Abstract
This work seeks to demonstrate that the doctrinal content of Marx’s Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie (Rohentwurf 1857/58) is indebted for its logical form to Hegel’s exposition of logical categories as found in the Wissenschaft der Logik.1 The Grundrisse are a series of manuscripts in notebook form that Marx composed from August 1857 to June 1858. As Marx stated in a letter to the German socialist Ferdinand Lassalle (February 1858), the work represents the culmination of fifteen years of research into the origins and nature of political economy.2 It is a “synthesis” of the wealth of empirical data that Marx had gathered in his study of economics.3 It was in fact Marx’s first, large scale attempt to set out his critique of the capitalist mode of production.
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References
Karl Marx, Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen oekonomie (Rohentwurf 1857/58), Marx-Engels Werke, vol. 42 (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1983); G.W.F. Hegel, Werke 5–6, Wissenschaft der Logik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986).
Marx-Engels Werke, vol. 29 (East Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1963) (hereafter MEW), p. 263
Ibid., p. 263; see also Allen Oakley, Marx’s Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1, (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, Inc., 1984), pp. 135–36.
For a detailed exposition of the evolution of Marx’s intellectual development, both before and after the Grundrisse, see “A History of Marx’s Economics,” by Maximilien Rubel in Rubel on Karl Marx, ed. by Joseph O’Malley and Keith Algozin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 82–190.
Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, trans, by S.W. Ryazanskayz (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977) (hereafter Contribution);
see also Allen Oakley, The Making of Marx’s Critical Theory (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983), esp. pp. 52–53.
Contribution, p. 20.
Ibid., p. 22.
MEW, vol. 29, p. 258; see also Allen Oakley, The Making of Marx’s Critical Theory, p. 52.
See for example, Roman Rosdolsky, The Making of Marx’s “Capital” trans, by Pete Burgess (London: Pluto Press Limited, 1977), esp. pp. 1–10;
see also Allen Oakley, The Making of Marx’s Critical Theory, pp. 52–80; and Rubel, “A History of Marx’s ‘Economics,’” and “The Plan and Method of the ‘Economics’,” in Rubelon Karl Marx.
See Rosdolsky in The Making of Marx’s “Kapital”, for a brief history of the manuscripts, esp. pp. 1–10.
Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft), trans, and ed., with a Foreward by M. Nicolaus (London: Allen Lane, 1973) (hereafter N);
see also Karl Marx, The Grundrisse, trans, and ed. by David McLellan (New York: Harper and Row, 1971) for the translation of selected parts of the Grundrisse.
See bibliography below.
See Carol Gould, Marx’s Social Ontology: Individuality and Community in Marx’s Theory of Social Reality (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1978);
and George E. McCarthy, Marx and the Ancients: Classical Ethics, Social Justice, and Nineteenth Century Political Economy (Maryland: Rowan and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1990);
and Georg Lukas, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxian Dialectics’, for the consideration of the underlying philosophy of human nature that serves as a foundation for the Grundrisse; cf. Pre-capitalist Economic Formations, trans, by Jack Cohen, ed. with an intro, by E.J. Hobsbawn (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1964); for the consideration of the history of modes of production as outlined by Marx in the Grundrisse.
I am indebted to Professor Burkhard Tuschling of the Philipps-Universität in Marburg, Germany, for helping me clarify the nature and aim of this work. Professor Tuschling cautioned me to make explicit to the reader that this work, though about logical form, does not reduce the content of the Grundrisse to logical form. There is much more at work in the Grundrisse than the sequence of economic categories, as the works of Lukas, Gould, McCarthy, Hobsbawn, et al., make abundantly clear.
See Marx-Engels Werke (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1963–65), vol. 29, p. 260.
Ibid., p. 260.
See Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s “Philosophy of Right”, trans, by Annette John and Joseph O’Malley, ed. By Joseph O’Malley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), p. 3.
Cf. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, trans, by Martin Milligan, ed. by Dirk J. Struik (New York: International Publishers, 1964), pp. 188–89;
and Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (New York: International Publishers, 1936), pp. 163–164.
See Karl Marx, “Introduction,” Grundrisse, p. 100ff; “Einleitung” Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie, Marx-Engels Werke (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1983), vol. 42, p.19ff.
See Terrell Carver, “Introduction,” in Karl Marx: Texts on Method (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1975), for a general consideration of the Hegelian origins of Marx’s discussion of method in the “Introduction.”
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology: Part 1 (hereafter GI) (New York: International Publishers, 1986), ed., with an introduction by C.J. Arthur, p. 42ff.
See David A. Duquette, “Methodology and Development in Marx and Hegel,” The Owl of Minerva 19 (Spring 1988): 131–148, for a seminal discussion of the term “concrete” in Marx; Tony Smith, The Logic of Marx’s Capital: Replies to Hegelian Criticisms (New York: SUNY Press, 1990).
See Marx, Critique, p. 3, for an example of the early Marx’s commendation of Hegel for having conceived of the real as an organism.
See Marx, GI, pp. 48–60.
See Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, pp. 163–64.
See Tony Smith, The Logic of Marx’s Capital, esp. pp. 19–21, for a discussion of Marx’s account of how the method of presentation ideally reflects the life of the subject matter.
Ibid., pp. 163–64.
Errol E. Harris, An Interpretation of the Logic of Hegel (London: University Press of America, 1983), p.9; cf. chapters 1 and 2 for a discussion of the proper object of Hegel’s logic. This section is indebted in the main to Harris’s eminent work on Hegel’s logic;
see also Justus Hartnack, An Introduction to Hegel ‘s Logic, trans, by Lars Aagaard-Mogensen (New York: Hackett, 1998) (hereafter Introduction), intro., for a discussion of the subject and objective foundation of the categories of Hegel’s SL.
Cf. Harris, An Interpretation, esp. chapters 1 and 2.
Ibid., 29–34.
Ibid., pp. 40–45, and also Hartnack, Introduction, pp. 4–6, for two short, concise discussions on the nature of Aufhebung.
Cf. Harris, “Introduction,” for a consideration of the circular nature of Hegel’s scientific method; see also Tony Smith, The Logic of Marx’s Capital, pp. 3–18.
See Eric Weil, “The Hegelian Dialectic,” in The Legacy of Hegel: Proceedings of the Marquette Hegel Symposium, 1970, ed. by J.J. O’Malley, K.W. Algozin, H.P. Kainz, and L.C. Rice for an interesting discussion on the absolute necessity of the development of categories in the SL. See also Professor Findlay’s “Comments on Weil’s “The Hegelian Dialectic,” for an alternative view to that of both Weil and Harris.
Hiroshi Uchi, Marx’s Grundrisse and Hegel’s Logic, ed. by Terrell Carver (London: Routledge, 1988), esp. “Preface;”
see also H. Uchida, “The money of Spirit: the Young Marx’s analysis of the homology between political economy and Hegel’s philosophy,” Monthly Report of the Institute for Social Sciences of Senshu University (Tokyo, 1986), 272:2–30.
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Meaney, M.E. (2002). Introduction. In: Capital as Organic Unity. Philosophical Studies in Contemporary Culture, vol 9. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9854-5_1
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