Royal Road to Science — Marx Engels Collected Works Volume 28, Economic Manuscripts of 1857–58 (first part of the Grundrisse)

One of David Harvey’s (in)famous chart s— more on him later!

Introduction

Greetings, loyal readers! This was again a long delay though partially because the work I was taking on was more dense, interesting, challenging, and (arguably) important than some of the journalistic and epistolary works I had been covering earlier.

As I mentioned in my very first entry, there are challenges to covering the Marx Engels Collected Works (MECW) in chronological order — in the same year, Marx and Engels wrote letters, newspaper articles, agitational flyers, and notebooks like this one. I was starting to feel a bit tired of doing so many newspaper articles in a row, and had at least six more such volumes coming up, so as a rough tie breaker, I chose to do all both MECW volumes of Grundrisse next to spark some excitement in myself (which are themselves followed by four more pre-Capital economic notebooks then three Capital volumes as well — I am not sure frankly how much I’ll bounce back or forth between those and the journalistic and letter volumes.)

Well, it delivered! I took around 40 dense pages of notes on the 590 pages of Volume 28. Volumes 29 will be a similar entry. I decided to do each as separate Medium.com pages instead of waiting to do one grand one. This is long enough already!

My entry for this volume will be structured simply:

I. This Introduction

II. The MECW Preface

III. Marx’s Bastiat and Carey and Introduction (related but written and released separately originally)

IV. The first section of his Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft of 1857–58) [First Installment]. Warning: this is quite long!

First off, it’s important to know that this volume is different in multiple ways than the more popular Penguin English language edition of Grundrisse (which I had read maybe twice before in my life.)

For one, this specific volume was translated by Ernst Wangermann unlike the Martin Nicolaus translated Penguin edition (side note: I find the whole Nicolaus story interesting, in that he was a new left activist in the Bay Area with a strong German language background asked in 1973 to do the first translation of this critical work as an unemployed young man.)

I was curious how others viewed the differences in the translations. The best short article I could find on that question was this, which I highly recommend: https://chrisarthur.net/a-guide-to-marxs-grundrisse-in-english-2008-christopher-j-arthur/ . Of note in the MECW version is the generally more familiar translation of “valorization” instead of “realization” for “Verwertung” — as well as Wangermann having access to MEGA2 materials for a more complete release and a preferable placement of additional notebooks’ materials.

An additional historical note is, as I mentioned, how relatively late Grundrisse came to English: the first full 1973 release compares to 1941 and 1953 for the first two German editions, 1958–65 for Japanese releases, 1967–68 for French, and 1968–69 for Russian and so on. Even the Swedes got a release first. There were partial “selections” translated to English for Grundrisse in the 1960s, but not a complete volume.

Finally, I will not I didn’t use any particular guide or reading group to help me here. In the case of the former, it was because I didn’t find one that was useful. I did try some David Harvey audio lectures, but I generally found them lacking (and I am admittedly a bit of a skeptic of him, especially on his history of relative uninterest in global warming and other ecological issues and how he somewhat dismisses a lot of important criticism by Marx in these volumes of Prodhoun as “boring” — buddy, it’s all boring to someone, including me, I am turning you to help make it useful and interesting!) As for the later, there was no reading group around me or online I found right now though I do find.

I will say however that Harvey had one key thing I latched on to: if you ever feel lost in this volume, ask yourself what “part” of the process are you in? What is Marx describing? He repeats himself (as is natural for many people taking notes) quite a bit. Even if there are challenging bits and examples that he makes, Marx generally is clearly speaking of a particular “place” within his economic anaylsis: find it and get what you can from it. Hence his graphic at the top of this entry.

All that to say, I fully admit that the Marxologists and serious students of Marx will probably find little to no use of my entry here. So be it! I’m a rank amateur learning as I go. Writing these entries are mostly for myself — because I don’t plan on re-reading all 50 volumes again someday but hopefully can remember more by doing this. I will likely have errors — feel free to contact me to correct them. Re-reading Grundrisse I believe will be critical to having a more useful entry for Capital, which I hope to get to before I am entirely bald and gray, as well as providing some joy in its own rights.

Finally, if you can’t afford a copy of either edition of Grundrisse, check your local library or the websites hiaw.org and hekmatist.com for hypertext and PDF editions respectively — unlike many works of Marx and Engels, marxists.org cannot publish the MECW version of Grundrisse due to copyright claims from what Terry Eagleton described as “the American aircraft carrier formerly known as the United Kingdom.”

The MECW Preface

The Preface begins direct:

“Volume 28 of the Collected Works of Marx and Engels opens a new section of this edition, containing Marx’s main work, Capital, its preliminary versions and the economic writings which immediately preceded it. The first two volumes of this section, 28 and 29, contain the Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy — the economic manuscripts widely known as the Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Oekonomie (the editorial heading under which they were first published in the language of the original in Moscow in 1939–41) — and also Marx’s work A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. The findings of research undertaken in the Soviet Union, the German Democratic Republic and other countries into the Grundrisse since the appearance of the first edition, particularly in connection with their publication in the second Russian edition of Works of Marx and Engels and in the second edition of Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe (MEGA2, a collection of works by Marx and Engels in the languages of the originals), have been taken into account. In the present edition the whole range of economic works written in the period 1857–61 is divided up into two interrelated groups. The first of these is the series Economic Manuscripts of 1857–58 which strictly speaking represent the original rough version of Capital. Of these Volume 28 includes “Bastiat and Carey”, “Introduction” and the first, larger instalment of the Grundrisse (the Chapter on Money and the greater part of the Chapter on Capital). Volume 29 contains the concluding part of the Chapter on Capital and the Index to the 7 Notebooks. It also includes the second XII Preface group of works dating from that period: A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (which came out in 1859) and preparatory material for that work — a fragment of the original text of the second and of the beginning of the third chapter, a draft plan for the third chapter, and also References to My Own Notebooks.”

The MECW editors then refer to Capital as the “supreme achievement of Marx’s theoretical thought”, a “scientific feat”, and a “work of genius” being “virtually the product of Marx’s whole life.” Whether or not you agree with such a conclusion, it’s very much the standard language of Marxism-Leninism as well as a position that many more heterodox Marxian types agree with (though typically couched in somewhat different language.)

The MECW connects Marx’s economic research to the political history and Marx’s biography of the time as well: the setbacks of 1849, Marx’s move to England, the culmination of his earlier research and notebooks, and the economic crisis of 1857. Lenin referred to Marx having “a veritable Mont Blanc of factual material” to begin his critique of political economy. I have covered many of the earlier materials in early entries.

The MECW also introduces the two “other” works in this journal as well:

1. “The draft manuscript ‘Bastiat and Carey’, opening this volume, shows that by that time Marx had reached a far clearer understanding of the distinctions between the classical bourgeois political economy and its vulgar school, whose rise pointed to a decline in bourgeois economic thought. Marx accurately characterised the merits of the classical school while at the same time pointing out its limitations”
2. “Although unfinished, Marx’s draft ‘Introduction’ to his future economic treatise is of extraordinary scientific value. It shows that by the autumn of 1857 he had already worked out in detail the methodological principles of his economic theory, which rests on the basic conclusions drawn from the materialist conception of history, above all on the proposition concerning the primacy of social production. At the same time, unlike bourgeois economists who declared capitalist production eternal and treated production as some general abstraction, Marx in his ‘Introduction’ Wrote of production as shaped by specific social conditions, singling out bourgeois production of his time as the object of his research.”

Later, the preface delves into Marx’s analysis of the “forms” and capitalist realities such as surplus labour, commodity production, alternative value theories, pre-capitalist forms, and so on. All of that is the key sections of the entire volume and better explored in the main text, later on.

However, of important textual note, the Preface tells us “The fact that these manuscripts were rough drafts explains many of their textual features: the absence of division into sections and paragraphs over long passages, the considerable number of digressions and incomplete sentences, and a certain unevenness of style. In many places Marx put down his ideas in a cursory, fragmentary, elliptic form. The greater part of the manuscripts was written in German but Marx often made use of foreign expressions and sometimes switched over completely to English or French. He quotes sometimes in German translation, sometimes in the language of the original and sometimes in more than one language at a time with switches in the middle. There are also word forms of Marx’s own invention: English and French words used with German prefixes or endings, and terms made up of elements from different language, etc. When these manuscripts were translated into English all these factors had to be taken into account and unified so that Marx’s ideas expressed in different languages could be rendered unequivocally and as precisely as possible.”

The editors finally go on to say how they broke up paragraphs for readability and other details.

“Bastiat and Carey” and “Introduction”

The introduction was in a separate notebook

First, we should turn to the MECW endnotes to get some basic background on “Bastiat and Carey”:

“The unfinished draft manuscript ‘Bastiat and Carey’, the first of Marx’s Economic Manuscripts of 1857–58, takes up the first seven pages in one of the seven notebooks containing the main manuscript of that cycle, the Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft). However, the date, ‘July 1857’, which Marx put on the cover of that notebook, shows that ‘Bastiat and Carey’ was written somewhat earlier than the Outlines. Pages 1, 2, 3 and the upper half of page 4 contain the ‘Avantpropos’ (Introductory Notes) to ‘Bastiat and Carey’, the lower half of page 4 is blank, and pages 5–7 are taken up by a passage entitled ‘XIV. De salaires’. From page 8 onwards, there follows the continuation of the text contained in Notebook II of the main manuscript (see page 219 of this volume). Marx marked this continuation ‘Notebook III’ and dated it ‘November 29 and 30, and December 1857’.

