Towards An Unknown Marx

A Commentary on the Manuscripts of 1861-63

Enrique Dussel

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9780415215459
• eBook ISBN: 9781134608546
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

This book is the first complete commentary on Marx's manuscripts of 1861-63, works that guide our understanding of fundamental concepts such as 'surplus-value' and 'production price'.

The recent publication of Marx's writings in their entirety has been a seminal event in Marxian scholarship. The hitherto unknown second draft of Volume 1 and first draft of Volume 3 of Capital, both published in the Manuscripts of 1861-63, now provide an important intermediate link between the Grundrisse and the final published editions of Capital. In this book, Enrique Dussel, one of the most original Marxist philosophers in the world today, provides an authoritative and detailed commentary on the manuscripts of 1861-63.

The main points which Dussel emphasises in this path-breaking work are:

• The fundamental category in Marx's theory is 'living labour' which exists outside of capital and which capital must subsume in order to produce surplus-value
• Theories of Surplus Value is not a historical survey of previous theories, but rather a 'critical confrontation' through which Marx developed new categories for his own theory
• The most important new categories developed in this manuscript are related to the 'forms of appearance' of surplus value.

The final part of the book discusses the relevance of the Manuscripts of 1861-63 to contemporary global capitalism, especially to the continuing underdevelopment and extreme poverty of Latin America.

Part I
The central Notebooks of ‘Chapter III’

The production process of capital

The first five Notebooks of the Manuscripts of 1861–63 were written between August 1861 and March 1862 as a perfectly constructed discourse, with logical continuity and achieving a certain definite form. And we say ‘certain’ because the text which corresponds to Capital (Parts II to IV of Book I) would later undergo changes. The subject matter which we shall discuss in Chapter 1 is more developed in some aspects than that of Capital; not so the subject matter which corresponds to Chapters 4 and 5. This manuscript represents some progress with respect to the Grundrisse,¹ but it does not deal with many of the subjects Marx had been discussing since November 1857.²

In this part, the ‘passage’ from money to capital is accomplished. From the abstract ‘being’ of ‘money’ (part or determination of the ‘whole’), now an ascent is made to the ‘essential concrete totality’: capital. It is a dialectical ‘ascent’, which, paradoxically, has not been sufficiently studied by the Marxist tradition. These Manuscripts of 1861–63 reinforce what we had already discovered in the Grundrisse. We consciously indicate some new aspects in the Marxist tradition: the category of ‘totality’ does not explain this passage. Only the implicit, but frequently used by Marx, category of ‘exteriority’ – as we have called it in other works – provides the hermeneutical code which allows a new perspective on the totality of Marx’s discourse. We shall discuss this category in Chapter 1, giving it a special importance in our interpretation.

At that time, the following was Marx’s working plan:

1. Transformation of money into capital.
2. Absolute surplus value.
3. Relative surplus value.
4. Here the question of accumulation should be included, but, a short time later, Marx speaks in the same terms of the ‘combination’ of ‘absolute’ and ‘relative’ surplus value (p. 311).
5. Theories of surplus value.

Up until January 1863 this original plan was respected, but modifications were gradually made.

1 Money becomes capital: from exteriority to totality

Notebooks I and II, pp. 1–88; started in August 1861 (MECW.30: 9–171)

In contrast to money (or value in general) as objectified labour, labour capacity (Arbeitvermögen) appears as a capacity of the living subject; the former is past labour, labour already performed, the latter is future labour, whose existence can only be the living activity, the currently present activity of the living subject itself [ ... ] The capitalist, who represents value as such, is confronted by the worker, as labour capacity pure and simple, as worker in general, so that the antithesis between self-valorizing value, self-valorizing objectified labour, and living value-creating (werthschaffenden) labour capacity forms the point and the actual content of the relation. They confront each other as capital and labour, as capitalist and worker.

