The Grundrisse is the vast rough draft of 1857–58 out of which the whole of the mature critique of political economy grew — the workshop notebooks in which Marx first worked out, at speed and for himself, the categories that Capital would later present in finished form. Because it is a draft, it says many things more explicitly, more speculatively, and more philosophically than the published work: the Hegelian scaffolding is visible, the historical and anthropological horizon is wider, and several of Marx's most far-reaching passages — the fragment on machines, the pre-capitalist formations, the reflections on disposable time and the individual — exist only here. The 1857 Introduction is the methodological gateway to all of it. Written first but never published by Marx (he judged it premature to "anticipate results still to be proved"), it lays out how the critique will proceed: what "production in general" can and cannot mean, how production, distribution, exchange, and consumption form a single articulated totality rather than a linear sequence, and — in its most influential section — the method of rising from the abstract to the concrete, the logic by which thought reconstructs a concrete whole out of simple determinations. This brief reconstructs the Introduction's argument and carries its load-bearing formulations, which are the charter for reading everything that follows in the notebooks and in Capital.

Marx opens by demolishing the "Robinsonades" of classical economy — the fiction of the isolated individual producing alone, from which Smith and Ricardo begin. There is no production outside society; the individual producer is always already a social being, and the eighteenth-century image of the self-sufficient individual is itself a historical product, the ideological reflex of the very society that dissolves all older communal bonds. Production in general is a useful abstraction, but only if one remembers that it never exists as such — real production is always production at a determinate stage of society.

The heart of the section is the relation among the four moments. Against the textbook order (production → distribution → exchange → consumption, each a separate sphere), Marx argues that the four are internally related: production is immediately consumption (of raw materials, of labour-power) and consumption is immediately production (of the human being, of new needs); distribution is not a neutral sharing-out that follows production but is itself determined by the production relations (the distribution of the agents of production into classes precedes and structures the distribution of products); exchange mediates between them. But the four are not simply identical. They form an articulated whole in which one moment governs.

The identity claims come first, stated with full dialectical explicitness before Marx qualifies them.

Production, then, is also immediately consumption, consumption is also immediately production. Each is immediately its opposite. But at the same time a mediating movement takes place between the two. Production mediates consumption; it creates the latter’s material; without it, consumption would lack an object. But consumption also mediates production, in that it alone creates for the products the subject for whom they are products.

Marx, Grundrisse, Introduction, page 91.

On distribution the notebook is just as categorical: the forms of distribution are not an autonomous sphere but the obverse of the relations of production themselves.

The structure [Gliederung] of distribution is completely determined by the structure of production. Distribution is itself a product of production, not only in its object, in that only the results of production can be distributed, but also in its form, in that the specific kind of participation in production determines the specific forms of distribution, i.e the pattern of participation in distribution.

Marx, Grundrisse, Introduction, page 95.

And behind the distribution of products stands a prior distribution that belongs to production itself.

In the shallowest conception, distribution appears as the distribution of products, and hence as further removed from and quasi-independent of production. But before distribution can be the distribution of products, it is: (1) the distribution of the instruments of production, and (2), which is a further specification of the same relation, the distribution of the members of the society among the different kinds of production. (Subsumption of the individuals under specific relations of production.)

Marx, Grundrisse, Introduction, page 96.

The summary judgement on the four moments then follows.

The conclusion we reach is not that production, distribution, exchange and consumption are identical, but that they all form the members of a totality, distinctions within a unity. Production predominates not only over itself, in the antithetical definition of production, but over the other moments as well. The process always returns to production to begin anew.

Marx, Grundrisse, Introduction, page 99.

This is the thesis that governs the architecture of Capital: distribution and exchange are not autonomous spheres with laws of their own but moments of a totality whose dominant term is production, and specifically the production relation between capital and labour. The vulgar economics that Volume III's trinity formula would later dissect is precisely the standpoint that takes distribution (the three revenues) as primary and independent — the error the Introduction forecloses in advance by establishing the predominance of production.

The second section is the most cited passage of the Introduction and the key to Marx's method. He asks how political economy should proceed. It seems natural to begin from the real, concrete starting point — the population, the nation. But "population" is an empty abstraction if one does not know the classes it is composed of, and the classes are empty without the elements they rest on (wage-labour, capital, exchange, value...). So the correct scientific path runs the other way: analysis first decomposes the concrete whole into ever simpler determinations, and then thought reconstructs the concrete by ascending from those simple abstractions back to the rich totality — but now grasped as a structured unity rather than a chaotic given.

Marx lays out the two paths in full.

Thus, if I were to begin with the population, this would be a chaotic conception [Vorstellung] of the whole, and I would then, by means of further determination, move analytically towards ever more simple concepts [Begriff], from the imagined concrete towards ever thinner abstractions until I had arrived at the simplest determinations. From there the journey would have to be retraced until I had finally arrived at the population again, but this time not as the chaotic conception of a whole, but as a rich totality of many determinations and relations. The former is the path historically followed by economics at the time of its origins. The economists of the seventeenth century, e.g., always begin with the living whole, with population, nation, state, several states, etc.; but they always conclude by discovering through analysis a small number of determinant, abstract, general relations such as division of labour, money, value, etc. As soon as these individual moments had been more or less firmly established and abstracted, there began the economic systems, which ascended from the simple relations, such as labour, division of labour, need, exchange value, to the level of the state, exchange between nations and the world market. The latter is obviously the scientifically correct method.

Marx, Grundrisse, Introduction, pages 100–101.

The concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse. It appears in the process of thinking, therefore, as a process of concentration, as a result, not as a point of departure, even though it is the point of departure in reality and hence also the point of departure for observation [Anschauung] and conception.

Marx, Grundrisse, Introduction, page 101.

This is why Capital begins with the commodity — the simplest, most abstract determination — and ascends through money, capital, surplus-value, profit, interest, and rent to the concrete surface of capitalist society. The order of the exposition is the ascent from the abstract to the concrete. Marx is careful, against Hegel, to insist that this is a method of thought reproducing the real, not the real generating itself out of thought: the movement of categories in the mind is not the movement that produces the world.

rising from the abstract to the concrete is only the way in which thought appropriates the concrete, reproduces it as the concrete in the mind. But this is by no means the process by which the concrete itself comes into being.

Marx, Grundrisse, Introduction, pages 101–102.

The materialist correction of Hegel here is the methodological signature of the whole critique: the categories are ideal reproductions of real relations, and their order in the exposition must be justified by the real structure of the object, not by a self-moving logic of concepts.

The final movement of the Introduction concerns the historical status of the categories — and it is where Marx is subtlest. The order in which categories appear in thought is not the order in which they appeared in history. A simple-looking category may be the latest to become socially dominant. His decisive example is labour itself: "labour" as such, labour in general, indifferent to its particular form, seems the simplest and most ancient of categories, yet it becomes practically true — a real abstraction, actually lived — only in the most modern society, where workers move freely between kinds of work and no particular labour defines the worker.

this abstraction of labour as such is not merely the mental product of a concrete totality of labours. Indifference towards specific labours corresponds to a form of society in which individuals can with ease transfer from one labour to another, and where the specific kind is a matter of chance for them, hence of indifference. Not only the category, labour, but labour in reality has here become the means of creating wealth in general, and has ceased to be organically linked with particular individuals in any specific form.