Since in the manuscript the draft bears the same subtitle as Bastiat’s book, it may be assumed that Marx originally wanted to write an extensive review, but later decided that the book did not deserve detailed discussion, and therefore gave up his original intention.

The draft goes beyond the bounds of an ordinary review. In the ‘Avantpropos’, Marx sums up the bourgeois political economy of his time and strictly delimits the era of classical political economy as beginning in the late 17th century, with the works of Petty and Boisguillebert, and ending in the first third of the 19th century, with the writings of Ricardo and Sismondi. He shows that the bourgeois economists of the subsequent period were either epigones of the classics or vulgar critics of them. The works of the Frenchman Bastiat and the American Carey, directed above all against Ricardo, were examples of that kind of criticism.

The title ‘Bastiat and Carey’ occurs in Marx’s ‘References to My Own Notebooks’, written in the summer of 1861 (see present edition, Vol. 29). This shows that Marx himself regarded the draft as part of his Economic Manuscripts of 1857–58.”

Also of relevance, the MECW presents this entry up front (chronologically correct), as opposed to the Penguin edition, which places it embedded into later text.

The MECW editors don’t have to dig hard for evidence that Marx decided to drop a more extensive review: indeed, he specifically says in “Bastiat and Carey” that “It is impossible to pursue this nonsense any further. We, therefore, drop Mr Bastiat.”

But what Marx DOES pursue further is not nonsense, but his lengthy INTRODUCTION, which I take notes for below:

[M1]* *meaning the first notebook of Marx’s series. I will try to number everything and largely continue with my notes chronologically based on Marx’s notebook order as well. Note every notebook will have notes from me though.]]

Marx’s introduction on section I, “Production, Circulation, Distribution, Exchange (Circulation)”

Marx writes “To begin with, the subject to be discussed is material production.” And that individuals produce in a society — contra the Robinson Crusoe like fantasies of Smith and Ricardo beginning with the isolated farmer or fisherman (Marx quotes extensively from “An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations” and Ricardo’s “On the Principles of Political Economy, and Taxation”.)

New productive forces have evolved for the 18th century individual. Avoid a false history.

[M2] “Production by an isolated individual outside society — something rare, which might occur when a civilised person already dynamically in possession of the social forces is accidentally cast into the wilderness — is just as preposterous as the development of language without individuals who live together and speak to one another.”

Marx says that “production in general” is an abstraction, if maybe a reasonable one. But he speaks of production here being at a definitive stage of social development. One that rests on previously accumulated labor from tools (something we know now that he had noted from his earliest economic notebooks.)

[M3] Production continues down a branch (e.g. agriculture) within a larger totality of production.

[M4] The previous political economists that Marx continually critiques are again critiqued for presenting “eternal natural laws independent of history” — with an agenda at that — “ bourgeois relations are quietly substituted as irrefutable natural laws of society in abstract.”

[M5] This begins “2. THE GENERAL RELATION OF PRODUCTION TO DISTRIBUTION, EXCHANGE AND CONSUMPTION”. Here Marx considers the “various rubrics” that economists placed along with production generally: production, distribution, exchange, and consumption.

[M6] Marx says production (according to the economists) is determined by “general laws of nature, distribution by social chance”, so it “exert[s] a more or less stimulating influence on production; exchange lies between the two as a formal social movement, and consumption, as the concluding act, which is regarded not only as the ultimate aim but as the ultimate purpose, falls properly outside the sphere of [political] economy[!]”

Marx continues, using some of his trademark dialectics-as-ironic-jabs: “As though this separation had not forced its way from real life into the textbooks, but, on the contrary, from the textbooks into real life, and as though it were a question of a dialectical reconciliation of concepts and not of comprehending actually existing relations.”

This is a good opportunity to mention Hegel. I found it striking, after a number of years, to return to Grundrisse with a bit more background on Marx and note the influence of Hegel upon Marx’s notes here generally. You have to squint a bit harder I believe to see this in Capital but it’s quite obvious at this point that Marx is a bit more boldly combining “classical German philosophy, classical English political economy, and French socialism” — imagine perhaps a chunky stew as opposed to a puréed soup.

Indeed, we see another Hegelian and Spinozist dialectical sort of philosophical logic right away again, when Marx says “Production is directly also consumption. Two-fold consumption, subjective and objective: [firstly,] the individual, who develops his capacities while producing, expends them as well, using them up in the act of production, just as in natural procreation vital energy is consumed. Secondly, consumption of the means of production, which are used and expended and in part (as, for instance, in combustion) are broken down into the basic elements. Similarly consumption of raw material, which does not retain its natural form and condition; these are, rather, extinguished. The act of production itself is thus in all its moments also an act of consumption. But the economists concede this. Production as directly identical with consumption, consumption as directly coinciding with production, is called by them productive consumption. This identity of production and consumption amounts to Spinoza’s proposition: determinate est negatio.*”

*“ ‘Determination is negation’, i.e., given the undifferentiated self-identity of the universal world substance, to attempt to introduce particular determinations is to negate this self-identity. (Spinoza, Letters, №50, to J. Jelles, 2 June 1674.)”

[M7]

The two fold approach continues heavily in this notebook:

“Production is thus directly consumption, consumption is directly production. Each is immediately its opposite. At the same time, however, a mediating movement takes place between the two. Production mediates consumption, for which it provides the material; consumption without production would have no object. But consumption also mediates production, by providing for the products the subject for whom they are products. The product only attains its final FINISH in consumption. A railway on which no one travels, which is therefore not used up, not consumed, is only a railway ‘Potentially’ [in Greek], a not in reality. Without production there is no consumption, but without consumption there is no production either, since in that case production would be useless.”

Through consumption, a product becomes a real product. The finishing stroke of building a house is someone living in it. Of a dress, someone wearing it. That consumption then drives the need for more production.

This whole notebook I thought interesting in its sort of organic or even botanic (Harvey uses this metaphor) logic. Here a lot of the hallmarks of Capital’s phrasing and logic grows its roots as well: mediated moments”, unity of opposites, the genesis of some sort of still unelaborated concept of value, fulfilled needs, etc.

[M8]

Production produces consumption by

1. Creating the material need
2. determining the mode of consumption
3. Creating the need in the consumer

Marx gives a basic example of the public seeing a collectible work of art owned by one person driving the interest to buy and therefore produce more of these works by another.

[M9]

Now from two folds to three for the identity of consumption and production:

1. Direct identity: production is consumption; consumption is production.
2. Each appears as a means of the other, is mediated by it; this is expressed as their mutual dependence; a movement through which they are brought into mutual relation and appear to be indispensable to each other, but nevertheless remain external to each other.
3. Production is not only directly consumption, and consumption directly production; nor is production only a means of consumption and consumption the purpose of production, in the sense that each provides the other with its object, with production supplying the external object of consumption, and consumption the notional object of production.

But don’t confuse Marx’s Hegelian background with any broader agreement with other descendants of that tradition, especially

“After this, nothing is simpler for a Hegelian than to posit production and consumption as identical. And this has been done not only by socialist belletrists [Proudhon] but also by prosaic economists, such as Say, in declaring that if one considers a nation — or mankind in abstracto — then its production is its consumption.”

Marx believes society is not a “single subject”[M9] and elaborates on a more dominant part of his initial cycle outline here (emphasis in bold always my own): “Consumption as a necessity, as a need, is itself an intrinsic moment of productive activity. The latter, however, is the point where the realisation begins and thus also its dominant moment, the act epitomising the entire process. An individual produces an object and by consuming it returns again to himself; he returns however as a productive individual and an individual reproducing himself. Consumption thus appears as a moment of production.”

[M10]

Marx speaks of (land) rent for the first time, which he says presupposes large-scale landed property (agriculture). But here only to contrast presuppositions about wages and labor.

[M11]

Marx again critiques some of the economists: “Ricardo, whose object was the understanding of modern production in its specific social structure, and who is the economist of production par excellence, for this very reason declares distribution, not production, the proper subject of modern [political] economy. This is added proof of the absurdity of those economists who treat production as an eternal truth, and confine history to the domain of distribution.”

To the individual, selling labor for wages, which is reliant on capital and landed property, is a requirement (explored more later.) But here Marx believes that the questions around production require analysis of history as well.

[M12]

Marx’s historical examples begin with “The conquering people imposes its own mode of production upon the conquered (for example, the English in Ireland during this century, and partly in India)” and continue with Turks, Romans, Germanic tribes, Mongols, etc. And slavery in (presumably) the US South (though maybe he means Brazil when he says “South America”, though that seems less likely.) But he doesn’t speak of a foreign primitive accumulation that is only plunder here — for you need some sort of production to get to the point where you could plunder in the first place.

Laws, Marx says, perpetuate an instrument of production. It might be inheritance of land for example. However, they have limits: he asks if small plots of land (e.g. large estates were broken up by the French Revolution) will survive even with legal backing since there had been a continued tendency there towards larger estates again.

[M13]

Finally part C of this section, “EXCHANGE AND CIRCULATION”.

Right to it!: “Circulation itself is only a definite moment of exchange, or it is also exchange regarded in its totality. Since exchange is only a mediating moment linking production and distribution (which is determined by production) with consumption; since consumption moreover itself appears as a moment of production, exchange is obviously also comprised in production as one of its moments.”

Though circulation may appear like a free floating exchange, the reality Marx notes is that it cannot exist without a division of labor, without production, and then the details of the exchange are determined also by the specific structures of production.

