The Introduction is an unfinished, rough draft, produced by Marx, and forms part of The Grundrisse. It was intended as an Introduction for the entire work planned by Marx on The Critique of Political Economy, of which this work, Capital and Theories of Surplus Value form only a small part.
I Production, Consumption, Distribution, Exchange (Circulation)
1 Production
“(a) To begin with, the question under discussion is material production.” (p 188)
By material production is meant, here, not just manufactured products, but also services. It is a distinction as against, for example, “spiritual production”. Marx elaborates on this distinction in Theories of Surplus Value, Chapter 4, in discussing productive labour. Marx also makes clear that the production being considered is that of individuals living in society, as distinguished from the individualist, bourgeois notions about production by isolated individuals, separated from society, as represented by the frequent use of Robinson Crusoe – though it should be noted that, in Capital, Chapter 1, Marx himself uses Robinson, to illustrate The Law of Value, and the creation of individual value.
Man, as a social animal, and production by humans, from the time they separated from the animal kingdom, has been social production – indeed, even a lot of production by animals is social production, as they hunt in packs, bees and ants engage in collective production etc. Whether it is the primitive commune, slave production, feudal society, or capitalist production, all production occurs in this social context. In the primitive commune, there is communal property, and production; in slave society, the slaves are put to work collectively by the slave owner; under feudalism, the production is determined by the paternalistic relations of the society, and labour on the land of the Lords is undertaken collectively, whilst even the production of the peasant household is collective.
Under bourgeois commodity production, this idea of the isolated individual producer arises, because the paternalistic relations of feudalism are destroyed, and the individual commodity producer emerges as the centre of production. However, precisely as a commodity producer, their production cannot be separated from the market, which itself owes its existence to society, and social interaction. Under capitalist production, this individual production disappears, and the wage labourer appears as an element of the collective labourer.
“The individual in this society of free competition seems to be rid of natural ties, etc., which made him an appurtenance of a particular, limited aggregation of human beings in previous historical epochs. The prophets of the eighteenth century, on whose shoulders Adam Smith and Ricardo were still wholly standing, envisaged this 18th-century individual – a product of the dissolution of feudal society on the one hand and of the new productive forces evolved since the sixteenth century on the other – as an ideal whose existence belonged to the past. They saw this individual not as an historical result, but as the starting point of history; not as something evolving in the course of history, but posited by nature, because for them this individual was in conformity with nature, in keeping with their idea of human nature.” (p 188)
The idea is contained in Rousseau's Social Contract, in which he starts with the idea of totally free individuals, in a state of nature, who abandon their freedom in order to join together in society, bounded by laws. But, this is the opposite of actual historical development.
“The further back we trace the course of history, the more does the individual, and accordingly also the producing individual, appear to be dependent and to belong to a larger whole.” (p 189)
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