Grundrisse 4: Marx's Method of Political Economy

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I’ll skip the section on exchange and production, as has been stated, the section is sufficiently self-explanatory.

I’ll be focusing on what I think is the most interesting part of the Grundrisse’s Introduction. Part 3, entitled, “The Method of Political Economy”.

Marx lays out, in his own words, a summary of his method. This is particularly helpful to be read prior to Das Kapital. Whereas in that book, as with Grundrisse, a reader can assess Marx’ method by seeing it played out in action, it’s not often that Marx himself states his method explicitly. This is one of the few moments that we see that.

Per usual, Marx begins by contrasting his method with bourgeois economists and Hegelian idealism.

When analyzing something, say a country, political-economy, you can start with many different elements. geography, different branches of production, consumption methods, commodity prices.

seems to be correct to begin with the real and the concrete, with the real precondition, thus to begin, in economics, with e.g. the population, which is the foundation and the subject of the entire social act of production. However, on closer examination this proves false.

You want to start with the real and concrete. By real and concrete, we’re talking about actual living real elements of the country.

Bourgeois economists start analyzing a country by beginning with population (as a point of departure). Population is the foundation of the entire social act of production.

This method is false became it remains faulty from the beginning. [Population] is an abstraction. It appears to be a concrete category. I mean, there ARE people living as a population. But Marx insists on understanding that population. Who are the people, how are they related through relations of production/distribution/exchange/consumption? What is the history of that population? What are its laws? etc

Marx labels these abstract concepts, like the unrefined “population”, as Vorstellung. Or, chaotic conceptions of the whole.

Starting with a general “population” as a concept fails to take into account its many facets that also exist in the real.

E.g. Populations exist as many classes of social relations. Populations exist in wage labour, have divisions of labor in the production process, correlate to one another through relations of exchange, etc.

Scientific analysis, or dialectical materialist analysis, or Marxism, or communist thought, or whatever you want to call it, moves different from bourgeois analysis. I’ll just call this method Marxism, but again , there’s lots of different ways to label it, all with historical and theoretical baggage. It should be understood that communist theory is far from homogenous, and has a rich tradition and history of internal conflict.

The method: move from the simple concept, break it down into further determinations and more simple concepts, from the imagined concrete (population) towards thinner abstractions (true relations, facets, structures) until you arrive at the simplest determinations. Then, RETRACE. Move back from the simplest determinations and relations to population again.

This [population] is no longer a chaotic conception, but now is a TOTALITY of many determinations and relations.

Bourgeois economists of the 17th century (and still today) often only go half-way. They might start at population and then move down to a single determination.

They start with population, or state, or nation, then conclude by “discovering” a number of determinant general relations.

“Ah hah! I’ve discovered [money] or [value] or [division of labor]”. But they stop there. They build their systems off those elements without retracing for a totality. It’s like looking at a 4-dimensional shape, but only drawing one aspect of it. This kind of thinking makes the mistake of assuming that the singular appearance IS the whole totality.

This remains unscientific.

“The full conception was evaporated to yield an abstract determination.”

As far as Hegelian thinking, or what can be called Idealism, it too is flawed.

“The concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse”.

What M is talking about is the process of analysis, population to its primary relations back to population. That concept, population, is now a concrete concept. It’s made of many determinations.

The concrete, in its totality, APPEARS (note, appearance is not reality) as a process of thinking. The totality is understood through the mind, which constructs it as a process of thinking. The mind analyzes, breaks down, reconstructs determinations and concepts into a concrete totality. So that totality, of the REAL, becomes grasped through a mental conception of it.

So what’s the Idealist flaw? It’s regarding the contradiction here. Even though the concrete is the point of departure for thinking, that is, we look at the concept [population], it’s not until we break it down through analysis that we arrive at a totality, from which we have a result, “population in totality”. So a thing is both a point of departure and a result. Population is a point of departure (population-as-Vorstellung) as well as a structure within a totality (population-in-totality).

“The abstract determinations lead towards a reproduction of the concrete by way of thought.”

Going back to Hegel, although its true that thinking is the method by which we arrive at the concrete totality, Hegel made the mistake in concluding that THOUGHT actually imposed itself on the world. Hegel concluded that thought, thinking, the construction of a mental totality, was the totality as such. That is, Hegel believed that the “thinking reproduction of the concrete” was literal.

This is why Marxists consider it a form of idealism. Note, this is not in the modern sense of “idealist”, meaning somebody who is out of touch with reality.

Marx,

“In this way Hegel fell into the illusion of conceiving the real as the product of thought concentration itself, probing its own depths, and unfolding itself out of itself, by itself, whereas the method of rising from the abstract to the concrete is only the way in which thought appropriates the concrete, reproduces it as the concrete in the mind.”

Marx emphasizes that it’s still a mind that is thinking (materialist) about something in the real world (materialist). And that the subject, e.g. population, remains existing with or without the thinking mind doing political-economic analysis.

“This is by no means the process by which the concrete itself comes into being.”

Hegel’s mistake is believing that the conceptual world of the mind IS the real world.

Note, that Marx is not dismissing thinking as a real act. He’s saying that its one part. This is the dialectal part of dialectical materialism. Thinking, conscious analysis, imposing itself back on the concrete totality, still applies. Ideology still applies. Mind still applies. The critique of capital as a system of exploitation still requires a thinking head to 1) discover it and 2) act on it.

Anyway, bear this in mind while reading Das Kapital or Grundrisse. Marx is being explicit in the method here, but it’s far more beautiful to see it in action.