“The result at which we arrive is, not that production, distribution, exchange and consumption are identical, but that they are all elements of a totality, differences within a unity.” Marx also says the process starts “afresh” with new production — something perhaps less elegant than where he goes later?

As for all of these interactions, “This is the case with any organic entity.”

[M14]

Next Marx moves to “ THE METHOD OF POLITICAL ECONOMY”

“When considering a given country from the standpoint of political economy, we begin with its population, the division of the population into classes, town and country, sea, the different branches of production, export and import, annual production and consumption, commodity prices, etc.”

Or later, said another way, “For example, the simplest economic category, e.g. exchange value, presupposes population, population which produces under definite conditions, as well as [M-15] a distinct type of family, or community, or State, etc. Exchange value cannot exist except as an abstract, one-sided relation of an already existing concrete living whole.”

Money can exist before capital, banks, wage labor, etc. Indeed, Marx will repeat many times the important precondition of the existence of money later for a more advanced system of capital.

[M16]

On the other hand, an advanced society (Peru is the given example; presumably the Inca) can exist without money at all. I found this example by Marx fascinating, especially with the new attention given to Marx’s later life ethnological notebooks (not part of the MECW!) by their translation in the 1970s and by Saito’s recent works on “Degrowth Communism.” And it could relate to between an Incan system of labor calculations and the old “labor vouchers” debate in socialism.

After various discussions of pastoral peoples, Romans, and more, [M20] Marx finally says that it is Capital which is the economic power that dominates in bourgeois society.

And finally a summary before moving on specifically to means of production and more:

“The arrangement has evidently to be made as follows:

(1) The general abstract determinations, which therefore appertain more or less to all forms of society, but in the sense set forth above. (2) The categories which constitute the internal structure of bourgeois society and on which the principal classes are based. Capital, wage labour, landed property. Their relation to one another. Town and country. The 3 large social classes. Exchange between them. Circulation. Credit system (private). (3) The State as the epitome of bourgeois society. Analysed in relation to itself. The “unproductive” classes. Taxes. National debt. Public credit. Population. Colonies. Emigration. (4) International character of production. International division of labour. International exchange. Export and import. Rate of exchange. (5) World market and crises.”

The last section of the long introduction is:

[M21] 4. PRODUCTION.

MEANS OF PRODUCTION AND RELATIONS OF PRODUCTION. RELATIONS OF PRODUCTION AND CONDITIONS OF COMMUNICATION. FORMS OF THE STATE AND OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN RELATION TO THE RELATIONS OF PRODUCTION AND OF COMMERCE. LEGAL RELATIONS. FAMILY RELATIONS

In this notebook, Marx lists eight miscellaneous notes “not to be forgotten”. Greatly shortening them, they are:

1. War
2. The historiography of civilization, of religion and states
3. Relations of productions and international relations
4. Relation to naturalistic materialism
5. A dialectic of the concepts of means of production and relations of production
6. The unequal development of material production and (e.g.) art or culture
7. The above conception of history, related to chance, inevitability, world history as a result, etc.
8. Determinateness of nature (including “tribes, races” — yikes?)

[M22]

Is the last part of the introduction, and delves specifically into art.

Here I will put a longer quote because unlike some of the more dry (if obviously important) sections of these notebooks, here is something really quite beautiful:

“ Let us take, for example, the relation of Greek art, and that of Shakespeare, to the present time. We know that Greek mythology is not only the arsenal of Greek art, but also its basis. Is the conception of nature and of social relations which underlies Greek imagination and therefore Greek [art] possible in the age of SELFACTORS, railways, locomotives and electric telegraphs? What is Vulcan compared with Roberts and Co., Jupiter compared with the lightning conductor, and Hermes compared with the Crédit Mobilier? All mythology subdues, dominates and fashions the forces of nature in the imagination and through the imagination; it therefore disappears when real domination over these forces is established. What becomes of Fama beside Printing House Square? Greek art presupposes Greek mythology, in other words, nature and even the social forms have already been worked up in an unconsciously artistic manner by the popular imagination. This is the material of Greek art. Not just any mythology, i.e. not any unconsciously artistic working up of nature (here the term comprises all objective phenomena, including society). Egyptian mythology could never become the basis or material womb of Greek art. But at any rate [it presupposes] a mythology. Hence, on no account a social development which precludes any mythological, [i.e.] any mythologising, attitude towards nature, and therefore demands from the artist an imagination independent of mythology.

“Regarded from another angle: is Achilles possible when powder and shot have been invented? And is the Iliad possible at all when the printing press and even printing machines exist? Does not the press bar inevitably spell the end of singing and reciting and the muses, that is, do not the conditions necessary for epic poetry disappear?”

Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft of 1857–58) [First Installment] [Also known as “Grundrisse”

Cover of Notebook VII of the manuscript Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy

Here begins arguably the most important sections of Marx’s economic manuscripts of 1857–58. Seven large notebooks noted as “rough draft” by Marx were written over this period. To describe the smaller sections within, I will number them as the MECW and Penguin with [I-1] through [VI-19]

[I-1–3]

II. CHAPTER ON MONEY

Marx begins as one might expect: with some notes on precious metals and criticisms of Proudhonist Aflred Darimon; and a basic circulation of bills to precious metals. Though the Darimon criticism is obscure and a bit over my head here (to be fair to Marx, of course they were just noted for himself not intended to be published as such!), but apparently Backhaus and others have borrowed from this section to analyze how Marx began to think of a value form that Darimon could not understand due to his failure to recognize that capitalism requires money and (therefore??) is prone to periodic crises.

[I-4] That criticism continues across several notebooks, but into making new points and variations thereof. For instance, on the dominance of precious metals: “But perhaps it is not a matter of a greater or lesser economy of gold and silver by means of notes and other banking devices, but of abandoning the metallic basis of the currency altogether? But then again, the statistical fable loses its point, and so does its moral. If the Bank, under whatever conditions, is to export precious metals in case of an emergency, it must previously have accumulated them; and if foreign countries are to accept them in exchange for their commodities, these metals must have asserted their predominance.

“The causes which drained from the Bank its precious metals were, according to Darimon, a bad harvest and the consequent necessity of importing grain from abroad. He forgets the failure of the silk harvest and the need of extensive purchases of silk from China.”

[I-5–7]

After a summary of some of his old observations about landed interests, moneyed interests, and the “new” circulations, Marx says he now arrives at the basic question here: “is it possible to revolutionise the existing relations of production and the corresponding relations of distribution by means of changes in the instrument of circulation — changes in the organisation of circulation? A further question: can such a transformation of circulation be accomplished without touching the existing relations of production and the social relations based on them?”

This is why even if it may be “boring”, Marx’s criticisms of Proudhonism remain relevant so many years after the death of that man: Marx is leaving a more familiar criticism of money and property for a new (and I would argue more complete, radical, and revolutionary) anaylsis of the economy.

The amount of money in circulation could cause a concentration of wealth (as in ancient Rome, Marx says) just as much as improved circulation could do the same. We are starting to feel out something (sorry if this is too crude by me!) around how the problem isn’t the money per se as much as a broader value concept that money is only an preconditioned part of.

Marx repeats many of the same points for several pages and moves on to crises of 1809 and 1811. One thing that seems to remain true is Marx continually analyzes each crisis, perhaps unsatisfied with how unpredictable they seemed (see Heinrich on Marx continued to analyze an unfinished theory into the 1870s.)

Back to a dialectical formulation and trademark sarcasm in criticizing Darimon, Marx continues, “Gold and silver are commodities like the others. Gold and silver are not commodities like the others: as universal instruments of exchange they are privileged commodities and degrade the other commodities by virtue of this very privilege. This is the final analysis to which Darimon reduces the antagonism. His final decision is: abolish this privilege of gold and silver, demote them to the level of all other commodities. Then you do not abolish the specific evil of gold and silver money, or of notes convertible into gold and silver. You do away with all evils. Or rather promote all commodities to the monopoly status now possessed by gold and silver. Let the Papacy remain, but make everyone Pope. Do away with money by turning every commodity into money and endowing it with the specific properties of money.”

[I-8–10]

Anticipating his later frequently quoted joke about Catholicism/Protestantism (with its “the Scotch hate gold”), Marx speaks of the Highland clearances and monetary forms to continue his critique:

“In the rural areas of Scotland, paper money is actually preferred to metallic currency. Before 1845, when the English Act of 1844 was imposed on it, Scotland was naturally affected by all English social crises, and in many cases to a higher degree, for in Scotland the CLEARING OF THE LAND was carried out more ruthlessly. Nevertheless, Scotland did not experience a real monetary crisis (that a few banks here and there went bankrupt, because they extended credit recklessly, is not relevant here); there was no depreciation of banknotes, no complaints or investigations as to whether the quantity of CURRENCY in circulation was sufficient or not, etc. Scotland is important in this context, because it shows on the one hand how the money system on its present basis can be completely regulated — all the evils deplored by Darimon abolished — without abandonment of the present social basis; indeed, while its contradictions, its antagonisms, the conflict of classes, etc., actually reach a higher degree than in any other country in the world.”

