‘Introduction’ to the Grundrisse

Summary

Introduction

Production, consumption, distribution, exchange (circulation)

PRODUCTION

Autonomous individuals. Eighteenth-century ideas.

(a) The subject at hand is, to begin with, material production.

Individuals producing in society – hence the starting point is naturally the socially specific production [carried on] by individuals. The individual – and individuated – hunter and fisher, with which [Adam] Smith and Ricardo begin, belongs to the unimaginative conceits of eighteenth-century stories à la Robinson Crusoe, which in no way express, as cultural historians imagine, a simple reaction against over-refinement and a regression to a misconstrued natural life. [Those stories] no more rest on such naturalism than does Rousseau's social contract, which brings naturally independent subjects into relation and association by means of a contract. This is the pretence, and merely the aesthetic pretence, of small- and large-scale stories à la Robinson Crusoe. It is rather the anticipation of ‘bourgeois society’, which had been in preparation since the sixteenth century and had made giant strides towards its maturity in the eighteenth. In that society of free competition the individual appears detached from the natural bonds, etc., which in earlier historical epochs make him into an appendage of a specific, delimited, human conglomerate. The prophets of the eighteenth century, on whose shoulders Smith and Ricardo are standing, conceived of that eighteenth century individual – the product, on the one hand, of the dissolution of feudal forms of society, and on the other, of the powers of production newly developed since the sixteenth century – as an ideal [conception], which may have had an existence in the past.