Originally posted at http://www.palaverer.com/
This refers to pp. 100-111.
I finished Marx's Introduction to the Grundrisse this morning, reading the third section, a methodological critique of political economy, and the fourth, some fairly sketchy notes on the relationship of production to other aspects of society, but which strikes me as a crucial rejoinder to those who would make the reductionist "base/superstructure" characterization of Marx's view of society. One of the joys of reading Marx, and particularly his manuscripts, is that it shows us a much more subtle intellect than the popular stereotype of Marx, and to some extent Engels' understanding of his project, would lead us to believe.
To some extent, this reading continues one of Marx's basic, and classic critiques of political economy:
Not only the category, labour, but labour in reality has here become the means of creating wealth in general, and has ceased to be organically linked with particular individuals in any specific form. Such a state of affairs is at its most developed in the most modern form of existence of bourgeois society – in the United States. Here, then, for the first time, the point of departure of modern economics, namely the abstraction of the category ‘labour’, ‘labour as such’, labour pure and simple, becomes true in practice...
This example of labour shows strikingly how even the most abstract categories, despite their validity – precisely because of their abstractness – for all epochs, are nevertheless, in the specific character of this abstraction, themselves likewise a product of historic relations, and possess their full validity only for and within these relations.
Smith, Marx says, was right to develop labor in general as a category, but Marx takes it further and points out that abstractions do not have existence outside of time but are rather themselves historically conditioned. Marx's materialism, then, is not at all about dismissing ideas as unimportant, as as far as I can tell a huge majority of critics accuse him of. Rather, he argues that ideas have no independent existence outside of history, i.e., material development. Ideas and the study of ideas were always central to Marx's project. Indeed:
Capital is the all-dominating economic power of bourgeois society. It must form the starting-point as well as the finishing-point, and must be dealt with before landed property. After both have been examined in particular, their interrelation must be examined.
It would therefore be unfeasible and wrong to let the economic categories follow one another in the same sequence as that in which they were historically decisive. Their sequence is determined, rather, by their relation to one another in modern bourgeois society, which is precisely the opposite of that which seems to be their natural order or which corresponds to historical development.
Again, Marx the dialectician is on brilliant display, above all because he doesn't crow about his technique. That said, while on the one hand grounding his analysis historically--it is bourgeois society itself, a historical epoch, that is his object of inquiry--he call for an order to the inquiry based not upon history but upon the relationship between categories within bourgeois society. Why? Because that will help people actually understand the object of inquiry.
He ends the Introduction with one of his brilliant discussions of art, broadly speaking. Marx is one of the more acute observers of art, and under-recognized as such though I know he had a project on Shakespeare going in his head near the end of his life. I would say the same thing about Malcolm X, too--a brilliant observer of art, most particularly jazz music and dance. In any event, Marx:
From another side: is Achilles possible with powder and lead? Or the Iliad with the printing press, not to mention the printing machine? Do not the song and the saga and the muse necessarily come to an end with the printer’s bar, hence do not the necessary conditions of epic poetry vanish?
But the difficulty lies not in understanding that the Greek arts and epic are bound up with certain forms of social development. The difficulty is that they still afford us artistic pleasure and that in a certain respect they count as a norm and as an unattainable model.
A man cannot become a child again, or he becomes childish. But does he not find joy in the child’s naïvité, and must he himself not strive to reproduce its truth at a higher stage? Does not the true character of each epoch come alive in the nature of its children? Why should not the historic childhood of humanity, its most beautiful unfolding, as a stage never to return, exercise an eternal charm?
Anyone who wants to say that Marx has a mechanistic economic base/cultural superstructure model of society needs to read this, in which he says
precisely the opposite. Greek models remained artistic norms in industrial England.