[I-11–12]

Marx then arrives more directly at Proudhon’s theory of value and then an early draft of his own:

“The value (the real exchange value) of all commodities (including labour) is determined by their production costs, in other words, by the labour time required for their production. Their price is this exchange value of theirs expressed in money. The replacement of metallic currency (and the paper or credit money denominated in terms of it) by labour money deriving its denomination from labour time itself, would therefore equate the real value (exchange value) of commodities and their nominal value, price, money value. Equation of real value and nominal value, of value and price. But this would be attained only on the assumption that value and price are only nominally distinct. But such is by no means the case. The value of commodities determined by labour time is only their average value. An average which appears as an external abstraction in so far as it is obtained by calculation as the average over a period of time, e.g. 1 pound of coffee, 1 shilling, if the average price of coffee is taken over a period of, say, 25 years. But this average is very real if it is recognised as both the driving force and the moving principle of the fluctuations which occur in the prices of commodities during a particular period of time.

“This reality is not only of theoretical importance. It also constitutes the basis of commercial speculation, where the calculation of probability proceeds from both the mean average price, which is taken as the centre of the fluctuations, and the average heights and depths of these fluctuations above or below this centre. The market value of commodities is always different from this average value and always stands either below or above it.

The market value equates itself to the real value by means of its continual fluctuations, not by an equation with real value as some third thing, but precisely through continual inequality to itself (not, as Hegel would say, by abstract identity but by a continual negation of the negation,” i.e. of itself as the negation of the real value). I have shown in my pamphlet against Proudhon, and it need not be gone into further at this point, that the real value — independently of its dominance over the fluctuations of the market price (apart from its being the law of these fluctuations) — negates itself again and brings the real value of the commodities continually into contradiction with its own determination, depreciates or appreciates the real value of existing commodities.

“Price, therefore, differs from value, not only as the nominal differs from the real; not only by its denomination in gold and silver; but also in that the latter appears as the law of the movements to which the former is subject. But they are always distinct and never coincide, or only quite fortuitously and exceptionally. The price of commodities always stands above or below their value, and the value of commodities itself exists only in the UPS AND DOWNS of commodity prices. Demand and supply continually determine the prices of commodities; they never coincide or do so only accidentally; but the costs of production…

“The gold or silver in which the price of a commodity, its market value, is expressed, is itself a particular quantity of stored up labour, a certain measure of materialised labour time.”

Marx not only introduces concepts like average labor time and distinctions of price and values but continues to elaborate a theory of value through criticism of that bugaboo, labor time tickets (or labor vouchers as we now more commonly call them.):

“The labour-time ticket, which represents the average labour time, would never correspond to the actual labour time and never be convertible into it. That is, the labour time objectified in a commodity would never command a quantity of labour money equal to itself, and vice versa. It would command more or less, just as now each fluctuation of market values is expressed in a rise or fall in their gold and silver prices…

“The constant depreciation of commodities — over longer periods — against the labour-time tickets, of which we spoke earlier, would result from the law of the rising productivity of labour time, from the disturbances in relative value itself, which are created through its own inherent principle, labour time. The inconvertibility of the labour-time tickets, which we are now discussing, is nothing but another expression of the inconvertibility between real value and market value, exchange value and price. In contrast to all commodities, the labour-time ticket would represent an ideal labour time, which would exchange now for more, now for less, actual labour time, and which would have a separate, individual existence in this ticket corresponding to this real inequality. Once again the general equivalent, the means of circulation and measure of commodities would confront them as something individualised, following its own laws, alienated, i.e. with all the properties of our present money without performing its services. But confusion would reach quite a new peak, as the medium for comparing commodities, these objectified quantities of labour time, would not be a third commodity but their own measure of value, labour time itself.”

[I-12]

After that lengthy criticism, Marx moves to [THE ORIGIN AND ESSENCE OF MONEY]. The beginning section states in several different ways and examples his own working theory, not as part of a criticism primarily, but as a direct statement (at least to the extent notes can be direct):

“Each commodity (product or instrument of production) = the objectification of a particular [quantity of] labour time. Its value, the proportion in which it is exchanged for other commodities or other commodities are exchanged for it, is equal to the quantity of labour time realised in it. If the commodity e.g. = l hour’s labour time, it can be exchanged for all other commodities which are the product of 1 hour’s labour time. (This proposition is based on the assumption that exchange value = market value; real value=price.)

“The value of a commodity is different from the commodity itself. The commodity is value (exchange value) only in exchange (real or imagined). Value is not only the exchangeability of this commodity in general, but its specific exchangeability. It is at once the indicator of the ratio in which the commodity exchanges for others and the indicator of the ratio in which it has already been exchanged for others (materialised labour time) in the process of production. Value is a commodity’s quantitatively determined [I–13] exchangeability. Commodities, e.g. a yard of cotton and a quart of oil, considered as cotton and oil, are of course distinct, possess different properties, are measured in different units, are incommensurable. As values, all commodities are qualitatively equal and only quantitatively different, hence they can be measured in terms of each other and are mutually replaceable (exchangeable, convertible into each other) in definite quantitative proportions.

Value is their social relationship, their economic quality. A book that has a certain value, and a loaf that has the same value, are mutually exchangeable, they represent the same value, only in different materials.”

Then only a little later, parnethetically relating this commodity form to money:

“ (The exchange value of the commodity, as a special existence alongside the commodity itself, is money: the form in which all commodities are equated, compared, measured; the form into which all commodities are dissolved, and which dissolves itself in all commodities; the general equivalent.)”

This real mediation into money is required to convert the commodity into exchange value. Marx contrasts this to “primitive barter trade” in West Africa before moving on to his very first of the famous (infamous?) linen examples we get more of in Capital:

“To determine the weight of bread that I can exchange for a yard of linen cloth, I first equate the yard of linen to its exchange value, i.e. to l/x labour time. Likewise I equate the pound of bread to its exchange value, l/x or 2/x, etc., labour time. I equate each commodity to a third, i.e. [1–14] I posit it as unequal to itself. This third thing, distinct from the other two since it expresses a ratio, exists initially in the head, in the imagination, just as in general ratios can only be thought if they are to be fixed, as distinct from the subjects which are in that ratio to each other.”

A product then becomes a commodity as mere element of exchange. Money itself then is produced alongside a product and Marx posits that it is impossible to abolish money itself as long as exchange value remains the social form of products — something I would posit to some of the advocates of co-op/collective businesses and the like today! (Wolff.)

Marx spends several pages on the multiple-existence of money; its measure of commodity exchange; means of exchange; as representative of commodities; and as a universal commodity aside the particular ones.

Money becomes a commodity like other commodities, and at the same time it is not a commodity like other commodities. Marx refers to this as a particular contradiction, an emerging special nature of money where it fulfils its purposes by simultaneously negating them.

[I-18–20]

Marx notes in parenthesis again, “Above all the phrase: the product (or activity) becomes a commodity; the commodity becomes exchange value; the exchange value becomes money.”

Marx then spends several more pages on his labor time ticket critique again, from this additional angle.

[I-20]

On a historical note, he says “The less social power the means of exchange possesses, the more closely it is still connected with the nature of the immediate product of labour and the immediate needs of the exchangers, the greater must that power of the community still be which binds together the individuals, the patriarchal relationship, the community of antiquity, feudalism and the guild system (see my Notebook, XII, 34ba).”

^This notebook in some MECW printings is listed as lost and later as likely being part of the materials in MEGA II.

Immediately after that he continues, “Every individual possesses social power in the form of a thing. Take away this social power from the thing, and you must give it to persons [to exercise] over persons.”

After several more pages trying to again summarize exchange value, money, and the concept of it expanding out to a world market, Marx tries some additional metaphors:

“(Here the relationship of the individual to science can be taken as an example.)

“(To compare money to blood — the word “circulation” suggested this — is about as valid as Menenius Agrippa’s comparing the patricians to the stomach.)

“(To compare money with language is no less incorrect. Ideas are not transformed into language in such a way that their particular attributes are dissolved and their social character exists alongside them in language as do prices alongside commodities. Ideas do not exist apart from language. Ideas which must first be translated from their mother tongue into a foreign language in order to circulate and to become exchangeable would provide a better analogy; but then the analogy is not with the language but with its foreignness.)”

A bit later, a fresh break and new explanation, combining the form analyses with a historical one: “The product becomes a commodity. The commodity becomes exchange value. The exchange value of the commodity acquires a separate existence alongside the commodity, i.e. the commodity in the form in which (1) it is exchangeable for all other commodities; in which (2) it is therefore a general commodity and its natural particularity is extinguished; (3) in which is established the measure of its exchangeability, the particular ratio in which it equates all other commodities to itself — is the commodity as money, not indeed as money in general, but as a particular sum of money, for to represent exchange value in all its variability, money must be countable, quantitatively divisible.

“Money, the common form into which all commodities transform themselves as exchange values, the general commodity, must itself exist as a particular commodity alongside the others, for they are not only mentally measured by it but must be traded and exchanged for it in actual exchange. The contradiction that arises from this is to be discussed elsewhere. Money does not originate by convention, any more than the State does. It arises from exchange, grows naturally out of exchange, is a product of exchange.”

Here you get a general sense of Grundrisse in content and form: repetitive but with enough variation to have rich differences in language to better understand and example these repetitive concepts.

[I-25–26]

Marx then goes on with notes on metals of implements of production as well as items of exchange, how copper and silver for instance are used in higher development as a ratio for money to exchange for labor time etc.

Then we arrive at the “Australian-California case” on precious metals, where a gold rush occurs yet a rapidly expanding market for (e.g.) gold and silver delays their depreciation — economists were apparently befuddled that they didn’t quickly collapse their value as other commodities with sudden jumps in supply might, Marx says, because they also have that special characteristic of representing wealth as well.