Marx, Grundrisse, Introduction, pages 104–105.

He immediately draws the general methodological lesson.

This example of labour shows strikingly how even the most abstract categories, despite their validity – precisely because of their abstractness – for all epochs, are nevertheless, in the specific character of this abstraction, themselves likewise a product of historic relations, and possess their full validity only for and within these relations.

Marx, Grundrisse, Introduction, page 105.

This is the germ of Volume I's abstract labour: the most abstract category is the product of the most developed concrete society, so the order of categories in the exposition must be governed by their place in modern bourgeois society, not by their historical sequence. From this Marx draws his famous methodological image for reading earlier societies through the present.

The premise of the image comes first: the most developed organization of production supplies the categories for deciphering all the earlier ones.

Bourgeois society is the most developed and the most complex historic organization of production. The categories which express its relations, the comprehension of its structure, thereby also allows insights into the structure and the relations of production of all the vanished social formations out of whose ruins and elements it built itself up,

Marx, Grundrisse, Introduction, page 105.

Human anatomy contains a key to the anatomy of the ape. The intimations of higher development among the subordinate animal species, however, can be understood only after the higher development is already known. The bourgeois economy thus supplies the key to the ancient, etc.

Marx, Grundrisse, Introduction, page 105.

The reason is structural: in every social formation one determinate kind of production dominates and colours all the rest — under the bourgeois form, capital.

In all forms of society there is one specific kind of production which predominates over the rest, whose relations thus assign rank and influence to the others. It is a general illumination which bathes all the other colours and modifies their particularity. It is a particular ether which determines the specific gravity of every being which has materialized within it.

Marx, Grundrisse, Introduction, pages 106–107.

From this follows the rule that governs the order of the whole critique.

It would therefore be unfeasible and wrong to let the economic categories follow one another in the same sequence as that in which they were historically decisive. Their sequence is determined, rather, by their relation to one another in modern bourgeois society, which is precisely the opposite of that which seems to be their natural order or which corresponds to historical development.

Marx, Grundrisse, Introduction, page 107.

With that principle — the sequence of the categories answers to their articulation in modern bourgeois society, not to the order of their historical appearance — the Introduction closes its methodological charter, and the notebooks turn to money.

The Chapter on Money opens the analysis proper, and it does so polemically, through a critique of the Proudhonist Alfred Darimon's scheme for a reformed money that would abolish the crises of capitalism by abolishing gold. Marx uses the occasion to establish a thesis that governs the whole critique: money is not an arbitrary device that could be reformed or legislated away while leaving commodity production intact; it is the necessary product of a society in which labour is private and social only through exchange. The contradictions that money seems to cause are really the contradictions of the commodity form itself, merely brought to visible existence in money. From this negative starting point Marx develops the positive analysis: how the contradiction latent in the commodity — that each product is a particular use-value yet must count as general, exchangeable value — drives toward money as the independent, autonomous existence of exchange-value; and how money, precisely because it is the general form of social wealth held by private individuals, becomes an impersonal social power, the "real community" of a society that has dissolved all personal bonds. Much of what Capital Chapters 1–3 present in compressed form is worked out here at greater length and with a more explicit philosophical horizon — above all the account of money as the alienated social bond, in which the social power of individuals confronts them as the property of a thing. This brief carries those load-bearing formulations, which are among the passages the value-form tradition most often reads against Capital.

Darimon, following Proudhon, proposed that the crises of capitalism arise from the special privilege of gold and silver, and that a bank issuing "time-chits" — certificates representing hours of labour, exchangeable directly against products — would let commodities circulate at their labour-values without the tyranny of precious money, abolishing crisis at a stroke. Marx's refutation is patient and devastating, and its logic is the same one he would use against every reformist monetary scheme thereafter. The scheme wants to keep commodity production — private production for exchange — while removing money, its necessary form. But money is not the cause of the contradictions of exchange; it is their solution and their expression. A commodity's price and its realization in sale can diverge; a producer's private labour may or may not prove socially necessary; these possibilities are inherent in a system where labour is validated as social only after the fact, through exchange. Time-chits would not abolish that gap — they would merely rename it, since a chit certifying an hour of individual labour cannot guarantee that the hour was socially necessary. The bank would have to become the general buyer and seller, the planner of all production, which is to abolish commodity production altogether — the opposite of what Proudhon intends. Marx's conclusion is that one cannot reform the money form while preserving the commodity form; to attack money without attacking the private, exchange-mediated character of labour is to attack a symptom and leave the disease. The critique establishes the internal necessity of money and clears the ground for its derivation.

Marx states the fundamental question at the outset, and it is the question every circulation-reform scheme since has had to face.

Can the existing relations of production and the relations of distribution which correspond to them be revolutionized by a change in the instrument of circulation, in the organization of circulation? Further question: Can such a transformation of circulation be undertaken without touching the existing relations of production and the social relations which rest on them? If every such transformation of circulation presupposes changes in other conditions of production and social upheavals, there would naturally follow from this the collapse of the doctrine which proposes tricks of circulation as a way of, on the one hand, avoiding the violent character of these social changes, and, on the other, of making these changes appear to be not a presupposition but a gradual result of the transformations in circulation.

Marx, Grundrisse, The Chapter on Money, page 122.

The technical refutation of the time-chit follows: the certificate of labour time could never coincide with the labour time the market actually validates.

The time-chit, representing average labour time, would never correspond to or be convertible into actual labour time; i.e. the amount of labour time objectified in a commodity would never command a quantity of labour time equal to itself, and vice versa, but would command, rather, either more or less, just as at present every oscillation of market values expresses itself in a rise or fall of the gold or silver prices of commodities.

Marx, Grundrisse, The Chapter on Money, page 139.

And the reductio is drawn out step by step until the reformist programme confesses what it would actually require.

In this last formulation the problem would have reduced itself to: how to overcome the rise and fall of prices. The way to do this: abolish prices. And how? By doing away with exchange value. But this problem arises: exchange corresponds to the bourgeois organization of society. Hence one last problem: to revolutionize bourgeois society economically. It would then have been self-evident from the outset that the evil of bourgeois society is not to be remedied by ‘transforming’ the banks or by founding a rational ‘money system’.

Marx, Grundrisse, The Chapter on Money, page 134.

From the critique Marx moves to the positive derivation, which anticipates the value-form analysis of Capital. The commodity is a contradiction in motion: it is a particular, sensuous use-value, and at the same time it must count as exchange-value — as a definite quantity of general, abstract social labour, indifferent to its natural form. These two aspects cannot coexist in the same body without splitting apart. The commodity's exchange-value must acquire an existence distinct from its use-value, a separate form in which it can confront all other commodities as their common measure and universal equivalent. That separate, autonomous existence of exchange-value is money. Money is thus not a thing added to commodities from outside but the necessary form that the value-side of the commodity takes on when it becomes independent — the commodity's own exchange-value set free and given a body of its own.

