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CULTURAL STUDIES 17(2) 2003, 113–149
Stuart Hall
MARX’S NOTES ON METHOD:
A ‘READING’ OF THE ‘1857
INTRODUCTION’
presented to and
discussed in a series of Centre seminars. It has been somewhat revised in the light of those
discussions, though I have not been able to take account of some further, more substantive
criticisms generously offered by John Mepham, among others. The
1857 Introduction
Prefatory note
is
Marx’s most substantial text on ‘method’, though even here many of his formulations
remain extremely condensed and provisional. Since the
1857 Introduction
presents such
enormous problems of interpretation, I have largely confined myself to a ‘reading’ of the
text. The positions taken by Marx in the
Introduction
run counter to many received ideas
as to his ‘method’. Properly grasped and imaginatively applied – as they were in the larger
corpus of the
Introduction
to which they constantly refer – they seem to me to offer quite
striking, original and seminal points of departure for the ‘problems of method’ which beset
our field of study, though I have not been able to establish this connection within the limits
of the paper. I see the paper, however, as contributing to this on-going work of theoretical
and methodological clarification, rather than as simply a piece of textual explication. I
hope this conjuncture will not be lost in the detail of the exposition.
Grundrisse
is one of the most pivotal of Marx’s texts (1). It is also one
of his most difficult, compressed and ‘illegible’. In his excellent Foreword to the
1857 Introduction
, Nicolaus warns that Marx’s Notebooks are hazardous to quote, ‘since
the context, the grammar and the very vocabulary raise doubts as to what Marx
“really” meant in a given passage’.
Vilar observes that the
is one of those texts ‘from which
everyone takes whatever suits him’ (2). With the growing interest in Marx’s
method and epistemology, the
1857 Introduction
occupies an increasingly central
position in the study of Marx’s work. I share this sense of its significance, while
differing often from how many of Marx’s explicators have read its meaning. My
aim, then, is to inaugurate a ‘reading’ of this
Introduction
1857
text. It is, of course,
not
a
, not a reading ‘without presuppositions’. It reflects my own
problematic, inevitably. I hope it also throws some undistorted light on Marx’s.
tabula rasa
Cultural Studies
ISSN 0950-2386 print/ISSN 1466-4348 online © 2003 Taylor & Francis Ltd
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
DOI: 10.1080/0950238032000114868
This is a shortened version of a paper on Marx’s
The
Grundrisse
reading
114
CULTURAL STUDIES
In a famous letter of January 14, 1858, Marx wrote to Engels:
has been of great service to me – Freiligarth found some volumes of
Hegel which originally belonged to Bakunin and sent them to me as a
present. If there should ever be used for such work again, I should greatly
like to make accessible to the ordinary human intelligence in two or three
printer’s sheets, what is rational in the method which Hegel discovered
but at the same time enveloped in mysticism.
It was not the only time Marx made expressed [sic] that hope. In 1843, Marx
made notes for a substantial critique of Hegel’s
Philosophy of Right
. The
Critique
of Hegel’s Philosophy As A Whole
, usually printed together with the other
1844
, also aimed at an exposition and critique of Hegel’s dialectic, now in
relation to the
, though, in the final event, largely
confined to the former. As late as 1876, he wrote to Dietzgen:
Phenomenology
and the
Logic
When I have shaken off the burden of my economic labours, I shall write
a dialectic. The correct laws of the dialectic are already included in Hegel,
albeit in a mystical form. It is necessary to strip it of this form. (3)
These hopes were not to be fulfilled, the burden of the economics never laid
aside. Thus, we do not have, from the mature Marx, either the systematic
delineation of the ‘rational kernel’, nor the method of its transformation, nor
an exposition of the results of that transformation: the Marxian dialectic. The
, and the compressed 1859
Preface
to the
Critique
in particular represents his fullest
methodological and theoretical summary text. Decisive, however, as this text
is, we must not handle it as if it were something other than it is. It was written
as an Introduction to the Notebooks, themselves enormously comprehensive in
scope, digressive and complex in structure; and quite unfinished – ‘rough
drafts’. Rosdolsky remarked that the
1857 Introduction
‘introduces us, so to speak, into
Marx’s economic laboratory and lays bare all the refinements, all the bypaths of
his methodology’. The
Grundrisse
was thus conceived as a résumé and guide, to
‘problems of method’ concretely and more expansively applied in the Note-
books themselves. It was not, therefore, intended to stand wholly in its own
right. Moreover, the tentative character of the text was signified by Marx’s
decision in the end
Introduction
not
to publish it. The
Introduction
was replaced by the terser
: and some of the central propositions of the
Introduction
are modified, or
at least suspended, in the later
Preface
. An immediate contrast of the
Introduction
Logic
I am getting some nice developments. For instance, I have thrown over
the whole doctrine of profit as it has existed up to now. In the method of
treatment the fact that, by mere accident, I have glanced through Hegel’s
Manuscripts
1857 Introduction
, together with
other scattered asides, have therefore to do duty for the unfulfilled parts of
Marx’s project. The
Preface
MARX’S NOTES ON METHOD
115
with the
Preface
(where a classical conciseness is everywhere in play, quite
different from the linguistic playfulness and conceit of the
Introduction
) reminds
us that, despite its dense argumentation, the
1857 Introduction
remains, even
with respect to Marx’s method, provisional.