Marx spends an additional 10 or more pages on the history of metals and the expression of metal on the money relationship generally. This is about as interesting to me as the whale biology chapters of Moby Dick, as Marx goes into the color of copper, Etruscans interest in copper, Chinese alloys, and other general notes that are clearly not meant to be published as coherent chapters in a future Capital/Capital-like book as such.

Next he goes on to [MONEY CIRCULATION], a first specific effort in the key topic of circulation in his form analysis here.

The essential characteristic of circulation is circulating exchange values in the form of prices.

Circulation, he says, is NOT bartering, payments in kind, feudal services, or other simple transactions but something more specific.

Circulation requires 1. the premise of commodities as prices and 2. circuits of exchange (not isolated acts but a totality in constant “flow”.)

[I-35]

The commodity is cast in the role of exchange value — the equivalent in definitive proportion to the labor time contained within it, to all other values (commodities.) A mediation is therefore required to post the commodity as exchange value.

Money then appears first as the unity of all exchange values and secondly as the quantitive ratio — a measure of exchange values/prices.

The commodity IS exchange value, but it HAS a price.

Marx continues with a critique of John Mill, who overlooks the fact that production costs, not merely their quantity, determine the value even of precious metals and the prices of the commodities measured in metallic values.

So then we must arrive at MONEY AS A MEANS OF CIRCULATION

[I-37]

Right away, a useful summary of another two fold character:

“If exchange values are notionally transformed into money in prices, then in exchange, in purchase and sale, they are really transformed into money, exchanged for money in order, as money, to be again exchanged for commodities. The particular exchange value must first be exchanged for the general, so as to be again exchanged for particular ones. The commodity is realised as exchange value only by means of this mediating movement in which money plays the role of mediator. Hence money circulates in the opposite direction from commodities. Money appears as mediator of commodity exchange, as means of exchange. It is the wheel of circulation, the instrument of circulation for the turnover of commodities; but as such it simultaneously has a circulation of its own — the monetary turnover, money circulation. The price of the commodity is only realised in its exchange for real money, or in its real exchange for money.”

Marx moves on to talk about production as a means, not as an end in itself — values are mediated, again he says, in exchange value.

In a footnote, Marx mentions a Hegelian “bad infinity” of endless circulation; a never-ending process”. Indeed, he uses similar language himself to continue, “So each is placed in a dual and antithetical determination, and so we have the living unity of both determinations.”

But unlike the economists, Marx does not believe that the acts of purchase and sale are two separate acts, indifferent, abstracted by bartering-like-logic — but that in circulation itself money is “realizing” prices.

[I-40–46] A little later, Marx gets to his first (I think) circulation formulas:

• commodity-money-money-commodity and
• money-commodity-commodity-money

Both are presented as a unity of circulation, though with a specific difference — money is to remain in circulation no matter what where the commodity is ejected from circulation to fulfil a need.

Stated differently, again and again, such as this:

“Hence the conclusion money — commodity — commodity — money, which we derive from the analysis of circulation, might appear merely as an arbitrary and senseless abstraction, rather as if one were to describe the cycle of life as: death — life — death; though in the latter case, it could not be denied that the constant dissolution of the individual into the elemental is as much an element of the natural process as the constant individualisation of the elemental.”

So money first is an end of itself, then it leaves a circuit, then it in a third determination is a general means of exchange realizing commodity prices.

Money is a [material representative of wealth] in the next section — to be accumulated. Marx starts to use his famous letters for these formulas:

“The form M — C — C — M is therefore quite as correct as the other, which appears to be the original one, C — M — M — C.”

Silver in a sense is a “symbol” of a thaler. Real pound sterling is also a “symbol” as prices are a fleeting meditation they can float to attain. Marx spends several more pages on examples and reiterations of this with some simple math as well.

[I-47]

We often here, including from anti-communists, in often simplistic terms, how Marx appreciated and built upon Adam Smith. We also hear much of his criticism of Smith, especially from socialists, communists, etc. It’s always best to give deeper into this, as here for example, Marx gives Smith credit but only to an extent — he knows he must read him, build upon him, and break from him. The relationship is nuanced and ongoing.

“A. Smith is right in so far as money is not the instrument of some particular branch of production; Ferrier is right, since it is inherent in general production based on exchange value to posit product and agent of production in the determination of money, and this implies a money distinct from the product; because the money relationship is itself a relationship of production, if production is considered in its totality.

“In so far as C — M — M — C is divided up into its two moments, although the prices of the commodities are implied (and this makes all the difference), circulation is divided up into two acts of direct barter. C — M: the exchange value of the commodity is expressed in another particular commodity, the material of money, as also that of money in the commodity; equally in M — C. To that extent, A. Smith is correct in saying that money as means of exchange is only a more complicated kind of BARTER. But when the whole of the process is considered, not the two phases as independent acts, so that the commodity is realised in money and money is realised in the commodity, the opponents of A. Smith are correct in their contention that he misunderstood the nature of money and that money circulation supplants BARTER; since money merely serves to balance the “ARITHMETICAL DIVISION” which arises from the division of labour. These “ARITHMETICAL FIGURES” need no more be of gold or silver than measures of length…

“Commodities from being marchandises become denrées, pass into consumption. Money as a means of circulation does not. So long as it retains its role of means of circulation, it does not cease at any point to be a commodity.”

Immediately after this, we get to Marx’s third determination of money: “which results directly from the second form of circulation: M — C — C — M. Here money appears not only as a means, nor as a measure, but as an end in itself, and hence leaves circulation, in the same way as the particular commodity which completes its circuit, and which has changed from marchandise to denrée.”

More on the unique and flexible status of this third determination of money:

“The third determination of money in its complete development presupposes the first two determinations and constitutes their unity. Money, then, has an independent existence outside circulation; it has stepped outside it. As a particular commodity, it can be converted from its form as money into that of objects of luxury, gold and silver ornaments..

“Or it can be accumulated as money and so constitute a hoarded treasure. So far as money in its independent existence derives from circulation, it appears in circulation itself as the result of circulation; it closes its own circle by means of circulation. In this aspect, its role as capital is already latent. It is negated as mere means of exchange. Nevertheless, since historically it can be posited as measure before it appears as means of exchange, and can conversely appear as means of exchange before it is posited as measure — in the latter case it would exist only as a preferred commodity — it can also appear historically in its third determination before it has been posited in the two previous ones. But gold and silver can be accumulated as money only if they are already present in one of the two previous determinations, and in its third determination it can appear in a developed form only if it has already been developed in the earlier two. Otherwise, its accumulation is merely accumulation of gold and silver, not of money.”

Again, Marx returns to antiquity, where exchange value was not the “nexus rerum”; it appears later as productivity was secondary among the “trading people” (Pheoncians, Carthagians, later the Jews, etc.) Marx considers the ancient world itself a precondition for the existence of “trading peoples” (shades of the much earlier, controversial “Jewish question?”)

[II-1–2 — on to another notebook entirely]

The Romans and Greeks would conquest and plunder; a different situation than an economy based around wage labor and a mercantile military. These sort of differences also manifest themselves in the differences between Negro slavery compared to the Ancient slavery, in that the former implies wage labor. I think Marx makes an astute observation here that many scholars of slavery have spent many books on; the particular nature of slavery of an unfree-commodity-themself-laborer who’s children will be the same (chattel slavery) is indeed different than previous forms of ancient and slavery of captured warriors etc.

Marx goes through more summaries of what he believes he has “already shown”. This goes on for quite a while, but some of it already has the sort of powerful prose of Capital, e.g.,

“Money in its final perfected determination now appears in all respects as a contradiction which resolves itself, which drives itself to its own resolution. As the general form of wealth, it is confronted by the whole world of real riches. It is their pure abstraction — hence comprehended as such, it is mere imagination. Where wealth appears to exist as such in a quite material, tangible form, it has its existence merely in my mind, is a sheer figment of the imagination. Midas. On the other hand, as the material representative of general wealth, money is realised only when it is thrown back into circulation and vanishes in procuring the individual particular forms of wealth. It remains in circulation as the means of circulation; but it is lost to the accumulating individual, and this disappearance is the only possible way in which it can be secured as wealth. The dissolution of the stored-up wealth into individual enjoyments is its realisation. It can now be amassed once more by other individuals, but then the same process commences anew. I can really posit its being for myself only by giving it up as mere being for others. If I want to hold on to it, it evaporates in my hand into a mere phantom of real wealth.

“Furthermore, the idea of the augmentation of money by means of its accumulation, the idea that its own quantity is the measure of its value, again proves a delusion. If the other riches are not accumulated it loses its value in the measure in which it is accumulated. What appears as its augmentation is in fact its diminution. Its independence is only a semblance; its independence of circulation exists only in relation to circulation, as dependence on it.

“It pretends to be the general commodity, but because of its natural particularity it is again a particular commodity, whose value both depends on demand and supply and changes with its specific production costs. And since it is itself incarnated in gold and silver, it becomes one-sided in any actual form; so that when the one appears as money the other appears as particular commodity, and vice versa, and thus each appears in both determinations.

“As absolutely secure wealth quite independent of my individuality, it is simultaneously quite external to me; it is absolutely insecure wealth, which any accidental event can separate from me.”

In other parts here, Marx has valuable material but that is not worked into powerful prose, even writing to himself “To be inserted in particular sections:” a four part concept of money as well, paraphrased by me in this case:

1. Money as coin
2. A historical survey of the sources of gold and silver.
3. Causes of variations in their values
4. The quantity of money in circulation in relation to the rise and fall of prices, which Marx knows is the most relevant of the four based on his notes.