Marx traces money's determinations in an order Capital would later formalize: money as measure of value (the ideal reckoning of prices), money as means of circulation (the vanishing mediator of C–M–C), and money as money — the autonomous form of wealth that is hoarded, that serves as means of payment, and that becomes the goal of accumulation. The crucial dialectical point is that in the third determination money ceases to be a mere servant of commodity circulation and becomes an end in itself: value that seeks to preserve and augment itself as value, the seed of the transition to capital. The Chapter on Money thus does not end in money but points beyond itself to the Chapter on Capital, exactly as the value-form analysis in Capital Part One drives forward into the general formula M–C–M′. Here, in the rough draft, the Hegelian logic of the contradiction unfolding through its forms is on open display, and reading it clarifies the compressed derivation of the published text.

The chapter's most far-reaching pages — richer here than anywhere in Capital — concern money as a social relation. In a society where production is private and the connection between producers is established only through exchange, the social character of each person's labour and the social bond itself take on the form of a thing, money, that individuals carry and command as private owners. Social power is privatized into a thing, and the thing then rules its owners. Marx states the alienation with unusual directness.

Each individual possesses social power in the form of a thing. Rob the thing of this social power and you must give it to persons to exercise over persons.

Marx, Grundrisse, The Chapter on Money, page 158.

The formulation compresses the analysis of the pages just before it, where exchange value itself is named as the social bond between persons who are indifferent to one another — and where the individual’s social power is located, with deliberate bathos, in his pocket.

The reciprocal and all-sided dependence of individuals who are indifferent to one another forms their social connection. This social bond is expressed in exchange value, by means of which alone each individual’s own activity or his product becomes an activity and a product for him; he must produce a general product – exchange value, or, the latter isolated for itself and individualized, money. On the other side, the power which each individual exercises over the activity of others or over social wealth exists in him as the owner of exchange values, of money. The individual carries his social power, as well as his bond with society, in his pocket.

Marx, Grundrisse, The Chapter on Money, pages 156–157.

Marx situates this within a great three-stage sketch of history that recurs throughout the notebooks: first, relations of personal dependence (the pre-capitalist communities, where the social bond is direct, personal, and limited); second, "personal independence founded on objective [sachlich] dependence" — the present, in which individuals are formally free and independent but bound together by their common dependence on the market, on money, on impersonal objective relations; and third, a possible future of free individuality founded on the universal development of individuals and their common, communal control of their social wealth. The second stage is capitalism, and its signature is that the social relations that individuals themselves produce escape them and return as an alien objective power.

The sketch itself deserves quotation in full.

Relations of personal dependence (entirely spontaneous at the outset) are the first social forms, in which human productive capacity develops only to a slight extent and at isolated points. Personal independence founded on objective [sachlicher] dependence is the second great form, in which a system of general social metabolism, of universal relations, of all-round needs and universal capacities is formed for the first time. Free individuality, based on the universal development of individuals and on their subordination of their communal, social productivity as their social wealth, is the third stage. The second stage creates the conditions for the third.

Marx, Grundrisse, The Chapter on Money, page 158.

The second form is ours, and Marx names its signature: rule by abstractions.

these objective dependency relations also appear, in antithesis to those of personal dependence … in such a way that individuals are now ruled by abstractions, whereas earlier they depended on one another. The abstraction, or idea, however, is nothing more than the theoretical expression of those material relations which are their lord and master.

Marx, Grundrisse, The Chapter on Money, page 164. The ellipsis drops the parenthetical restating that objective relations are social relations become independent.

This is the philosophical heart of the money chapter and one of the passages most read against Capital's fetishism section: money is the "real community" [Gemeinwesen] of bourgeois society, the impersonal bond that replaces the personal ties of earlier forms, and "rule by abstractions" is not a metaphor but the precise description of a society governed by value, money, and capital — abstractions that are the congealed expression of the producers' own material relations, turned against them. Marx is careful that these abstractions are not illusions to be dispelled by criticism: they are the real form of a real domination, and can be superseded only by superseding the mode of production that generates them. The passage thus binds the money analysis to the whole critique and to the emancipatory horizon — the third stage — that the notebooks keep in view.

Against every romantic reading of that diagnosis, Marx closes the door in both directions: neither back to the old fullness nor a halt in the present emptiness.

In earlier stages of development the single individual seems to be developed more fully, because he has not yet worked out his relationships in their fullness, or erected them as independent social powers and relations opposite himself. It is as ridiculous to yearn for a return to that original fullness as it is to believe that with this complete emptiness history has come to a standstill. The bourgeois viewpoint has never advanced beyond this antithesis between itself and this romantic viewpoint, and therefore the latter will accompany it as legitimate antithesis up to its blessed end.)

Marx, Grundrisse, The Chapter on Money, page 162.

And the chapter’s later pages, looking back from the threshold of capital, give the "real community" thesis its sharpest statements: money does not merely dissolve the older communities — it takes their place.

Monetary greed, or mania for wealth, necessarily brings with it the decline and fall of the ancient communities [Gemeinwesen]. Hence it is the antithesis to them. It is itself the community [Gemeinwesen], and can tolerate none other standing above it.

Marx, Grundrisse, The Chapter on Money, page 223.

Money thereby directly and simultaneously becomes the real community [Gemeinwesen], since it is the general substance of survival for all, and at the same time the social product of all. But as we have seen, in money the community [Gemeinwesen] is at the same time a mere abstraction, a mere external, accidental thing for the individual, and at the same time merely a means for his satisfaction as an isolated individual. The community of antiquity presupposes a quite different relation to, and on the part of, the individual. The development of money in its third role therefore smashes this community.

Marx, Grundrisse, The Chapter on Money, pages 225–226.

The Chapter on Capital is the vast body of the Grundrisse, and its opening movement — the transition from money to capital and the analysis of the production process — is where Marx first works out, in his own most philosophical vocabulary, the concepts that Volume I would later present. This brief covers that opening movement: how money becomes capital only by confronting living labour and buying it as a commodity; what the exchange between capital and labour really is; and the concept of capital that emerges — capital as value that valorizes itself by absorbing living labour, a self-moving subject that presupposes and reproduces the very labour it exploits. Here Marx states more explicitly than anywhere in Capital the deep structure of the relation: that living labour, considered against capital, is the pure subjective activity that is the source of all value yet is separated from every objective condition of its own realization — "absolute poverty" as pure possibility — while capital is objectified, dead labour that has monopolized those conditions. And here too Marx develops, with a dialectical evenhandedness that has drawn readers from every direction, the "great civilizing influence of capital": its historically progressive, boundary-destroying, need-creating, universalizing tendency, which develops the productive forces and the human being to a degree no earlier form approached, even as it does so in the alienated form of capital's self-expansion. The brief carries these load-bearing formulations, several of which are among the most quoted lines in all of Marx.

Money becomes capital only when it enters a specific exchange — the exchange with living labour. Marx analyses this exchange as a double transaction that looks like a simple sale but conceals a unique asymmetry. In the first act, the worker sells his labour-capacity for a wage (money), an ordinary exchange of equivalents. In the second act, which is not an exchange at all but a consumption, the capitalist sets that labour-capacity to work — and living labour, in being used, produces more value than it cost. The worker exchanges his labour-capacity for its value (the means of subsistence); the capitalist receives, in return, the living activity that creates value without limit. What is exchanged on the worker's side is a definite, objectified value; what the capitalist obtains is value-creating activity itself. The two acts together are the secret that Capital would formalize as the distinction between the value of labour-power and the value it creates.

The notebooks state the split directly.