In the
Introduction
, Marx proceeds via a critique of the ideological presup-
position of political economy. The first section deals with Production. The
object of the inquiry is ‘material production’. Smith and Ricardo begin with ‘the
individual and isolated hunter or fisherman’. Marx, however, begins with
‘socially determinate’ individuals, and hence ‘socially determined individual
production’. Eighteenth-century theorists, up to and including Rousseau, find a
general point of departure ‘the individual’ producer. Smith and Ricardo found
their theories upon this ideological projection. Yet ‘the individual’ cannot be the
point of departure, but only
the result
. Rousseau’s ‘natural man’ appears as a
stripping away of the contingent complexities of modern life, a rediscovery of
the natural, universal human-individual core beneath. Actually, the whole
development of ‘civil society’ is subsumed in this aesthetic conceit. It is not until
labour has been freed of the dependent forms of feudal society, and subject to
the revolutionary development it undergoes under early capitalism, that the
modern concept of ‘the individual’ could appear at all. A whole historical and
ideological development, then, is already presupposed in – but hidden within –
the notion of the Natural Individual and of universal ‘human nature’.
This is an absolutely characteristic movement of thought in the
Introduction
.
It takes up the ‘given’ points of departure in Political Economy. It shows by a
critique that these are not, in fact, starting points but points of arrival. In them,
a whole historical development is already ‘summed up’. In short: what appears
[sic] as the most concrete, common-sense, simple, constituent starting-points
for a theory of Political Economy, turn out, on inspection, to be the sum of
many, prior, determinations.
Production outside society is as absurd as language without individuals living
and talking together. It takes a gigantic social development to produce ‘the
isolated individual’ producer as a concept: only a highly elaborated form of
developed social connectedness can appear as – take the ‘phenomenal form’ –
men pursuing their egoistic interests as ‘indifferent’, isolated, individuals in a
‘free’ market organized by an ‘invisible hand’. In fact, of course, even this
individualism is an ‘all sided dependence’ which appears as mutual indifference:
‘The reciprocal and all-sided dependence of individuals who are indifferent to
one another forms their social connection. The social bond is expressed in
exchange value
’ (4).
This concept – that the capitalist mode of production depends on social
connection assuming the ‘ideological’ form of an individual dis-connection – is
one of the great, substantive themes of the
Grundrisse
as a whole. But its
working-out also has consequences for the problems of method. For the
displacement of real relations via their ideological representations requires – for
116
CULTURAL STUDIES
its critique, its unmasking – a method which reveals the ‘essential relations’
behind the necessary but mystifying inversions assumed by their ‘surface forms’.
This method – which, later, Marx identifies as the core of what is
scientific
in his
dialectic – forms the master methodological procedure, not only of the Note-
books, but of
Capital
itself. This ‘methodological’ procedure becomes, in its
turn, a theoretical discovery of the utmost importance: in its expanded form
(there are several provisional attempts to formulate it in the
Grundrisse
) it
constitutes the basis of the pivotal section in
Capital
I, on ‘The Fetishism of
Commodities’ (5).
