Marx's Grundrisse: Footnotes
1. The manuscript has: '... now appears as circulating capital (the first two) and fixed capital'.
2. Hodgskin, Labour Defended, p. 16.
3. 'als hätt es Lieb im Leibe', Goethe, Faust, Pt I, Act 5, Auerbach's Cellar in Leipzig.
5. Fourier, Le Nouveau Monde industriel et sociétaire, Vol. VI, pp. 242-52.
* The determinations of raw material, product, instrument of production, change according to the role which the use values play in the production process itself. What may be regarded as a mere raw material (certainly not agricultural products, which are all reproduced, and not only reproduced in their original form, but also modified in their natural being itself to correspond to human needs. Quote from Hodges etc. [NOTE: The author referred to here may be J. F. Hodges, who wrote Lessons on Agricultural Chemistry (1849), and First Steps to Practical Chemistry for Agricultural Students (1857); or Marx may have intended to write 'Hodgskin'.] The products of purely extractive industry such as e.g. coal, metals, are themselves the result of labour, not only to bring them to light, but also in order to give them the form, as with metals, in which they can serve as raw materials for industry. But they are not reproduced, since we do not yet know how to create metals) is itself the product of labour. The product of one industry is the raw material for another and vice versa. The instrument of production itself is the product of one industry, and serves as instrument of production only in the other. One industry's waste is the raw material of the other. In agriculture, a part of the product (seed, cattle etc.) itself appears as raw material for the same industry; hence, like fixed capital, it never leaves the production process; the portion of the agricultural products destined for animal feed can be regarded as matière instrumentale; but seed is reproduced in the production process, while the instrument as such is consumed in it. Could not seed, considering that it always remains within the production process, like draught animals, be regarded as fixed capital, like draught animals? No; otherwise all raw materials would have to be so regarded. As raw material it is always comprised within the production process. Finally, products entering into direct consumption in turn come out of consumption as raw materials for production, fertilizer in the process of nature etc., paper out of rags etc.; but secondly, their consumption reproduces the individual himself in a specific mode of being, not only in his immediate quality of being alive, and in specific social relations. So that the ultimate appropriation by individuals taking place in the consumption process reproduces them in the original relations in which they move within the production process and towards each other; reproduces them in their social being, and hence reproduces their social being -- society -- which appears as much the subject as the result of this great total process.
7. De Quincey, The Logic of Political Economy, p. 114.
8. Babbage, Traité sur l'économie des machines et des manufactures, pp. 375-6.
* Risk, which plays a role for the economists in the determination of profit -- it can obviously play none in the surplus gain, because the creation of surplus value is not increased thereby, and possible that capital incurs risk in the realization of this surplus value -- is the danger that the capital does not pass through the different phases of circulation, or remains fixated in one of them. We have seen that the surplus gain is- part of the production costs, not of the capital, but of the product. The necessity for capital to realize this surplus gain or a part of it confronts it as a double external compulsion. As soon as profit and interest become separated, so that the industrial capitalist must pay interest, a portion of the surplus gain is cost of production from capital's viewpoint, i.e. belongs itself among his outlays. In another respect, it is the average assecurance which it gives itself in order to cover the risk of devaluation which it runs in the metamorphoses of the total process. A part of the surplus gain appears to the capitalist only as a compensation for the risk he runs so as to make more money; a risk which can lead to the loss of the presupposed value itself. In this form, the necessity of realizing the surplus gain appears to him as means to ensure its reproduction. Both relations, of course, do not determine the surplus value, but rather make its positing appear as an external necessity for capital, and not only as the satisfaction of its tendency to seek riches.
** We are not concerned here with the illusion that all parts of capital equally bring a profit, an illusion arising out of the division of the surplus value into average portions, independently of the relations of the component parts of capital as circulating and fixed, and the part of it transformed into living labour. Because Ricardo half shares this illusion, he considers the influence of the proportions of fixed and circulating capital from the start of his determination of value as such, and the reverend parson Malthus stupidly and simple-mindedly speaks of the profits accruing to fixed capital, as if capital grew organically by some power of nature.
10. The Economist, Vol. V, No. 219, 6 November 1847, p.1271.
11. The Economist, Vol. V, No. 219, 6 November 1847, p. 1271.
13. The first part of this quotation is taken over by Storch from the French edition of Adam Smith, Vol. II, p. 207; the whole quotation, with the addition of Storch's remark about revenue, is to be found in Storch, Cours d'économie politique, Vol. I, p. 246.
14. Cf. Hegel, Science of Logic, p. 746: 'The relation of the activity of the end through the means to the external object is... an immediate relation of the middle term to the other extreme. It is immediate because the middle term has an external object in it and the other extreme is another such object.'
15. Sir Frederick Morton Eden, Bt (1766-1809) was inspired by the high prices of 1794 and 1795 to make the first ever investigation into working-class history. 'The only disciple of Adam Smith throughout the eighteenth century who produced anything of importance' (Marx).
16. The passages from Eden's book (Vol. I, Bk 1) are as follows, beginning with the passage on p. 735 of the present edition: pp. 1-2; pp. 57-61; pp. 75-6; p. 100; p. 101.
17. Adam Smith, Recherches sur la nature et les causes de la richesse des nations, Vol. II, p. 226.
18. Adam Smith, Recherches sur la nature et les causes de la richesse des nations, Vol. II, pp. 197-8.
* In regard to the reproduction phase (especially circulation time), note that use value itself places limits upon it. Wheat must be reproduced in a year. Perishable things like milk etc. must be reproduced more often. Meat on the hoof does not need to be reproduced quite so often, since the animal is alive and hence resists time; but slaughtered meat on the market has to be reproduced in the form of money in the very short term, or it rots. The reproduction of value and of use value partly coincide, partly not.
19. Say, Traité d'économie politique, Vol. II, p. 185.
21. The sentence preceding this one was inserted by Marx, above the line, in English; thus the apparent virtual repetition. (The sentence following also appears in English in the original.)