If we consider the exchange between capital and labour, then we find that it splits into two processes which are not only formally but also qualitatively different, and even contradictory: (1) The worker sells his commodity, labour, which has a use value, and, as commodity, also a price, like all other commodities, for a specific sum of exchange values, specific sum of money, which capital concedes to him. (2) The capitalist obtains labour itself, labour as value-positing activity, as productive labour; i.e. he obtains the productive force which maintains and multiplies capital, and which thereby becomes the productive force, the reproductive force of capital, a force belonging to capital itself.

Marx, Grundrisse, The Chapter on Capital, page 274.

And Marx is emphatic that the second act is not an exchange at all.

The difference between the second act and the first – note that the particular process of the appropriation of labour by capital is the second act – is exactly the difference between the exchange of capital and labour, and exchange between commodities as it is mediated by money. In the exchange between capital and labour, the first act is an exchange, falls entirely within ordinary circulation; the second is a process qualitatively different from exchange, and only by misuse could it have been called any sort of exchange at all. It stands directly opposite exchange; essentially different category.

Marx, Grundrisse, The Chapter on Capital, page 275.

Marx dwells on what living labour is, considered from the standpoint of capital, and here the Grundrisse reaches a philosophical extremity the published work only implies. Labour separated from all its objective conditions — from raw material, instrument, and product, which now confront it as capital's property — is reduced to pure subjectivity, sheer capacity, absolute deprivation.

Labour separated from all means and objects of labour, from its entire objectivity. This living labour, existing as an abstraction from these moments of its actual reality (also, not-value); this complete denudation, purely subjective existence of labour, stripped of all objectivity. Labour as absolute poverty: poverty not as shortage, but as total exclusion of objective wealth.

Marx, Grundrisse, The Chapter on Capital, page 295.

But the same stripped-bare labour is, from the other side, the living source of all wealth — poverty as pure possibility, the general potentiality of wealth that has not yet been objectified. This double character — labour as at once absolute poverty and universal possibility — is the pivot on which the concept of capital turns.

Marx himself insists that the two statements are not an inconsistency but the essence of the relation.

Thus, it is not at all contradictory, or, rather, the in-every-way mutually contradictory statements that labour is absolute poverty as object, on one side, and is, on the other side, the general possibility of wealth as subject and as activity, are reciprocally determined and follow from the essence of labour, such as it is presupposed by capital as its contradiction and as its contradictory being, and such as it, in turn, presupposes capital.

Marx, Grundrisse, The Chapter on Capital, page 296.

From this Marx builds the concept of capital. Capital is not a thing (money, machines, stock) but a relation and a process: value that preserves and augments itself by continually absorbing living labour, dead labour that vampirically feeds on the living. The famous formulation of living labour as the source of value states the positive pole of the relation Marx has just described from its negative side.

Labour not as an object, but as activity; not as itself value, but as the living source of value. [Namely, it is] general wealth (in contrast to capital in which it exists objectively, as reality) as the general possibility of the same, which proves itself as such in action.

Marx, Grundrisse, The Chapter on Capital, page 296.

Later in the chapter, in the analysis of the simple production process, living labour receives its most famous image.

Labour is the living, form-giving fire; it is the transitoriness of things, their temporality, as their formation by living time. In the simple production process – leaving aside the realization process – the transitoriness of the forms of things is used to posit their usefulness.

Marx, Grundrisse, The Chapter on Capital, page 361.

Capital, then, is the unity of objectified labour (value) and living labour — but a unity in which objectified labour dominates and living labour is reduced to a mere moment of capital's self-valorization. Marx traces how capital, once constituted, posits all its own presuppositions: it produces not only commodities and surplus-value but the continued separation of the worker from the means of production, so that the relation reproduces itself on an ever-expanding scale. This is the Grundrisse's version of the reproduction of the capital-relation that Volume I Part Seven would formalize, and it is stated here with the full Hegelian apparatus of a subject that posits its own conditions. Capital appears as the "moving contradiction" — value whose only content is more value, an insatiable drive to appropriate surplus labour that recognizes no natural or social limit as anything but a barrier to be overcome.

The two sides of that drive each receive a full statement. First, the historic achievement: capital is the first form of production to create surplus labour as a general condition — and, in doing so, the material elements of the rich individuality beyond it.

The great historic quality of capital is to create this surplus labour, superfluous labour from the standpoint of mere use value, mere subsistence; and its historic destiny [Bestimmung] is fulfilled as soon as, on one side, there has been such a development of needs that surplus labour above and beyond necessity has itself become a general need arising out of individual needs themselves – and, on the other side, when the severe discipline of capital, acting on succeeding generations [Geschlechter], has developed general industriousness as the general property of the new species [Geschlecht] – and, finally, when the development of the productive powers of labour, which capital incessantly whips onward with its unlimited mania for wealth, and of the sole conditions in which this mania can be realized, have flourished to the stage where the possession and preservation of general wealth require a lesser labour time of society as a whole, and where the labouring society relates scientifically to the process of its progressive reproduction, its reproduction in a constantly greater abundance; hence where labour in which a human being does what a thing could do has ceased.

Marx, Grundrisse, The Chapter on Capital, page 325.

Second, the limitlessness itself, rooted in capital’s form as the general form of wealth.

However, as representative of the general form of wealth – money – capital is the endless and limitless drive to go beyond its limiting barrier. Every boundary [Grenze] is and has to be a barrier [Schranke] for it. Else it would cease to be capital – money as self-reproductive. If ever it perceived a certain boundary not as a barrier, but became comfortable within it as a boundary, it would itself have declined from exchange value to use value, from the general form of wealth to a specific, substantial mode of the same. Capital as such creates a specific surplus value because it cannot create an infinite one all at once; but it is the constant movement to create more of the same. The quantitative boundary of the surplus value appears to it as a mere natural barrier, as a necessity which it constantly tries to violate and beyond which it constantly seeks to go.

Marx, Grundrisse, The Chapter on Capital, pages 334–335.

The most striking pages of the production-process material give capital its due as a historically revolutionary force. Because capital's drive to surplus-value knows no limit, it batters down every barrier to the development of production, consumption, and human needs; it universalizes exchange, tears producers out of their local and traditional confinement, and drives the productive forces and the human being itself to a development no earlier form could reach. Marx's evenhandedness here is deliberate: capital is at once the most exploitative and the most dynamic of all social forms, and the same movement that alienates also universalizes.

The world market is not an external result of this drive but is contained in the concept of capital itself.

The tendency to create the world market is directly given in the concept of capital itself. Every limit appears as a barrier to be overcome. Initially, to subjugate every moment of production itself to exchange and to suspend the production of direct use values not entering into exchange, i.e. precisely to posit production based on capital in place of earlier modes of production, which appear primitive [naturwüchsig] from its standpoint.

Marx, Grundrisse, The Chapter on Capital, page 408.

From this follows the verdict on capital as civilizing force.

Thus, just as production founded on capital creates universal industriousness on one side … so does it create on the other side a system of general exploitation of the natural and human qualities, a system of general utility … Hence the great civilizing influence of capital; its production of a stage of society in comparison to which all earlier ones appear as mere local developments of humanity and as nature-idolatry. For the first time, nature becomes purely an object for humankind, purely a matter of utility.

Marx, Grundrisse, The Chapter on Capital, page 409. Ellipses drop the parallel clauses on universal appropriation.