(p. 41)

Karel Kosík writes that ‘the category of totality [ ... ] has been elaborated in classical German philosophy as a central concept [ ... ]. In the materialist philosophy, the category of concrete totality answers first and foremost to the question: what is reality

’ (Kosík 1976:17–18). Decades before, George Lukács had written that ‘the concrete totality is then the fundamental category of reality’ (Lukács 1968: 10). And speaking of the Marxist ontology, he writes that ‘since Marx is investigating the social being, the central ontological place of the category of totality is manifested to him, much more than in the case of the philosophical investigation of nature [ ... ] because in society, totality is always given in an immediate form’ (Lukács 1972: 34). The text which we shall analyse is the third one in a sequence of drafts: (1) from the Grundrisse;¹ (2) from a later part of the Grundrisse, the so-called Urtext;² and (3) in the beginning of Notebook I of the Manuscripts of 1861–63 being commented upon; and (4) Part 2 of Volume 1 of Capital. These four successive texts allow us to affirm that, if it is true that ‘totality’ is the fundamental category in the analysis of capital ‘already given’, then only from the category of ‘exteriority’ – from the reality of the ‘living labour’ beyond capital, against Kosík’s opinion – can one understand the possibility of the original development of capital and the critique of bourgeois political economy. Once capital exists, then the ‘totality’ functions as the ontological category par excellence.

In the dialectical process, the ‘appearing’, or the ‘construction’ of the ‘development’ of money into capital must be situated precisely in this ‘from where’ capital and the critique emerge. If ontology deals with the ‘totality’ (of being), metaphysics (or trans-ontology) describes the dialectical constitution of totality from the ‘exteriority’, from the real reality (as Marx liked to express it, non-tautologically).

1.1 New syllogism: M–C–M (MECW. 30: 9–33)

Then Marx posed first the transcendental ‘passage’ of money into capital. In the first place, as in the Grundrisse, commodities ‘become’ money. Now the radical transition is made. This is a real metaphysical jump. It seems that in June 1858 – in the ‘Index for the 7 Notebooks’ (MECW. 29: 421–3) – Marx already had clearly in mind the question of the ‘transition of money into capital’, in the same systematic place as the ‘passage’ of ‘being into essence’ in Hegel’s Logic. Hence, in the ‘draft of the 1859 project’ written in February or March 1859 (or afterwards, in 1861, according to some authors), there appear references to passages in the Grundrisse on this subject (MECW. 29: 518–32).

In Marx’s discourse, this ‘passage’ has three prior moments – which are reflected in the Urtext, in this Notebook I, and which are equally present in the Grundrisse and in Capital. Let us see in this section the first two moments: ‘M–C–M. The general formula of capital’ and ‘Difficulties derived from the nature of value’.

To summarize, the discourse follows this path: we start from simple circulation (C–M–C), selling in order to buy, in which money is only a means of exchange or circulation (the level of ‘appearances’ or ‘phenomena’). But ‘behind’ the superficial appearance of circulation, a new formula develops; M–C–M, a new, profound ‘movement’, where the presence of the permanence of a bifacetic subject is discovered: objectively, the same value is permanent and grows only in its quantity; subjectively, the capitalist, as a person, is permanently the subject of appropriation of the increasing value.

The starting point is a person, who is the owner of the money (references to Figure 1.1 are between brackets):

It is the money owner [ ... ] who makes his money, or the value he possesses in the form of money, pass through the process M–C–M [M1–C1– C2–M2]. This movement is the content of his activity and he therefore appears only as the personification (Personnification) of capital defined in this way, as the capitalist. His person (Person) (or rather his pocket) is the starting point of M, and it is the point of return. He is the conscious vehicle of this process. Just as the result of the process is the preservation and increase of value, the self-valorization of value, what forms the content of the movement appears in him as a conscious purpose. [ ... ] A capitalist [is] the conscious subject (bewusstes Subjets) of the movement M–C–M.

(p. 19)

Explanation: Capitalist (S1) buys (b) with money (M1) a commodity (C1) from the proprietor (S2); they sell (s) it; with C1 he produces C2, which he sells (s) to the consumer (S3) who consumes it (x), obtaining a greater amount of money (M2). The value (V1) has increased. r : reproduction.