This must have been daunting because there was also some notes to insert “specifically economic investigations” about this as well.

But in summary of the above, Marx is already making one of his key contributions in my opinion: that property commands someone else’s labor.

Next is the crucial

[III. CHAPTER ON CAPITAL]

Its first section is

[THE PROCESS OF PRODUCTION OF CAPITAL]

[TRANSFORMATION OF MONEY INTO CAPITAL]

[II–8]

So we have already seen how gold/silver is not inherently just “money.” Marx speaks then of three “moments” of capital and I am utterly incapable at this point of understanding what he means. Among any other section of Grundrisse so far, this is one I have to put aside until he rewrites things in the follow four “Surplus Value” notebooks or Capital itself.

[II-9]

But on to use value, Marx writes about a natural particularity as well as a particular need for exchange. Combining the two aspects, Marx speaks of the unique nature of humans creating objects for exchange with other humans: all bees create the same thing, but we create different things that we can trade even without needing to seize by force. This reminds me of a Heinrich(?) anecdote on how no dog has ever traded two small bones for one large bone; this is the natural tendency of tool using humans to barter, expanded out to a social interest, which Marx says posits freedom.

However, with labor, Marx says in the ancient world, labor was forced (I imagine a warrior with a whip above a field.) But in the modern world, it’s not generally forced labor but a conditioning of perhaps a more nuanced coercion of a relationship to exchanging to meet natural needs. But ultimately the exchange value is now realized in money and a money system aimed towards accumulation.

Inheritance and judicial relationships, heirs are the realization of the role of the individualization as money. Ultimately this leads, finally, to a talk of a sort of class struggle.

Marx speaks (on page 179!) finally of the “antagonism of wages and capital, etc.”, which was “already latent” in the simple determination of exchange value and money: “Conceived of in isolation these are pure abstractions; but in reality they are mediated by means of the most profound contradictions, and present an aspect in which the expression of these contradictions is blurred.”

As is often the case, this shifts to a critique of the French socialists again, who viewed the bourgeois revolutions as being perverted by money away from freedom, where Marx goes a level deeper and more radical, saying “It is an aspiration as pious as it is stupid to wish that exchange value would not develop into capital, or that labour which produces exchange value would not develop into wage labour.”

[II-12–13]

In the next section, we get an odd but direct comparison:

“Money as capital is a determination of money that goes beyond its simple determination as money. It can be considered as a higher form of realisation just as it might be said that man is a developed ape.”

A few pages later, another circulation formula as capital emerges from circulation, money its point of departure, and a return to the “trading people” concept: “Money is the first form in which capital appears as such. M — C — C — M; the exchange of money for the commodity and of the commodity for money; this movement of buying in order to sell, which constitutes the specific form of trade, capital as merchant capital, is found in the earliest periods of economic development. It is the first movement in which exchange value as such forms the content of the exchange, is not only form but its own content. This movement can take place within peoples and between peoples for whose production exchange value has by no means yet become the prerequisite. The movement only touches the surplus of their output, which is still directed towards the satisfaction of their immediate needs, and takes place only on the boundary of production. Special trading peoples could play this mediating role between peoples whose mode of production did not yet presuppose exchange value as its basis. Thus in antiquity, and later the Lombards, thus the Jews within the old Polish society or in medieval society in general.”

A little later, Marx moves on to “CIRCULATION AND EXCHANGE VALUE DERIVING FROM CIRCULATION AS A PREREQUISITE OF CAPITAL”.

What he means by this is “In order to develop the concept of capital, we must begin not with labour but with value, or more precisely, with the exchange value already developed in the movement of circulation. It is just as impossible to pass directly from labour to capital as from the different races of men directly to the banker, or from nature to the steam-engine.”

Only in capital is exchange value posited literally as exchange value — remaining both commodity and money. This is also where there is the realization of money as exchange value. Said differently, capital alternately becomes commodity and money. But as the alteration of those determinations and as a totality of commodities. As exchange value, capital maintains and perpetuates itself by circulation.

[II-18]

In this notebook, the thesis so far is restated with the most steps and most clearly that I had found it so far:

“Differently expressed: As regards its content, exchange value was originally an objectified quantity of labour or labour time. As such it progressed, in the process of its objectification, through circulation until it became money, palpable money. Now it must again posit the point of departure of circulation, which lay outside of, and was presupposed by, circulation, in relation to which circulation itself appeared as a movement grasping it from outside and transforming it within itself. That is, exchange value must now posit labour; but now no longer as the simple equivalent or simple objectification of labour but as objectified exchange value become independent, which yields itself up to labour as its material, only in order to renew itself and from itself to begin circulation anew. And with that it is no longer a simple equation, a maintenance of its identity, as in circulation; but a multiplication of itself. Exchange value posits itself as exchange value only by valorising itself, i.e. by increasing its value. As capital, money (having returned from circulation to itself) has lost its rigidity, and has turned from a palpable thing into a process.”

The next 10–12 pages are variations on the theme, often in fragmentary note form: “EXCHANGE VALUE EMERGING FROM CIRCULATION BECOMES ITS PREMISS, MAINTAINS ITSELF IN IT AND MULTIPLIES ITSELF BY MEANS OF LABOUR”

Returning to Smith’s alleged correctness, this time on the hotly contested concept of productive labor, with Marx using more foul language than his notes typically have:

“A. Smith was essentially right with his distinction between productive and unproductive labour, right from the standpoint of bourgeois political economy. The arguments advanced against it by other economists are either rot (e.g. Storch, Senior still more pitiable,81 etc.), namely that any action after all acts upon something, thus confusion of the product in its natural and economic sense. According to this a criminal is also a productive worker, since he [11–22] indirectly produces books on criminal law (at least this reasoning as sound as if a judge is called a productive worker because he protects from theft). Or the modern economists have become such sycophants of the bourgeois, that they wish to make him believe that it is productive labour if someone picks the lice out of his hair, or strokes his tail, because the latter activity might make his fat head — BLOCKHEAD — clearer the next day for the office. It is therefore quite correct — but at the same time also characteristic — that for the consistent economists the workers in e.g. luxury shops are productive, although the fellows who consume such objects are explicitly castigated as unproductive wastrels. The FACT is that these workers are INDEED productive AS FAR AS THEY INCREASE THE CAPITAL OF THEIR MASTER; UNPRODUCTIVE AS TO THE MATERIAL RESULT OF THEIR LABOUR. IN FACT, this “productive” worker is just as interested in the shit which he must make as the capitalist who employs him, and who does not give a damn about the junk. But looked at more precisely, it turns out in fact that the true definition of a productive worker consists in this: a man who requires and demands absolutely no more than is necessary to enable him to bring to his capitalist the greatest possible advantage. ALL THIS NONSENSE. Digression. But have to return to the productive and unproductive in more detail later.”

Marx of course stays true to his word and does return to this later in volumes 31 and 34. And the debate among Marxists/Marxian “economists” today continue a debate on the service sector and so on; for what it’s worth, my own view is the service INDUSTRY has expanded as such since Marx’s time (e.g. massive home cleaning companies) even if there IS indeed a difference in terms of surplus labor from a private chef of a wealthy individual and a chef at a successful restaurant chain. We should be on the same side of the picket line regardless of your technical view on the Starbucks barista and it’s sad some do not agree.

[I-22]

Next is EXCHANGE BETWEEN CAPITAL AND LABOUR

Marx says “Use value confronting capital as posited exchange value is labour. Capital exchanges itself, or exists in this specific form only in relation to non-capital, the negation of capital, in respect to which alone it is capital; the real non-capital is labour.

If we consider the exchange between capital and labour, we find that it is divided into two processes which are not only formally but qualitatively distinct and even contradictory:

(1) The worker exchanges his commodity, labour, the use value which as a commodity also has a price like all other commodities, for a specific sum of exchange values, specific sum of money, which capital cedes to him.

(2) The capitalist obtains, in exchange, labour itself, labour as value-positing activity, as productive labour; i.e. he obtains the productive power which maintains and multiplies capital and which therefore becomes the productive power and reproducing power of capital, a power belonging to capital itself.

In the next page, Marx continues with another key contribution — the process of clearing the land to prepare industrial agronomy:

“ Historically, the transition is indisputable. It is already implied in the fact that [modern] landed property is the product of capital. We thus always find that wherever the reaction of capital on the older forms of landed property converts the latter into money rent (the same thing occurs in other ways, where the modern farmer is created) and agriculture therefore, carried on by capital, is converted into industrial agronomy, the COTTIERS, serfs, villeins, copyholders, cottagers, etc., necessarily become day-labourers, wage labourers. Thus wage labour in its totality is first created by the action of capital upon landed property, and later, as soon as this has been elaborated as a form, by the landowner himself. The landowner himself then CLEARS the land, as Steuart says, of its superfluous mouths, rips the children of the earth away from the breast on which they were raised, and so converts even labour on the land…”

[II-24]

Marx moves on to Wakefield’s Australian colonization theory in action, where land prices are raised to transform workers into wage labor workers for the home colonizers (of recent note, as part of a global movement to tear down racist statues, Wakefield’s has faced threats to bring his down as well.)