Yet the civilizing tendency is inseparable from its limit. Capital develops the productive forces universally, but only within the narrow purpose of its own valorization; it creates the material conditions and the universally developed individuals of a possible free society, but in an alienated, class-divided form that fetters what it creates. This is the Grundrisse's formulation of the contradiction that Volume III would state as "the true barrier to capitalist production is capital itself." Capital produces, in spite of itself, the material and human basis of its own supersession — the universal development of the productive forces, of needs, of social connection, and of individuals — and it is this doubled character, revolutionary and fettering at once, that makes Marx refuse both the reactionary condemnation of capital and its liberal celebration. The production-process material thus closes on the horizon that the machine fragment and the disposable-time passages, treated in the next brief, will make explicit: the possibility, latent within capital's own development, of a form of wealth measured not by labour-time but by the free development of human beings.

Marx states that self-limiting universality outright, in the sentence on which the machine fragment will build.

But from the fact that capital posits every such limit as a barrier and hence gets ideally beyond it, it does not by any means follow that it has really overcome it, and, since every such barrier contradicts its character, its production moves in contradictions which are constantly overcome but just as constantly posited. Furthermore. The universality towards which it irresistibly strives encounters barriers in its own nature, which will, at a certain stage of its development, allow it to be recognized as being itself the greatest barrier to this tendency, and hence will drive towards its own suspension.

Marx, Grundrisse, The Chapter on Capital, page 410.

"Forms which precede capitalist production" — the Formen — is the most famous self-contained section of the Grundrisse, published separately for decades and the founding text of the modern debate on pre-capitalist societies, the "Asiatic mode of production," and the historical origins of capital. It is a charter capture-target. Its problem arises directly from the analysis of capital: capital presupposes the free labourer, the worker separated from all objective conditions of production and owning nothing but his labour-power. But this separation is not natural or eternal; it is the outcome of a long history. To understand capital, then, one must understand what it dissolved — the earlier forms in which the labourer was not separated from the means of production, in which the producer stood in an original, un-torn unity with the earth and its instruments through membership in a community. Marx surveys these forms — the communal (Asiatic), the ancient (classical city-state), and the Germanic — not as a linear ladder but as distinct configurations of the same underlying relation between the individual, the community, and the land. His decisive theoretical reversal, stated here more sharply than anywhere else, is that it is not the original unity of humans with their natural conditions that requires historical explanation, but the separation — the divorce that capital both presupposes and endlessly reproduces. The brief carries this reversal and the forms it organizes, the material that underlies both Volume I's account of primitive accumulation and the twentieth-century anthropology of modes of production.

The starting point is the relation of the labouring individual to the earth. In all pre-capitalist forms, the producer relates to the land not as an alien object to be bought but as his own — as the natural workshop, larder, and instrument that belongs to him by belonging to his community. The earth is, in Marx's image, the individual's own extended body, the objective condition of his activity that is given to him in advance rather than produced.

The earth is the great workshop, the arsenal which furnishes both means and material of labour, as well as the seat, the base of the community. They relate naïvely to it as the property of the community, of the community producing and reproducing itself in living labour. Each individual conducts himself only as a link, as a member of this community as proprietor or possessor.

Marx, Grundrisse, Forms Which Precede Capitalist Production, page 472.

The decisive consequence is that property, originally, does not mean the private ownership of a thing but membership — belonging to a community that is itself the real proprietor of the land, so that the individual has access to the objective conditions of his labour only through his standing as a member. Property is a relation to the community before it is a relation to a thing. The isolated proprietor of bourgeois society, owning the earth as an alienable commodity against all others, is the historical dissolution-product of these communal forms, not their original truth. This inverts the whole liberal account of property, which takes the isolated owner as natural and the community as a later, artificial construction.

Marx’s formula for the whole inversion is that the naked worker is not a natural datum but history’s late product.

The aim of this work is not the creation of value – although they may do surplus labour in order to obtain alien, i.e. surplus products in exchange – rather, its aim is sustenance of the individual proprietor and of his family, as well as of the total community. The positing of the individual as a worker, in this nakedness, is itself a product of history.

Marx, Grundrisse, Forms Which Precede Capitalist Production, pages 471–472.

Marx distinguishes several great forms of this communal relation, treating them as distinct structures rather than as rungs of a single evolutionary ladder. In the Asiatic or Oriental form, the real proprietor of the land is the overarching community, embodied in the despot or the god; the many small village communities are self-sufficient units of agriculture and handicraft, and the "higher unity" above them appropriates a portion of their surplus labour as tribute, while property in the Western sense scarcely exists — the individual is never a private owner, only a hereditary possessor through the commune. In the ancient (Greco-Roman) form, the community takes the shape of the city-state, and the individual is a proprietor only as a citizen, a member of the polis; private property in land and communal (state) property coexist, and the citizen's landholding is the material basis of his political membership and his standing as a warrior. In the Germanic form, the community does not exist as a standing entity over the households at all; it exists only in the periodic coming-together of otherwise independent household-proprietors, so that here individual property is primary and the community is the intermittent association of proprietors rather than their encompassing substance.

Each form is fixed in its own formulation. The Asiatic form first, where the higher unity sits above the real communities as sole proprietor.

it is not in the least a contradiction to it that, as in most of the Asiatic landforms, the comprehensive unity standing above all these little communities appears as the higher proprietor or as the sole proprietor; the real communities hence only as hereditary possessors. Because the unity is the real proprietor and the real presupposition of communal property, it follows that this unity can appear as a particular entity above the many real particular communities, where the individual is then in fact propertyless, or, property – i.e. the relation of the individual to the natural conditions of labour and of reproduction as belonging to him, as the objective, nature-given inorganic body of his subjectivity – appears mediated for him through a cession by the total unity – a unity realized in the form of the despot, the father of the many communities – to the individual, through the mediation of the particular commune.

Marx, Grundrisse, Forms Which Precede Capitalist Production, pages 472–473.

The ancient form doubles the relation: the individual is a private proprietor, but only as a member of the commune.

Membership in the commune remains the presupposition for the appropriation of land and soil, but, as a member of the commune, the individual is a private proprietor. He relates to his private property as land and soil, but at the same time as to his being as commune member; and his own sustenance as such is likewise the sustenance of the commune, and conversely etc.

Marx, Grundrisse, Forms Which Precede Capitalist Production, page 475.

Marx compresses the historical geography of the forms into a single sentence on city and land.

The history of classical antiquity is the history of cities, but of cities founded on landed property and on agriculture; Asiatic history is a kind of indifferent unity of town and countryside (the really large cities must be regarded here merely as royal camps, as works of artifice [Superfötation] erected over the economic construction proper); the Middle Ages (Germanic period) begins with the land as the seat of history, whose further development then moves forward in the contradiction between town and countryside; the modern [age] is the urbanization of the countryside, not ruralization of the city as in antiquity.

Marx, Grundrisse, Forms Which Precede Capitalist Production, page 479.

And the Germanic form stands at the opposite pole from the Asiatic: the commune has no standing existence at all above its independent proprietors.