Figure 1.1 ‘Entrance’ and ‘exit’ of money and commodities. ‘Permanence’ of the subject person (capitalist) (S1) and the subject value (V).

Marx wishes to indicate the difference with the syllogism C–M–C. In this case, many subjects enter into circulation as sellers and come out as consumers. Nothing in reality remains nor grows: only money is always in circulation, as means and not as an end, and the circulation is the place where exchange is made. While the M–C–M formula is different:

value becomes independent in money (if we employ the word value without defining it more closely, it must always be understood as exchange value),³ hence value emerging from circulation [V2], enters again into circulation [M2], maintains itself in it [C3], and returns from it multiplied (returns as a greater magnitude of value) [V3].

(p. 11)

The money which entered into circulation (M1) is less than the money coming out from it (M2), namely, the value (V1) which circulates under the form of money is being increased (V2) in the hands of the capitalist himself (S1).

The value exists first as money [V1 = M1], then as commodity [C1], then again as money [M2 ] [ ... ] The alteration of these forms therefore appears as its own process, or, in other words, value as it presents itself here is value-in-process, the subject of a process. Money and the commodity each appear only as particular forms of existence of the value [ ... ] Money and commodity thus appear as the forms of existence of value-inprocess or capital.

(pp. 12–13)

At this point, the deep ‘difficulty’ (which in Capital appears under the title of ‘contradiction’) arises: where does this surplus value that emerges at the end of each process come from? How is value, under the form of money (M1) greater at the end (M2 as form of V2)? Marx argues in different ways and shows that, in fact, ‘commodities are bought and sold at their value’ (p. 26). ‘The entire capitalist class’ (p. 25) cannot produce surplus value through the sale of commodities, because this class itself behaves as the main buyer. There would be no surplus value, but only the same value distributed among its members in several ways. Profit in the form of interest or commercial profit ‘presupposes’ ‘the existence of the surplus value as such’ (p. 32). Neither money nor commerce ‘creates’ value.

Thus, capital, different from money, presupposes circulation and always passes through circulation as money: but new value can emerge from circulation alone.

1.2 Face-to-face encounter of the owner of money and the owner of labour. Creative exteriority (MECW. 30: 33–50 and other texts)⁴

One cannot ‘pass’ immediately from labour into capital; the mediation of a third moment would be required; that is, value. When objectified labour posits value and the value is capital, such a ‘passage’ can be performed. Convertibility, commensurability or exchangeability between money and capital and between both with labour shall be performed then through the mediation of value. Nonetheless, if this passage is possible, because money and capital are value, it is an absolutely peculiar intervention of the ‘living labour’ (a new concept, not used up to this moment), which creates capital as capital.

1. Exteriority of the ‘creative source of value’ from the ‘non-capital’
   
   In the analysis of the exchange between money and labour (exchange between the S1, the capitalist, and S2, the labourer, of Figure 1.1), Marx begins from the ‘non-capital (Nicht-Kapital), non-raw materials, non-labour instrument, non-product, means of non-life, non-money’ (text quoted below). All these negativities already announce that the realm, which is located beyond the being of capital is, however, the same ‘creative’ reality of value – which must not be confused with the mere ‘positing’ of value; namely, capital as capital. If Parmenides said: ‘Being is, non-being is not’, Marx – and here liberation philosophy agrees – by contrast announces: ‘The Being of the capital is value, non-being (non-value) is real’. As affirmation of the exteriority (affirmation of the reality of the non-being) metaphysics transcends ontology (the mere affirmation of being).
   Certainly considering the text of the Grundrisse, but modifying it (and in the modifications are important corrections of concepts), Marx writes:
   The separation of property from l...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Figures
• Editor’s Introduction
• Author’s Introduction
• Part I: The Central Notebooks of ‘Chapter III’: The Production Process of Capital
• Part II: Critical Confrontation of the System of Categories As a Whole: The So-Called ‘Theories of Surplus Value’
• Part III: New Discoveries
• Part IV: The New Transition
• Appendix 1: Correlation of Pages of the Different Texts (Originals and Editions)
• Appendix 2: Exteriority In Marx’s Thought
• Notes
• Bibliography