Alienated Labour and Capital

Abstract

The additional value is thus again established as capital, as objectified labour entering into the exchange process with living labour, and thence dividing itself into a constant part — the objective conditions of labour, the existence of living labour power, the necessaries, food for the worker. In this second appearance of capital in this form, some points are cleared up which in its first appearance — as money, which is changing from the form of value into that of capital — were completely obscure. They are now solved through the process of valorisation and production. At their first occurrence, the prerequisites themselves seemed to be exterior and derived from circulation; thus they did not arise from its internal nature, nor were they explained by it. These external prerequisites will now appear as elements in the movement of capital itself, so that capital itself has presupposed them as its own elements, irrespective of how they arose historically.

From Grundrisse, pp. 5–31

This is one of the first parts of the Grundrisse to be written, dated August 1857. Marx did not publish it in his Critique of Political Economy since ‘any anticipation of results that are still to be proven seemed to me objectionable’. Marx begins with a critique of the eighteenth-century view of ‘natural’ man and the eternal laws supposed to govern economics by such writers as Mill. In the second section Marx considers the way in which production, distribution, exchange and consumption are intimately linked. The third section is particularly interesting for its discussion of method in political economy and the plan of the whole Economics. It ends with an unfinished digression on the appreciation of Greek art as an apparent difficulty for the materialist conception of history.