Among the Germanic tribes, where the individual family chiefs settled in the forests, long distances apart, the commune exists, already from outward observation, only in the periodic gathering-together [Vereinigung] of the commune members, although their unity-in-itself is posited in their ancestry, language, common past and history, etc. The commune thus appears as a coming-together [Vereinigung], not as a being-together [Verein]; as a unification made up of independent subjects, landed proprietors, and not as a unity. The commune therefore does not in fact exist as a state or political body, as in classical antiquity, because it does not exist as a city.

Marx, Grundrisse, Forms Which Precede Capitalist Production, page 483.

Across all three, the common structure is that the individual has access to the objective conditions of labour — above all the land — as a member of a community, and thus is not separated from the means of production. The aim of production in these forms is the reproduction of the individual and the community in their given mode of life, not the creation of value or wealth as such; production is bounded by need and custom, and the human being appears, however narrowly, as the purpose of production. This is what capital dissolves.

It is here that the Formen delivers its most quoted verdict on the ancients and the moderns.

Thus the old view, in which the human being appears as the aim of production, regardless of his limited national, religious, political character, seems to be very lofty when contrasted to the modern world, where production appears as the aim of mankind and wealth as the aim of production. In fact, however, when the limited bourgeois form is stripped away, what is wealth other than the universality of individual needs, capacities, pleasures, productive forces etc., created through universal exchange? The full development of human mastery over the forces of nature, those of so-called nature as well as of humanity’s own nature? The absolute working-out of his creative potentialities, with no presupposition other than the previous historic development, which makes this totality of development, i.e. the development of all human powers as such the end in itself, not as measured on a predetermined yardstick? Where he does not reproduce himself in one specificity, but produces his totality? Strives not to remain something he has become, but is in the absolute movement of becoming?

Marx, Grundrisse, Forms Which Precede Capitalist Production, pages 487–488.

The whole survey is oriented toward a single conclusion, and it is Marx's most important methodological reversal in the Formen. The unity of the labourer with the objective conditions of his labour — with the earth as his "inorganic body" — is the natural, given starting point. What is historically peculiar, what demands explanation, is not this unity but its rupture.

It is not the unity of living and active humanity with the natural, inorganic conditions of their metabolic exchange with nature, and hence their appropriation of nature, which requires explanation or is the result of a historic process, but rather the separation between these inorganic conditions of human existence and this active existence, a separation which is completely posited only in the relation of wage labour and capital.

Marx, Grundrisse, Forms Which Precede Capitalist Production, page 489.

The opening lines of the section had already fixed that separation as capital’s own presupposition.

Another presupposition is the separation of free labour from the objective conditions of its realization – from the means of labour and the material for labour. Thus, above all, release of the worker from the soil as his natural workshop – hence dissolution of small, free landed property as well as of communal landownership resting on the oriental commune. In both forms, the worker relates to the objective conditions of his labour as to his property; this is the natural unity of labour with its material [sachlich] presuppositions.

Marx, Grundrisse, Forms Which Precede Capitalist Production, page 471.

This inverts the entire bourgeois problematic. Classical political economy takes the propertyless wage-labourer as a natural fact and asks how wealth accumulates; Marx asks how the labourer came to be propertyless in the first place — how the original unity with the land was torn apart — and answers that this separation is a violent historical process, the dissolution of the communal forms, whose end-product is the free labourer confronting capital. The pre-capitalist forms all "dissolve" toward this result under the corrosive action of money, exchange, and the development of individual against communal property, though Marx insists the dissolution of one form does not automatically produce capital: the freed labourer might become a peasant, a slave, a pauper. Capital arises only where the separated labourer meets, on the other side, the objective conditions of labour concentrated as capital — the meeting Volume I would call the presupposition of the capital-relation and would excavate historically as primitive accumulation. The Formen thus supplies the theoretical armature of that later account, and its reversal — that separation, not unity, is what history produces — remains the deepest statement of Marx's view of the origin of capital, and the seed of the long debate over the diversity of paths out of pre-capitalist society.

Against the myth of a provident, stockpiling capital, the notebooks state the conclusion in full: original formation is dissolution, not creation.

The original formation of capital does not happen, as is sometimes imagined, with capital heaping up necessaries of life and instruments of labour and raw materials, in short, the objective conditions of labour which have already been unbound from the soil and animated by human labour. Capital does not create the objective conditions of labour. Rather, its original formation is that, through the historic process of the dissolution of the old mode of production, value existing as money-wealth is enabled, on one side, to buy the objective conditions of labour; on the other side, to exchange money for the living labour of the workers who have been set free. All these moments are present; their divorce is itself a historic process, a process of dissolution, and it is the latter which enables money to transform itself into capital.

Marx, Grundrisse, Forms Which Precede Capitalist Production, pages 506–507.

Primitive accumulation, when Volume I comes to it, will be the historical excavation of exactly this divorce.

The last stretch of the Chapter on Capital carries the analysis through circulation and turnover into the theory of fixed capital — and it is in the pages on fixed capital and machinery, in Notebook VII, that Marx wrote the single most influential passage of the entire Grundrisse: the "Fragment on Machines." This brief gathers that culminating material. The circulation and turnover analysis here is the rough-draft ancestor of Volume II. But the fragment on machines reaches beyond anything in the published Capital. Contemplating the fully developed automatic factory, where the worker no longer wields the tool but stands beside a self-moving system of machinery as its watchman and regulator, Marx projects the tendency to its limit and draws a startling conclusion: that capital, by developing the social productive forces and the "general intellect" to this degree, undermines its own foundation, the measure of wealth by labour-time. Once the automatic system of machines embodies accumulated social knowledge and does the producing, direct labour shrinks to a vanishing quantity, and the real source of wealth becomes the general productive powers of the social individual — the collective knowledge, science, and cooperation objectified in the machinery — while the real measure of wealth becomes not labour-time but disposable time, free time for human development. Capital thus becomes "the moving contradiction," straining to reduce labour-time to a minimum while clinging to labour-time as the sole measure and source of value. These pages are the fountainhead of autonomist Marxism, of post-work and "cognitive capitalism" theory, and of every argument that automation points beyond the value form; they are also a charter capture-target. The brief carries them whole.

Before the fragment, Marx develops the material that Volume II would formalize. Capital is value in constant motion through its forms, and its circulation — the time it spends in the market, changing from commodity into money and back — is a limit on its valorization, "circulation time = time of devaluation," time in which capital produces no value. He works out the distinction between fixed capital (the means of labour that stays in production and yields its value gradually, over many turnovers) and circulating capital (whose value returns whole each cycle), and the turnover time compounded of production time and circulation time — the whole apparatus of the later volume, here in first draft. The crucial move is that Marx treats fixed capital not as a merely technical category but as the form in which capital's tendency to develop the productive forces becomes objectified: fixed capital is where accumulated social labour, science, and skill are deposited in the instruments of production. The analysis of fixed capital therefore opens directly onto the analysis of machinery, because the machine is fixed capital in its "most adequate" form — the form in which the means of labour has been wholly transformed by capital and confronts living labour as an alien, dominating power.

The fragment opens with that transformation stated in full.

But, once adopted into the production process of capital, the means of labour passes through different metamorphoses, whose culmination is the machine, or rather, an automatic system of machinery (system of machinery: the automatic one is merely its most complete, most adequate form, and alone transforms machinery into a system), set in motion by an automaton, a moving power that moves itself; this automaton consisting of numerous mechanical and intellectual organs, so that the workers themselves are cast merely as its conscious linkages.

