the philosopher’s stone would towards science” (222). That is, money is responsible for placing the subject in the direction of what the subject thinks they want. Without surprise, then, money triggers greed “a particular form of drive” (222), that accelerates the speed travelled by the subject who approaches the object of their desires. To be against money, in capitalism, is to be against oneself, because only money can approach what we want and desire to us. 

At the same time that money is the oil that secures the function of the capitalist machine of exchanges and exploitation, money is also a scurrilous thing. While money is key to the production and accumulation of wealth, money cannot fulfill these duties on its own. “One is the richer the more of it [money] one possesses, and the only important process, for the individual as well as the nation is, to pile it up” (230). Money could easily be accumulated, because to accumulate is to “step back or outside of circulation” (230). But this has its risks. To display abundance and extraordinary wealth hoarding, or expense, reduces the way money circulates, and therefore, it reduces the way money is valued. To accumulate money is not based on a random greed-guided increase, but in a regulated competition because accumulation is completely dependent on circulation. If money has a close relationship to capital, then, as capital itself, money must be in constant movement, the moments it is accumulated it happens as a “wholly secret relation with the individual” (230). Of course, only sanctioned by society is the wealth (secret or not) of the individual valorized. 

Money is strictly tied to capital production because money, as a system, is the one that guarantees equality and freedom at the moment of exchange. The problem of the ideas of freedom and equality, that money promises, is that these two features soon turn out to be “inequality and unfreedom” (249). In other words, to be part of the system of capitalist exchange one must always be aware that as simple as an exchange might be, that simplicity is not a simplified relationship. In an exchange relationship an individual is not merely exchanging with another, but their exchange actually “expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand” (265). This is why the money inside of ones pocket is never the same money as the one that is in the banks, or speculated in the stock market. What the relationship of money and capital problematizes is the fact that certain activities are the same and exchangeable at the same time that they are different and alien to each-other. In this landscape, the world market appears as an always under construction edifice of an inside that faces its own reflection repetitively. The world market is “not only the internal market [of a country] in relation to all foreign markets existing outside it, but at the same time the internal market of all foreign markets as, in turn, components of the home market” (280). As it is difficult to determine the difference between money and capital in capitalism, so it is to determine the inside-outside relationship that the idea of world market suggests. 

As monstruous as this could look, the shaping and reshaping of capitalist society requires not only money and commodities in exchange between free individuals. What is missing the picture depicted so far by Marx is the presence of those who produce, the workers, bodies without value but with an almost infinite capacity to dispose their own labour: free as birds subjects. 

Notes on “The Grundrisse” (1939/1993) by Karl Marx

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What follows are a series of posts on Karl Marx’s Grundrisse. 

“Introduction” and “Notebook I”

Perhaps the main topic of the notebooks that today we can call Grundrisse, by Karl Marx, is production. In fact the “Introduction” to the rest of the notebooks focuses on production overall. The question that starts these notebooks is: is production possible without a social structure that presupposes the exchange within individuals? That is to say, if exchange, production, circulation and the other faces of economy relay on capital’s sway. Marx states that “whenever we speak of production, then, what is meant is always production at a definite stage of social development —production by social individuals” (85). This means that whatever we perceive as individual production, the latter relies on a social production that presupposes it. More importantly, production is not something a part, or a step, in the way political economy works. It is then, that Marx states that everything that is related to production “requires an instrument [but not necessarily a machine] […] the instrument could be the body itself” (85). Thus, all human activity, in a way, is but a form of production. Production is everywhere and it can hardly be stopped, at best production is reshaped, dominated, controlled and triggered towards something that is not necessarily production’s target. 

In the “Introduction” to the Grundrisse there is an invitation to rethink production. Marx, after this invitation, proposes to start thinking production through money. If all possession presupposes an act of power, then, the question is to determine how that power was stablished. In a very simple term, from today’s perspective, one can think, why is it that money is so powerful? Why is it that we do things without acknowledging the dangers that might come afterwards? The problem of money, in fact, puts at stake what is really what value tells us when we buy, exchange, or produce things. What is at stake, then, in the first notebook of the Grundrisse is to determine how is it that value is produce and how is it that we all embrace it. 

For Marx all value is to be examined through labour time. A coin, or money, is but accumulated labour. That is, that “what determines value is not the amount of labour time incorporated in products, but rather the amount of labour time necessary at a given moment” (135). It could be argued, then, that value is but an abstraction, something that happened in the past but still, somehow, haunt us until today. The problem is now to examine why is money so special, why is it that money can serve as a third party that exchanges what was produced in another time?, why can money perpetuate the dead, or past, labour? 

When we buy things, we don’t really buy them. Perhaps this is obvious for anyone who reads this post, but what Marx proposed at the end of XIX century is that commodities (merchandises) are but values when they faced a process of exchange. “All commodifies are perishable money; money is the imperishable commodity” (149). What Marx means when he stated the latter is that perhaps what is at stake when buying and selling commodities in the bourgeois system is the reaffirmation of a third party. Everything that cannot be turned into money cannot be a commodity. A commodity, then, carries within a potential to become money and the other way around. Of course, this does not mean that money resolves all the processes that are part of production. That is to say, that money itself does not resolve the problems of circulation or distribution of merchandises. 

What is really at stake with money is another thing, not only the way exchanges are made. If for Marx are value is but an abstraction, and that abstraction comes directly from a head (144), whose head is that? That is, who is abstracting value for everyone else? Marx stablishes that the comparison between merchandises consist in a process of comparison, and this process creates money. Then, this “comparison, which the head accomplishes in one stroke, can be achieved in reality only in a delimited sphere by needs, and only in successive steps” (144). Thus, there seems to be a “head” that presupposes all general exchange. That head, a head of an unknown person, gets whatever it wants in a single stroke, a dull, or hard, blow. The head that presupposes value hits hard. This characteristic, then, is pure affect. Consequently, whoever experiences this hard blow has but no other choice but to replicate the first blow of the aforementioned thinking head. Soon, all idea of the general equivalent seems to be but the habituation of that single stroke, or a process that happens “little by little” (144) in the formation of capitalist society.