Marx speaks of another two fold process here in this transformation:

“Thus two-fold transition to wage labour. This the positive side. Negatively, after capital has posited landed property and thereby achieved its two-fold aim: (1) industrial agriculture and thereby development of the productivity of the soil and (2) wage labour, therefore the general domination of capital on the land, it considers the existence of landed property itself as a purely transitory development, which is necessary as the action of capital on the old relationships of landed property, and is a product of their decomposition; but which as such — once this aim has been achieved — is merely a restriction on profit, not a necessity for production. Capital therefore seeks to dissolve landed property as private property and to transfer it to the State. This the negative side. Thus to transform the whole internal society into capitalists and wage labourers.”

Around 10 pages later, Marx writes that labor must confront capital as “pure use value” offered as a commodity in exchange for exchange value (coin), for a mediated subsistence. Again he notes how a slave him/herself has exchange value but that the wage laborer has no value, which is a prerequisite for “free labor”.

[II-29]

This capacity to work may be called the “capital of the worker” but that worker must repeated the exchange for their labor power consistently.

[III-8, yes another notebook now as the rest of the 29th page of II was missing and the third jumps to page 8.]

Marx takes an hours of work concept and starts to spread it further: a worker exchanges their labor capacity over and over again across 20 years in weekly installments. He gives the example of the fight over the 10 hour bill that was discussed in previous volumes as proof of the capitalist’s desire to take as much labor capacity per week as possible from the worker.

[III-9–20]

Marx talks now of this relationship of labor and capital as a dialectic in appearance but a more specific reality:

“it becomes clear that the worker, who exchanges his commodity, goes through the form C — M — M — C in the process of exchange. If in circulation we start from the commodity, from use value as the principle of exchange, we necessarily arrive back at the commodity, in that money appears only as coin, and as means of exchange is only a vanishing mediator; but the commodity as such, after it has traversed its circuit, is consumed as a direct object of need. On the other hand, capital represents M — C — C — M; the antithetical moment.”

Workers surrender creative power while having an appropriation of their alien labor. The transformation of this labor is turned into capital. Marx summarizes Say and Simondi again, speaking of capital as a commercial idea before returning to Proudhon, a repeat of Marx’s process of self-valorization concept, another return to the concept of a totality of production etc.

Finally and logically this brings Marx to his first mention of “surplus value” using that specific term. Indeed, it’s the first time Marx writes this phrase anywhere that we know of.

Though Marx grants that the risks and overhead of production must be accounted for, as capital must preserve itself in price fluctuations, he rejects economists who insist on a non-valorization instead stating that “It is easy to understand how labour can augment use value; the difficulty lies in understanding how it can create higher exchange values than those with which it began.”

After that, Marx speaks of “primitive accumulation” (though again we wonder if this should instead be translated as “so-called primitive” or “original” accumulation, depending on the context? I don’t have the German text or knowledge to comment on this for Grundrisse in particular but am familiar with the debate for Capital.)

[III-21]

Marx says this primitive accumulation is required for a genesis of capital, that it assumes a certain amount of accumulation has happened allowing his process to begin.

After all of these pieces are in place, Marx says:

“The surplus value of capital at the end of the production process — a surplus value which is realised in the higher price of the product only in circulation, but realised in it as all prices are, by already being presupposed to it in thought, laid down, before they enter into it — signifies, if expressed according to the general concept of exchange value, that the labour time objectified in the product — or the quantity of labour (expressed in terms of rest, the magnitude of labour appears as a spatial quantity, but expressed in terms of motion it is measurable only by time) — is greater than that present in the original components of capital. Now this is possible only if the labour objectified in the price of labour is less than the living labour time which has been bought with it”.

After more engagement with Bastiat, and re-summarizing and re-example-ing some of this concepts again, Marx finally gets to Malthus, Ricardo and Smith on surplus value.

Marx claims the English economists accuse Ricardo of failing to understand surplus value. He credits Malthus for at least trying to proceed scientifically but says Ricardo alone (like in his polemic against Smith) has grasped the concept. Pulling no punches, Marx says these economists are “nothing but shallow simpletons” (keep that one in mind the next time someone tells you “Marx loved Adam Smith!”)

Separately from the economists, Marx claims the physiocrats also do not understand capital and self-valorization.

Capital, Marx says, should be seen as command over alien[iated] labor. The immediate unity of production and money, or better, of production and circulation.

He returns to the work day, of surplus value, and of the concept of necessary labor time again before summarizing it all again for many more pages.

That leads Marx eventually to ABSOLUTE AND RELATIVE SURPLUS VALUE

[111–32]

Marx says some of this is already clear: increased productivity does not raise prices but allows the surplus value of capital to grow as its relative value to the worker, the relative amount of labor (even without longer hours), has grown.

A few pages later, Marx introduces a concept of an exchange of previous labor power (“Arbeitskraft”), in line (I think!) of his use of “labor power” (as edited by Engels retroactively in some works as well) as opposed to simple “labor”. More on this in future notebooks.

[III-36–37]

Unlike earlier, Marx does get to some Ricardo criticism next, especially the fact that Ricardo (who “did” roughly understand surplus) did not understand the working day and associated exploitation (my preemptive term here) of surplus value.

Marx also crucially says (and I am not sure if he did this earlier?) that wages include the worker but also his reproduction.

[III-38] Marx analyses Malthus on value, who he claims “senses” (maybe similar to his earlier praise of his attempt to use scientific methods) the contradictions of exchange value, objectified labor time, et al. but becomes a “cropper” who presumably does not elaborate usefully.

Before asking questions to set up more examples, Marx gives another clear set of summarizing notes:

“We have always spoken only of the two elements of capital, of the two parts of the living working day, of which the one represents wages and the other profit, the one necessary labour and the other surplus labour. Where, then, are the two other parts of capital, which are realised in the material and instrument of labour? As regards the simple production process, labour implies the existence of an instrument which facilitates labour and of material in which it represents itself, which it forms. This form gives it its use value. In exchange, this use value becomes exchange value to the extent that it contains objectified labour.”

Speaking of cropping, I am leaving out lengthy multi-page examples of thalers and cotton that repeat the same things in different ways.

A lengthy section of Notebook [IV 1–15] continues showing this sort of math on surplus, necessary labor time hypotheticals, and so on.

After dozens of more pages of examples, Marx begins a next section, [CIRCULATION PROCESS OF CAPITAL] [REPRODUCTION AND ACCUMULATION OF CAPITAL]

Marx returns to a valorization process, where capital has

1. maintained its value by means of exchange (with living labor)
2. increased produced surplus value, making value “appear” (as such is realized as money)
3. has devalued from the form of money to that of the commodity which is to be realized in price of the product

[IV-16–17]

These three process have a unity formed by capital, external to each other but united with other capitalists, which is a necessary precondition for production as a whole.

Eventually this leads Marx to “exterior barriers” like consumption demand (which I would imagine traditional economists would criticize Marx for pushing so far into his observations here.) As well as consumption capacity, money supply, and more.

[IV-18–19]

Marx continues with a concept of an absolute surplus value needing constantly expanding circulation. Eventually this creates a “world market”, with a prerequisite of trade. This could mean a “civilizing” capital and/or overproduction.

[IV-20–31]

Marx again contrasts Say, Ricardo, and Sismondi but now with MacCulloch as well before returning to Malthus and others. Basically, this is again to show his own total disagreements or partial agreements to contrast his own view of consumption/demand and the limits thereof.

[IV-22–24]

Marx speaks of the following inherent, necessary limits:

1. Necessary labor (limit on exchange value of living labor capacity)
2. Surplus value (limit on surplus labor time, a limit on the development of productive forces)
3. Transformation into money
4. Restriction of the production of use value by exchange value.

Marx writes of the general tendency (as we should assume generally about his generalities!) then towards overproduction.

This can lead to a credit system, overtrading, and overspeculation. Pages and pages later, we read how this process compels workers to surplus labor beyond necessary labor even further.

[IV-25]

Exchange itself adds nothing to these values.

[IV-26]

And unlike those who may a more elegant unity of such a system, Marx believes that contradictions flow from the general relationships themselves — not from the “fraudulent tricks” of individuals upsetting some natural balance.

[IV-39]

Jumping ahead substantially, Marx gets to a “general devaluation” that would be an additional crisis point:

“Thus in a crisis — with a general depreciation of prices — then also occurs up to a certain moment a general devaluation or destruction of capital. The devaluation can be general, absolute, and not just relative, as with a depreciation, because value does not, like price, merely express the relationship of one commodity to another, but the relationship between the price of the commodity to the labour objectified in it, or the relationship of one amount of objectified labour of the same quality to another. If these amounts are not equal, a devaluation occurs which is not compensated for by an appreciation on the other side, since the other side expresses a fixed amount of objectified labour which cannot be altered by exchange. In general crises, this devaluation extends even to living labour capacity.

“According to what has been indicated above, [IV-40] the destruction of value and capital which occurs in a crisis coincides with — or means the same as — a general growth of the productive forces, which, however, does not take place through a real increase in the productivity of labour (in so far as this results from crises, it does not belong here) but through a diminution of the existing value of raw materials, machinery and labour capacity. E.g. the cotton manufacturer loses capital on his products (e.g. twist), but he buys the same value in cotton, labour, etc., at a lower price. It is the same for him as if the real value of labour, of cotton, etc., had diminished, i.e. as if they had been more cheaply produced through an increase in the productivity of labour. Likewise, on the other hand, a sudden general growth of the productive forces would devalue relatively all existing values, labour objectified at a lower level of the productive forces, and therefore destroy existing capital just as it would destroy existing labour capacity. The other aspect of the crisis resolves itself into a real fall in production, in living labour, in order to restore the correct proportion of necessary to surplus labour, on which, in the last analysis, everything rests.”