The
Introduction
, then, opens with a methodological argument: the critique
of ‘normal’ types of logical abstraction. ‘Political Economy’ operates as a theory
through its categories. How are these categories formed? The normal method is
to isolate and analyse a category by abstracting those elements that remain
‘common’ to it through all epochs and all types of social formation. This attempt
to identify, by means of the logic of abstraction, which remains the core of a
concept stable through history is really a type of ‘essentialism’. Many types of
theorizing fall prey to it. Hegel, the summit of classical German philosophy,
developed a mode of thought that was the very opposite of static: his grasp of
movement and of contradiction is what raised his logic above all other types of
logical theorizing, in Marx’s eyes. Yet, because the movement of Hegel’s
dialectic was cast in an idealist form, his thought also retained the notion of an
‘essential core’ that survived all the motions of mind. It was the perpetuation of
this ‘essential core’ within the concept which, Marx believed, constituted the
secret guarantee within Hegel’s dialectic of the ultimate harmoniousness of
existing social relations (e.g. The Prussian State). Classical Political Economy
also speaks of ‘bourgeois’ production and of private property as if these were
the ‘essence’ of the concepts, ‘production’ and ‘property’ and exhaust their
historical content. In this way, Political Economy too presented the capitalist
mode of production, not as a historical structure, but as the natural and inevi-
table state of things. At
this
level, even classical Political Economy retained an
ideological presupposition at its ‘scientific’ heart: it reduces, by abstraction,
specific historical relations to their lowest common, trans-historical essence. Its
ideology is inscribed in its method.
On the contrary, Marx argues, there is no ‘production-in-general’: only
distinct forms of production, specific to time and conditions. One of those
distinct forms is – rather confusingly – ‘general production’: production based
on a type of labour, which is not specific to a particular branch of production,
but which has been ‘generalized’: ‘abstract labour’. (But we shall come to that
in a moment.) Since any mode of production depends upon ‘determinate con-
ditions’, there can be no guarantee that those conditions will always be fulfilled,
or remain constant or ‘the same’ through time. For example: except in the most
common-sense way, there is no scientific form in which the concept, ‘produc-
tion’, referring to the capitalist mode, and entailing as one of its required
MARX’S NOTES ON METHOD
117
conditions, ‘free labour’, can be said to have an ‘immediate identity’ (to be
‘essentially the same as’) production in, say, slave, clan or communal society.
(Later, in
Capital
, Marx reminds us that this transformation of feudal bondsmen
into ‘free labour’, which is assumed here as a ‘natural’ precondition for capi-
talism, has, indeed, a specific history: ‘the history of . . . expropriation . . .
written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire’ (6).) This is one of
the key points-of-departure of historical materialism as a method of thought and
practice. Nothing in what Marx subsequently wrote allows us to fall behind it.
It is what Korsch called Marx’s principle of ‘historical specification’ (7). The
‘unity’ which Marx’s method is intended to produce is not
weak
identity achieved
by abstracting away everything of any historical specificity until we are left with
an essential core, without differentiation or specification.
The
Introduction
thus opens, as Nicolaus remarks, as the provisional,
extended answer to an unwritten question: Political Economy is our starting
point, but, however valid are some of its theories, it has not formulated scien-
tifically the laws of the inner structure of the mode of production whose
categories it expresses and theoretically reflects. It ‘sticks’, despite everything,
inside its ‘bourgeois skin’ (
Capital
I, p.542). This is because, within it, historical
relations have ‘already acquired the stability of natural, self-understood forms
of social life’. (p.75). Its categories, then, (in contrast with vulgar Political
Economy) ‘are forms of thought expressing with social validity the conditions
and relations of a definite, historically determined mode of production’ (8). But
it presents these relations as ‘a self-evident necessity imposed by Nature as
productive labour itself’. Thus, though classical Political Economy
has
‘dis-
covered what lies beneath these forms’, it has not asked certain key questions
(such as the origin of commodity-production based in labour-power: ‘the form
under which value becomes exchange-value’) which are peculiar to specific
historical conditions (the forms and conditions of commodity-production).
These ‘errors’ are not incidental. They are already present in its presuppositions,
its method, its starting points. But, if Political Economy is itself to be tran-
scended,
how
?
Where to begin
?
The answer is, with ‘production by social individuals’, ‘production at a
definite stage of social development’. Political Economy tends to etherealize,
universalize and de-historicize the relations of bourgeois production. But what
follows if, as Marx does, we
insist
on starting with a principle of historical
specification? Do we then, nevertheless, assume that there is some common,
universal practice – ‘production-in-general’ – which has always existed, which
has then been subject to an evolutionary historical development which can be
steadily traced through: a practice which, therefore, we can reduce to its
common-sense content and employ as the obvious, uncontested starting-point
for analysis? The answer is, no. Whatever other kind of ‘historicist’ Marx may
have been, he was definitively
not
a historical evolutionist. Every child knows,
he once remarked, that production cannot cease for a moment. So, there must
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