Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts: Grundrisse

Overview
The Grundrisse is a series of exploratory notebooks in which Marx develops the conceptual architecture that underpins Capital. It investigates the historically specific nature of capitalist social relations, reconstructs the inner logic of value and capital, and links economic categories to the development of productive forces, social forms, and the world market. The text moves from abstract determinations to more concrete wholes, insisting that categories like labor, value, money, and capital are not eternal but arise from particular social relations.

Method
Marx outlines a method that ascends from simple, abstract determinations toward a concrete totality. Instead of beginning with an undifferentiated notion like population, analysis starts with basic relations, commodity, exchange, labor, then unfolds their mediations until the social whole appears as a structured ensemble. The concrete is grasped as a synthesis of many determinations, not a sum of empirical facts. This method permits a critique of political economy’s tendency to naturalize historically contingent forms.

Production, Distribution, Consumption
Production is primary, shaping distribution, exchange, and consumption; yet the moments interpenetrate. Distribution is not an independent sphere allocating a pre-given product, but itself a function of production relations (for example, the wage presupposes the separation of workers from means of production). Consumption feeds back into production by determining needs and by reproducing labor power, while exchange mediates these processes. The unity of these moments is historically specific under capitalism.

Value, Money, and Capital
Value is determined by socially necessary labor time. The commodity expresses a dual character: use-value and exchange-value. Money emerges as the universal equivalent that measures value, mediates exchange, and can be hoarded; in its role as world money it expresses the global reach of capitalist circulation. Capital develops from money when money enters circulation to valorize itself, M–C–M', transforming labor power and means of production into a process of self-expanding value.

Surplus Value and Exploitation
Surplus value arises in production through the purchase of labor power as a commodity. Because labor power can create more value than its own reproduction cost, the capitalist achieves a surplus that appears as profit, interest, and rent. The wage relation conceals exploitation by presenting an exchange of equivalents, while the worker’s separation from the means of production compels participation in this relation.

Historical Forms and Property
Marx sketches pre-capitalist formations, communal, ancient, and feudal, emphasizing how distinct property relations shape the labor process and social cohesion. Capitalism dissolves earlier communities by generalizing commodity exchange and wage labor, enclosing common resources, and subordinating production to valorization. Historical analysis reveals that categories of political economy arise and pass away with determinate forms of property and social cooperation.

Machinery, General Intellect, and Time
A central reflection concerns machinery and the “general intellect” embodied in science, knowledge, and social cooperation. As large-scale industry advances, the immediate expenditure of labor time becomes a less adequate measure of wealth, even while value remains tied to labor time. Capital tends to reduce necessary labor time, expanding relative surplus labor, yet simultaneously creates the material conditions for free time and the development of human capacities beyond the labor process.

Crisis and the World Market
Capital is a restless, self-expanding totality that confronts limits, within labor, within markets, within its own measures. Overaccumulation, disproportionality among sectors, and the tension between production for profit and social needs generate crises that forcibly recompose the system. The world market is intrinsic, not external, to capital: competition, credit, and international trade knit together a single field in which contradictions appear as global disturbances.

Aim of Critique
By reconstructing the inner connections of capitalist categories, the Grundrisse exposes their historicity and contradictions, clearing the ground for a scientific critique of political economy and for apprehending possibilities immanent to modern productive forces that point beyond the wage relation.