Marx's "Grundrisse" [Paperback]

David McClellan's translation of selections from Marx's Grundrisse was first published in 1971 At that time, the Grundrisse was little known in the U.S., and a complete English translation by Martin Nicolaus did not appear until 1973.

Written during the period from 1857 to 1858, the Grundrisse, or First Principles, was not published during Marx's lifetime. McClellan concludes, moreover, that its existence was not known to Marx's life-long collaborator, Friedrich Engels. In McClellans's judgment, however, the Grundrisse is the centerpiece of Marx's oeuvere, surpassing Capital in its scope and coverage.

The Grundrisse undercuts tedious efforts to neatly divide Marx's work into periods, including those separated by an epistemological break that Louis Althusser and others have discerned between the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 and the German Ideology, published two years later. Instead of moving rather abruptly from Marx the humanistic philosopher to Marx the materialist social scientist, the selections from the Grundrisse offered by McClellan make it clear that Marx's earlier and later work are complementary and mutually consistent. Yes, Marx's understanding of political economy was productively developed over the course of his adult life, but that development was marked by continuity rather than abrupt departures and dislocations.

Marx's understanding of alienation, first developed in the Paris Manuscripts, has been frequently cited as an unfortunate youthful concern, betraying his early humanism and having drastically diminished importance in his later work, especially Capital. In the Grundreisse, however, alienation is a conspicuous concept, one which Marx invokes again and again in explaining the circumstances and activity of labor. The completed first volume of Capital, when compared with the Grundrisse, seems best described as the work of Marx when he focused narrowly on peculiarly economic issues. The Grundrisse, however, is much broader in scope, part of a planned multi-volume, all-encompassing social scientific master work that Marx did not live to complete.

I read McClellan's book as a prelude to the daunting task of reading the Grundrisse in its entirety. McClellan provides his own introductory material and occasional footnotes, but nothing that serves the purpose of an instructive commentary. There is, moreover, no explanation of how McClellan selected the passages included in his one hundred fifty page book. The reader, in short, is left pretty much on his own, and the material that McClellan provides is often quite difficult, even for readers who are familiar with much that Marx wrote.

The primary virtue of McClellan's book is that it provides an overview of the Grundrisse that does not include discussion of historically specific details that will almost certainly be unfamiliar to the reader. Nevertheless, this is not a book for someone completely unfamiliar with Marx and his customary mode of exposition. Given the opportunity, I thing Marx would have rewritten some of the material, recognizing that his efforts to be precise sometimes led him into bewildering wordiness and hopelessly convoluted passages.

Nevertheless, it is abundantly evident that the Grundrisse is in many ways a continuation of the work Marx began with the Paris Manuscripts. I found McCleallan's selections especially valuable for their further development of the notion that the more productive the worker the more he strengthens the position of capital, and for illuminating the nature of a demand crisis, something that is currently crippling the U.S. economy.