Marx, Grundrisse, The Chapter on Capital (Fragment on Machines), page 692.

In the fully developed machine system, the relation of worker to instrument is inverted. The worker no longer uses the tool; the automatic system of machinery uses the worker, who is reduced to a conscious linkage — a watchman and regulator — beside a process that runs by its own power. This is the passage Volume I's factory chapter would echo, but here Marx presses it further.

The worker’s activity, reduced to a mere abstraction of activity, is determined and regulated on all sides by the movement of the machinery, and not the opposite. The science which compels the inanimate limbs of the machinery, by their construction, to act purposefully, as an automaton, does not exist in the worker’s consciousness, but rather acts upon him through the machine as an alien power, as the power of the machine itself.

Marx, Grundrisse, The Chapter on Capital (Fragment on Machines), page 693.

The inversion culminates in the loss of the process’s unity to the machine.

The production process has ceased to be a labour process in the sense of a process dominated by labour as its governing unity. Labour appears, rather, merely as a conscious organ, scattered among the individual living workers at numerous points of the mechanical system; subsumed under the total process of the machinery itself, as itself only a link of the system, whose unity exists not in the living workers, but rather in the living (active) machinery.

Marx, Grundrisse, The Chapter on Capital (Fragment on Machines), page 693.

What the machine system embodies, the notebooks say outright, is society’s accumulated knowledge, absorbed into capital and confronting labour as capital’s attribute.

The development of the means of labour into machinery is not an accidental moment of capital, but is rather the historical reshaping of the traditional, inherited means of labour into a form adequate to capital. The accumulation of knowledge and of skill, of the general productive forces of the social brain, is thus absorbed into capital, as opposed to labour, and hence appears as an attribute of capital, and more specifically of fixed capital, in so far as it enters into the production process as a means of production proper. Machinery appears, then, as the most adequate form of fixed capital, and fixed capital, in so far as capital’s relations with itself are concerned, appears as the most adequate form of capital as such.

Marx, Grundrisse, The Chapter on Capital (Fragment on Machines), page 694.

For the worker, that objectified knowledge is an alien power.

In machinery, knowledge appears as alien, external to him; and living labour [as] subsumed under self-activating objectified labour. The worker appears as superfluous to the extent that his action is not determined by [capital’s] requirements.

Marx, Grundrisse, The Chapter on Capital (Fragment on Machines), page 695.

Because the machine embodies the accumulated knowledge and skill of society, the real productive power at work is no longer the individual worker's labour but the collective, social knowledge objectified in the machinery — what Marx names, in the phrase that has echoed through a century of theory, the general intellect.

The naming of the general intellect builds from the image of machines as organs of the human brain.

Nature builds no machines, no locomotives, railways, electric telegraphs, self-acting mules etc. These are products of human industry; natural material transformed into organs of the human will over nature, or of human participation in nature. They are organs of the human brain, created by the human hand; the power of knowledge, objectified.

Marx, Grundrisse, The Chapter on Capital (Fragment on Machines), page 706.

The development of fixed capital indicates to what degree general social knowledge has become a direct force of production, and to what degree, hence, the conditions of the process of social life itself have come under the control of the general intellect and been transformed in accordance with it.

Marx, Grundrisse, The Chapter on Capital (Fragment on Machines), page 706.

This is the conceptual heart of the fragment. Social knowledge — science, technology, the accumulated cooperation and skill of society — becomes a direct productive force, materialized in fixed capital, and the process of social life comes under the control of this "general intellect." Under capitalism this social knowledge confronts the worker as capital's property, an alien power dominating him; but the fact that it is social knowledge, produced collectively and objectified in a common apparatus, points beyond the private form in which capital holds it. It is this double character — social power appropriated privately — that makes the passage so combustible for later readers.

The fragment’s own verdict on this double character is explosive.

Forces of production and social relations – two different sides of the development of the social individual – appear to capital as mere means, and are merely means for it to produce on its limited foundation. In fact, however, they are the material conditions to blow this foundation sky-high.

Marx, Grundrisse, The Chapter on Capital (Fragment on Machines), page 706.

From the general intellect Marx draws the consequence that has made the fragment legendary. If wealth is really produced by the automatic system of machinery embodying social knowledge, and direct human labour shrinks toward the margin, then the whole foundation of the value form — the measurement of wealth by labour-time — is cut away beneath capital's feet. Capital develops productive powers so great that the labour-time of the individual worker becomes an ever more absurd measure of the wealth actually produced.

The argument comes in one continuous run, and it deserves to be carried whole. First, the premise of the value form — and its undermining by large industry itself.

The exchange of living labour for objectified labour – i.e. the positing of social labour in the form of the contradiction of capital and wage labour – is the ultimate development of the value-relation and of production resting on value. Its presupposition is – and remains – the mass of direct labour time, the quantity of labour employed, as the determinant factor in the production of wealth. But to the degree that large industry develops, the creation of real wealth comes to depend less on labour time and on the amount of labour employed than on the power of the agencies set in motion during labour time, whose ‘powerful effectiveness’ is itself in turn out of all proportion to the direct labour time spent on their production, but depends rather on the general state of science and on the progress of technology, or the application of this science to production.

Marx, Grundrisse, The Chapter on Capital (Fragment on Machines), pages 704–705.

Then the new figure of the producer, and the verdict on the old foundation of wealth.

Real wealth manifests itself, rather – and large industry reveals this – in the monstrous disproportion between the labour time applied, and its product, as well as in the qualitative imbalance between labour, reduced to a pure abstraction, and the power of the production process it superintends. Labour no longer appears so much to be included within the production process; rather, the human being comes to relate more as watchman and regulator to the production process itself. (What holds for machinery holds likewise for the combination of human activities and the development of human intercourse.) No longer does the worker insert a modified natural thing [Naturgegenstand] as middle link between the object [Objekt] and himself; rather, he inserts the process of nature, transformed into an industrial process, as a means between himself and inorganic nature, mastering it. He steps to the side of the production process instead of being its chief actor. In this transformation, it is neither the direct human labour he himself performs, nor the time during which he works, but rather the appropriation of his own general productive power, his understanding of nature and his mastery over it by virtue of his presence as a social body – it is, in a word, the development of the social individual which appears as the great foundation-stone of production and of wealth. The theft of alien labour time, on which the present wealth is based, appears a miserable foundation in face of this new one, created by large-scale industry itself.

Marx, Grundrisse, The Chapter on Capital (Fragment on Machines), page 705.

The conclusion follows at once.

As soon as labour in the direct form has ceased to be the great well-spring of wealth, labour time ceases and must cease to be its measure, and hence exchange value [must cease to be the measure] of use value. The surplus labour of the mass has ceased to be the condition for the development of general wealth, just as the non-labour of the few, for the development of the general powers of the human head.

Marx, Grundrisse, The Chapter on Capital (Fragment on Machines), page 705.

And the draft presses past the collapse to what it sets free.

With that, production based on exchange value breaks down, and the direct, material production process is stripped of the form of penury and antithesis. The free development of individualities, and hence not the reduction of necessary labour time so as to posit surplus labour, but rather the general reduction of the necessary labour of society to a minimum, which then corresponds to the artistic, scientific etc. development of the individuals in the time set free, and with the means created, for all of them.