Marx does not believe, as Overstone thought, that crisis simply resolve by large profits for one and total losses for others.

Returning to his broader thoughts, Marx says exchange does not alter the inner conditions of valorization. The commodity realized as price is now realized capital. Without exchange, we should only be concerned with the measurement of use value.

[IV41–42]

The new value is posited once more as capital, dividing itself, and the process continues.

United Electrical Workers cartoon Fred Wright had an amusing way to explain some of the above sections to their union’s audience:

Labor movement classic

[IV-43]

After this, Marx enters into one of the most rambling, run-on sets of notes I have seen from him, much better handled by the careful edits of Capital Volume 1. Of particular note though is Marx’s statement that the class relationship is more important than the material results it produces (presumably for both analysis and a self sustaining loop.)

I made a silly Twitter thread on this as well: https://twitter.com/Dazzleox/status/1704586652016865292

Next is notebook [V-1–7], which includes more history on “trading peoples” as well as additional Proudhon crit. Marx puts aside a lot of the previous notebooks for “deeper and more detailed anaylsis later” before getting to something quite interesting [I-8], which is the relationship of labor to capital through a historical process. This happens through

1. Dissolution of the relations to the earth or soil
2. Dissolution of the relations in which he is proprietor of the instrument (like a blacksmith)
3. Including both above: consumption prior to production thanks to inheritance, journeymen/apprenticeships, guild protections etc.
4. Dissolution of the relationships in which workers reproduce themselves, perhaps due to the introduction of machinery.

Resulting in a “free” worker confronting capital, without land ownership etc.

[V-13]

A historical process comes back several pages later as Marx writes about usury, trade, urbanization, and government finance enabling the formation of monetary wealth to be transformed ultimately into capital, though also giving smaller examples of hoarding by tenant farmers and peasants.

A bit later, he says,

“It is therefore no longer surprising to find that the system of exchange values — the exchange of equivalents measured by labour — turns into, or rather reveals as its concealed background, the appropriation of alien labour without exchange, the total separation of labour and property. For the domination of exchange value and of production producing exchange values presupposes [V-14] alien labour capacity as itself an exchange value. I.e. it presupposes the separation of living labour capacity from its objective conditions. It presupposes relating to these — or to its own objectivity — as to alien property; in a word, relating to them as capital. The golden age of labour emancipating itself is confined to those periods when feudalism was in decay, but still engaged in internecine conflict, as in England in the 14th and the first half of the 15th centuries…”

Later, the merchant hires spinners and weavers who move those tasks from their secondary to primary occupations, which begins manufacture if not yet the factory. Later came the glass works, metal factories, sawmills, and eventually papermills and plants with even greater demand of mass production and concentration of labor.

Marx says, in something that may remain less explored (for now? generally?) that the exchange of labor is (was, potentially?) based on a propertyless-ness.

The next section is the CIRCUIT AND TURNOVER OF CAPITAL

The true nature of capital only emerges at the end of circulation. This is the turnover of capital.

[IV-17–18]

Capital is now in circulation, expanding both itself and its path, in this totality of production and reproduction.

However, Marx is still not entirely sure (if he ever was) of these analysis. For example, footnote 140 is Marx saying “WRONG!” to his own statement that “The duration here is simply the labour time necessary for the manufacture of the product” — about 100 pages later, he mentions other things that could lengthen the time capital remains within the sphere of the process of production (e.g. fields that must remain fallow, more distant markets for trade, and several other complicating factors.)

[IV-19]

A bit later, Marx gets to the “movements” that make up the turnover of capital. Summarized:

(I) The real process of production and its duration

(II) Conversion of the product into money/the duration of this operation

(III) Conversion of the money into the appropriate proportions of raw material, means of labour and labor

(IV) The most “special” part, the exchange of part of capital for living labor capacity

Here Marx says we have arrived are part II. This includes examples about bringing products to a Chinese market (“The longer time required by capital a for its valorisation is due here to the greater geographical distance it must travel after the process of production in order to be exchanged as C for M.”)

Along the same lines, Marx says capital strives to go beyond its spatial limitations. The language of capital having a power of its own is becoming more powerful than his earlier economic notebooks, I believe.

In notebook [V-22] Marx mentions industrial agriculture, the conversion of animal products into luxury goods, etc. in the context of ecological issues. This isn’t a fully developed metabolic rift concept as we see emerging later in Capital but it is an earlier example of noting these issues. This also overlaps with a somewhat contemporary observation of a consumer economy, “the conversion of what previously appeared superfluous into necessities”, as luxury goods are the literal opposite of necessary needs.

[V-23]

I had skipped an ongoing example Marx has used to explain these historical, economical process, which is that of the road. Marx now speaks of the road not just being built to facilitate travel and trade by employing a special class of road workers who the state could draw upon the unemployed to convert into master road builders, as menial servants of the state. This is the closet we get so far to an analysis of anything like “public employees”. Of course the capitalist could also construct roads (as contractors, toll roads, etc.)

[V-24–25]

The private cook I mentioned before makes his debut a few pages later, joining up with the proto (?) public sector worker:

“But for the employer it is labour which has, to be sure, a use value for him, like e.g. his cook, but no exchange value. Hence the entire distinction between necessary and surplus labour time does not exist.

Labour may be necessary without being productive. All general, social conditions of production — as long as they cannot as yet be produced by capital as such and under its conditions — are consequently paid for out of a part of the revenue of the country, by the government’s treasury, and the workers do not appear as productive workers even though they increase the productive power of capital.

The result of our digression is, incidentally, that the production of the means of communication, the physical conditions of circulation, are put into the category of the production of capital fixe, and hence do not constitute a special CASE.”

Around a dozen pages later begins the new section, THEORIES OF SURPLUS VALUE AND PROFIT]

This again begins with a critique of political economy, this time aimed at Ramsay/McCulloch.

The more interesting section to me is Marx’s engagement with Malthus later. Malthus has a tendency to be treated by many Marxists as simply “the overpopulation guy” and not one of the most important intellectuals of the early 19th century, influencing Ricardo, Smith, Sismondi but also Rosseau, Hume, and Charles Darwin.

[VI-several]

Marx uses Malthus here to break with Ricardo on his concept of a “relative value of commodities”, which Marx considers as meaningless as an “absolute value” of them. But this was just the pre-game to Marx’s return to Malthus finally, where Marx says:

“In his Principles of Political Economy, 2nd ed., [London,] 1836, Malthus has an inkling of the fact that profit, i.e. not profit but real surplus value, must be calculated not in relation to the capital advanced, but to the living labour advanced, whose value is objectively expressed in wages. But this leads him into pure trivialities, which become absurdities when he tries to use them as a basis for the determination of value or for statements concerning the relation of labour to value determination.”

Marx sees in Malthus’ work an illusion that every part of capital has contributed equally to newly created value. Marx argues the purpose Malthus has in mind is a faulty determination of value, a sort of Platonic (my word) ideal of a “true measure” of an amount of labor ignoring Marx’s concept of “necessary labor” and unpaid labor. Malthus would say an object could return to its owner by means of exchange by an exchange of any wage rate, equalized all along a chain. This raises (and begs, of legitimate usage for once I hope) the question of where profit comes from, which Malthus attributes to labor already performed. I am not sure I particularly understand Marx’s analysis of Malthus here and much greatly perform the summary he instead gives in Theories of Surplus Value, which we will get to later.

About 30 pages later, Marx states “now we are finally done with Malthus”, which is true for this notebook, but very much not so as Marx will go to this ground more fruitfully (in my opinion) again in a couple years with the Surplus Value notebooks. And in fact even in the short run, it was wrong, as Marx returns briefly to Malthus about five pages later to mention his “infamous” overpopulation theories finally!

The last sections of this MECW volume also contains an interesting passage again on reproduction:

“On the other hand, it is inherent in the condition for the appropriation of alien surplus labour that necessary population — i.e. the population representing necessary labour, labour necessary for production — is matched by a surplus population, which does not work. In the further development of capital, we find that alongside the industrial part of this surplus population — the industrial capitalists — a purely consuming part branches off.

“Idlers whose business it is to consume alien products, and [who,] since crude consumption has its limits, have to have a part of these products FORWARDED to them in refined form, as luxury products. When the economists speak of surplus population, they are not referring to this idle surplus population. On the contrary, it is precisely they, with their consumption business, who are regarded by the population fanatics as necessary population, and [if one takes their view] justly (consistently) so. The expression “surplus population” refers exclusively to labour capacities, i.e. to the necessary population; surplus labour capacities. This arises simply from the nature of capital. Labour capacity can only perform its necessary labour if its surplus labour has value for capital, if it can be valorised by capital.”

Finally, Marx returns to Smith, to both again praise him for his harsh criticism of slavery, as well as to critique Fourier’s childish views of work as pure amusement, to say his own view of work could be like that composing music: damned hard, demanding intensive effort, but truly free.

This section ends rather abruptly and the remainder of Grundrisse for the MECW is in volume 29, an additional 615 pages. I will do that next before deciding how to proceed chronologically with so many overlapping works of the 1860s.

My very initial, not finished (in reading or writing) thought on this Grundrisse read/re-read is that I don’t think it’s by any means essential for fans of Capital, and even less so every person who thinks of themselves as a socialist/communist, to read Grundrisse. That said, it is at least occasionally interesting even for the novice like me to delve into these materials to see the soup beginning to form, in a somewhat unique form from what we read in Capital and beyond.