Fetters on the Development of the Productive Forces

Compare the following two sentences:

"From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters." (January 1859)

"The stages of production that precede capital appear as so many fetters on the productive forces, regarded from the standpoint of capital." (December 1857)

Both sentences were written by Karl Marx, a bit more than a year apart. Both are about historical social relations imposing "fetters" on the development of the productive forces. The first sentence, from Marx's preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy has become part of the canonical definition of "Historical Materialism." The second is from notebook IV of Marx's 1857-58 manuscripts, the Grundrisse.

One might expect that scholars would have paid a great deal of attention to the relationship between the two sentences since publication of the Grundrisse in 1953. One would be wrong. Searches in Google Books and Google Scholar in German and English return no books or articles that quote the two sentences, even portions of the two.

Eric Hobsbawm, who edited and wrote an introduction to Pre-capitalist Economic Formations, a selection from the Grundrisse called it "an indispensable pendant to the superb Preface." By "pendant" Hobsbawm probably meant something like supplement or companion. The English translator of the Grundrisse, Martin Nicolaus called it "One long extended commentary on the contradiction between the forces of production and the relations of production." Neither examined the respective treatment in the two texts of the fetters on the development of the forces of production.

In my view, the standard reception of the preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy has been, if not a misinterpretation, a one-sided interpretation. Left out of that interpretation is the pivotal role of disposable time. The creation and appropriation of disposable time is both the secret of capital's accumulation and the focal point of labour's resistance to capital's domination.

The prominence of disposable time in Marx's discussion of the forces of production in the Grundrisse illuminates why Marx repeatedly referred to the limitation of the working day as the prerequisite or precondition for emancipation and hailed the enactment of the English Ten-Hour Bill as a victory of the political economy of the working class. 

In a future post, I plan to address the relationship between the political economy of the working class and the much better know "dictatorship of the proletariat." In my view, the former is to forces of production as the latter is to relations of production.

Below the jump break are the passages from the preface to A Contribution and the Grundrisse (shaded brown and indented) that I have combined to create an enhanced narrative of what Nicolaus called "the contradiction between the forces of production and the relations of production." This is the composite text I used in Marx's Fetters: A Remedial Reading.

Stephen Miller: Renegade Without a Cause

In case you've ever wondered about Stephen Miller's histrionic performance of rage and disdain, here is a brief explanation.

In 1971, David Horowitz edited a volume of essays, Isaac Deutscher: the man and his work, conceived as a tribute to Deutscher, who had died in 1967. Deutscher had been one of Horowitz's mentors. 

Horowitz died in April of this year. Deutscher wrote Horowitz's obituary 75 years earlier in a review of The God That Failed published in 1950 and republished five years later as "The Ex-Communist’s Conscience" in Heretics and Renegades and other essays.

Deutscher's review begins with a joke:

IGNAZIO SILONE relates that he once said jokingly to Togliatti, the Italian Communist leader: ‘The final struggle will be between the communists and the ex-communists.’ There is a bitter drop of truth in the joke.

Deutscher cites Silone again later in the essay: 

...irrational emotionalism dominates the evolution of many an ex-communist. ‘The logic of opposition at all costs’ says Silone, ‘has carried many ex-communists far from their starting-points, in some cases as far as fascism.’ What were those starting-points? Nearly every ex-communist broke with his party in the name of communism. Nearly every one set out to defend the ideal of socialism from the abuses of a bureaucracy subservient to Moscow. Nearly every one began by throwing out the dirty water of the Russian revolution to protect the baby bathing in it.

Sooner or later these intentions are forgotten or abandoned. Having broken with a party bureaucracy in the name of communism, the heretic goes on to break with communism itself. He claims to have made the discovery that the root of the evil goes far deeper than he at first imagined, even though his digging for that ‘root’ may have been very lazy and very shallow.

David Horowitz's trajectory from the radical left to the radical right and Deutscher's prescient commentary on the mundaneness of that trajectory are important for understanding the bizarre demeanor of Horowitz's disciple, Stephen Miller. 

Miller has appropriated the characteristic traits of the renegade ex-communist without ever having belonged to the creed he has "broken" with. That is to say, his bitterness, rage, and feeling of betrayal is an affectation. He is pretending to have the same feelings he learned from his mentor. But without the life experience.

When the Truth is Found to be Lies...

And all the hope within you dies... 

Then what?