Marx, Grundrisse, The Chapter on Capital (Fragment on Machines), pages 705–706.

The real measure of wealth then becomes not labour-time but disposable time — free time for the many, time for the full development of human capacities, which the development of the productive forces has made materially possible.

The measure of wealth is then not any longer, in any way, labour time, but rather disposable time. Labour time as the measure of value posits wealth itself as founded on poverty, and disposable time as existing in and because of the antithesis to surplus labour time; or, the positing of an individual's entire time as labour time, and his degradation therefore to mere worker, subsumption under labour.

Marx, Grundrisse, The Chapter on Capital (Fragment on Machines), page 708.

But capital cannot allow this consequence, because its whole existence is the appropriation of surplus labour-time; it must therefore go on measuring and extracting value by labour-time even as it destroys the basis of that measure. This is the "moving contradiction" — the formulation in which the fragment names capital's self-undermining tendency.

Capital itself is the moving contradiction, [in] that it presses to reduce labour time to a minimum, while it posits labour time, on the other side, as sole measure and source of wealth. Hence it diminishes labour time in the necessary form so as to increase it in the superfluous form; hence posits the superfluous in growing measure as a condition – question of life or death – for the necessary.

Marx, Grundrisse, The Chapter on Capital (Fragment on Machines), page 706.

Marx seconds the anonymous pamphleteer of 1821, whose formulation the fragment adopts as its own measure of wealth.

Truly wealthy a nation, when the working day is 6 rather than 12 hours. Wealth is not command over surplus labour time’ (real wealth), ‘but rather, disposable time outside that needed in direct production, for every individual and the whole society.’ (The Source and Remedy etc. 1821, p. 6.)

Marx, Grundrisse, The Chapter on Capital (Fragment on Machines), page 706.

The horizon the passage opens is unmistakable: capital creates, in the automatic system of machinery and the general intellect, the material conditions of a society freed from toil, in which disposable time — free time for the development of individuals — would be the true wealth; and it simultaneously fetters those conditions within the value form, which can only measure wealth by the labour-time it is destroying. The contradiction points beyond capital to a form of society in which the "development of the social individual" and the free disposal of time would replace the extraction of surplus labour as the organizing principle of production. This is the passage that later readers — from the operaisti and Negri to the theorists of post-work and cognitive capitalism — have taken as Marx's most direct anticipation of a post-capitalist, post-scarcity horizon, and it is the deepest root of the charter's own concern with disposable time and the realm beyond necessity.

The see-saw is stated explicitly: capital creates disposable time and reconverts it into surplus labour, on pain of crisis — until the workers appropriate their own surplus.

It is thus, despite itself, instrumental in creating the means of social disposable time, in order to reduce labour time for the whole society to a diminishing minimum, and thus to free everyone’s time for their own development. But its tendency always, on the one side, to create disposable time, on the other, to convert it into surplus labour. If it succeeds too well at the first, then it suffers from surplus production, and then necessary labour is interrupted, because no surplus labour can be realized by capital. The more this contradiction develops, the more does it become evident that the growth of the forces of production can no longer be bound up with the appropriation of alien labour, but that the mass of workers must themselves appropriate their own surplus labour.

Marx, Grundrisse, The Chapter on Capital (Fragment on Machines), page 708.

In the closing pages of Notebook VII the positive horizon returns, in the vocabulary of free time and the production of the human being himself.

The saving of labour time [is] equal to an increase of free time, i.e. time for the full development of the individual, which in turn reacts back upon the productive power of labour as itself the greatest productive power. From the standpoint of the direct production process it can be regarded as the production of fixed capital, this fixed capital being man himself.

Marx, Grundrisse, The Chapter on Capital (Fragment on Machines), pages 711–712.

Free time – which is both idle time and time for higher activity – has naturally transformed its possessor into a different subject, and he then enters into the direct production process as this different subject. This process is then both discipline, as regards the human being in the process of becoming; and, at the same time, practice [Ausübung], experimental science, materially creative and objectifying science, as regards the human being who has become, in whose head exists the accumulated knowledge of society.

Marx, Grundrisse, The Chapter on Capital (Fragment on Machines), page 712.

The closing notebooks turn toward the transformation of surplus value into profit and the tendential fall in the rate of profit — the material that Volume III Part Three would formalize. Here the law appears in first draft, and Marx states its standing in terms even stronger than those of the published work.

The derivation is compact.

Presupposing the same surplus value, the same surplus labour in proportion to necessary labour, then, the rate of profit depends on the relation between the part of capital exchanged for living labour and the part existing in the form of raw material and means of production. Hence, the smaller the portion exchanged for living labour becomes, the smaller becomes the rate of profit. Thus, in the same proportion as capital takes up a larger place as capital in the production process relative to immediate labour, i.e. the more the relative surplus value grows – the value-creating power of capital – the more does the rate of profit fall.

Marx, Grundrisse, The Chapter on Capital, page 747.

Marx immediately ranks the law.

This is in every respect the most important law of modern political economy, and the most essential for understanding the most difficult relations. It is the most important law from the historical standpoint.

Marx, Grundrisse, The Chapter on Capital, page 748.

The Grundrisse's derivation is the same in principle as Volume III's: as capital develops the productive forces, the proportion of living labour to objectified labour falls, and since only living labour produces surplus-value, the rate of profit tends to decline even as the mass of profit and the productive power of labour grow. But Marx reads the law here in an explicitly historical register — as the sign that capital is developing the forces of production up against the barrier of its own value form, that the very success of accumulation erodes the ground of profit, and that this contradiction announces the historical limit of the capitalist mode. The falling-rate material and the machine fragment thus point in the same direction: capital undermines itself by developing the social productivity of labour beyond what the appropriation of surplus labour-time can contain.

The notebooks draw the historical conclusion in the strongest language they contain.

Beyond a certain point, the development of the powers of production becomes a barrier for capital; hence the capital relation a barrier for the development of the productive powers of labour. When it has reached this point, capital, i.e. wage labour, enters into the same relation towards the development of social wealth and of the forces of production as the guild system, serfdom, slavery, and is necessarily stripped off as a fetter.

Marx, Grundrisse, The Chapter on Capital, page 749.

Crises are the form of the reckoning.

The growing incompatibility between the productive development of society and its hitherto existing relations of production expresses itself in bitter contradictions, crises, spasms. The violent destruction of capital not by relations external to it, but rather as a condition of its self-preservation, is the most striking form in which advice is given it to be gone and to give room to a higher state of social production.

Marx, Grundrisse, The Chapter on Capital, pages 749–750.

Appended to the notebooks is the early fragment "Bastiat and Carey," a polemic against two economists of bourgeois harmony — Bastiat, the French apostle of laissez-faire and the natural concord of labour and capital, and Carey, the American protectionist who saw disharmony only where the state intervened. Marx treats both as ideologists who abolish the antagonisms of capitalist society by definition, projecting a harmony of interests that the analysis of the whole work has shown to be a mystification. The fragment is minor beside the machine pages, but it belongs to the same critique: the systematic exposure of the standpoint that takes the fetishized surface of capitalist society — its apparent freedom, equality, and harmony of interests — for its truth, the standpoint that Capital Volume III's trinity formula would dissect as the completed form of the fetish. With this the Grundrisse notebooks, the workshop of the entire critique, come to their close.