Grundrisse 1. Introduction. The Individual

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As I argued in a previous post, the notion of the individual originates in the bourgeois enlightenment, so far as it existed in bourgeois society. As the mercantile class broke from the landowning class (most easily seen in the currents of the French Revolution), so did the individual emerge from the feudal conceptions of the world.

The concept of an individual amounts to a projection of a 17th/18th century idea onto the rest of society and history. It is an illusion. This illusion naturalizes present day society as something without history. It assumes that society is always like this, or, at least, “people” have always been like this.

So whenever you hear someone lament over “human nature”, or offer the banal response to a conception of the world that is even remotely progressive or revolutionary (or sane and rational) that “it sounds good on paper, but...human nature”, whenever you hear this phrase, take a step back.

Really, the speaker is assuming that everyone in the planet is the same as the people they grew up with. They assume everywhere on Earth has always been the same, has never changed, and will always remain the same.

The first step is separating what is biology and what is social conditioning. Yes, Plato, Aristotle, Locke, Descartes and countless others have had much to say about this. I'm not going to go deep into this as in this section, from Grundrisse, we’re only addressing the few points that Marx makes.

The more deeply we go back into history, the more does the individual, and hence also the producing individual, appear as dependent, as belonging to a greater whole: in a still quite natural way in the family and in the family expanded into the clan [Stamm]; then later in the various forms of communal society arising out of the antitheses and fusions of the clan.

The further back in history we look ,the more immediately dependent “human beings” are on one another. We remain dependent on one another today, but much of that dependence is outsourced and decentralized. Imagine a hunter gatherer tribe. They’re pretty fucking dependent on one another to keep their shit together and maintain the hunt. Consider what would happen if one of them tried “having a sick day”, when there were just three hunters.

...But the epoch which produces this standpoint, that of the isolated individual, is also precisely that of the hitherto most developed social (from this standpoint, general) relations. The human being is in the most literal sense a ζῶον πολιτιχόν, (a political animal) not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society.

The nature of a human being is a political animal. We are social. Our biology is the medium through which society imposes its rules and will. More over, we cannot even realize ourselves as an individual without being in a society. There is a dialect here. Society is composed of individuals, but the individuals are not individuals without a society. There is no ‘man’ or ‘human’ without the group. Why? Because a human cannot produce. And without production, there’s no existence.

Banal bourgeois economist: But what about people on an island without any civilization? Surely they are….[Robinson Crusoe blah blah]

Marx:

Production by an isolated individual outside society – a rare exception which may well occur when a civilized person in whom the social forces are already dynamically present is cast by accident into the wilderness – is as much of an absurdity as is the development of language without individuals living together and talking to each other. There is no point in dwelling on this any longer. The point could go entirely unmentioned if this twaddle, which had sense and reason for the eighteenth-century characters, had not been earnestly pulled back into the centre of the most modern economics by Bastiat, [4] Carey, [5] Proudhon etc. Of course it is a convenience for Proudhon et al. to be able to give a historico-philosophic account of the source of an economic relation, of whose historic origins he is ignorant, by inventing the myth that Adam or Prometheus stumbled on the idea ready-made, and then it was adopted, etc. Nothing is more dry and boring than the fantasies of a locus communis. [6]

Again, this notion of an individual able to produce outside society is absurd. It can’t happen. So what Marx establishes, as far as the concept of the individual is concerned, is that its both a projection and, by itself, an absurdity. Humans can’t functionally exist without a society, without social production, through which they realize themselves as humans. Labor, production, and its variants, including consumption, are the mechanisms through which a human being establishes itself as a human living in society.

But of course, capital, as the objectification of the exploitative labor process, of stolen surplus value, dominates that labor process. It guides the direction of society, of the social labor process, of the human metabolism. It exudes an illusion of “individuals” onto the matrix of labor. Like a draught, it convinces those engaging in social labor that, really, they’re just individuals. And perhaps it’s no coincidence that often this is done through consumption.

Though the person consuming the commodity surely did not produce it themself, it is, functionally, an individual act. The shirt is worn alone. The shoes, alone. The food is consumed alone. The attempts to express a personality are through an individual consuming a product. And capitalism has at its basis this idea of the individual being in control, of satisfying their needs, of creating themselves through expressions of commodity consumption. These illusions are just reiterations of Robinson Crusoe. The idea that a human being can realize itself through commodity consumption, when its labor is dominated for profit and the society it lives in commands it entirely, is as absurd as an Englishman winding up adrift on a island, complete with the knowledge of mathematics, imperialism and religion, is a tabula rasa.