Introduction to the Grundrisse Part I: Material Production

The point of departure is SOCIALLY DETERMINED INDIVIDUAL PRODUCTION. Not, then, Plato’s craftsmen, Crusoe, savages entering into a social contract; unlike the Political Economists, Marx maintains that production is always already social. Man is a zoon politikon; he individuates himself only in the midst of society. In fact, the isolated producer is an image of the 18th-century individual in a ‘civil society’ with its free competition.

To speak of production developing apart from society is akin to speaking that way about language.

Civil society is the state of affairs (maturing in c.18) where “the various forms of social connectedness confront the individual as a mere means toward his private purposes, as external necessity” (84). But this epoch of the isolated individual is also the epoch of the hitherto most developed social relations.

To speak of production, then, is always to speak of production at a definite stage of social development. BUT the abstraction “production in general” (PIG) takes the common traits of all epochs of production and is thus theoretically useful. However, “general preconditions” have no role in actual genesis. (86: Here, “the relationship between scientific presentation and the real movement” is acknowledged but deferred.)

The Political Economists eternalize production, in such a manner as the following:
“No production possible without an instrument of production, even if only the hand. No production without stored-up, past labor, even if it is only the facility gathered together and concentrated in the hand of the savage by repeated practice. Capital is, among other things, also an instrument of production, also objectified, past labor. Therefore capital is a general, eternal relation of nature; that is, if I leave out just the specific quality which alone makes ‘instrument of production’ and ‘stored-up labor’ into capital. (85-86).”

The Political Economists theorize production in general (distinct from distribution) in order (“more or less conscious[ly]”) to establish bourgeois relations as the eternal natural laws on which society is founded.

Some determinations of PIG belong to all epochs, others only to a few. These must be differentiated. Production is always a particular branch of production, but it is also always “a certain social body, a social subject, which is active in a greater or sparser totality of branches of production” (86).

“Production is also immediately consumption” (90): both subjective and objective: consumption of the worker and consumption of the means and materials of production.

“Consumption is also immediately production”: it produces human beings in some aspect or other. In production, the producer objectifies himself; in consumption, the object personifies itself.
This leaves production proper and consumption proper distinct. But of course they also mediate one another: production produces the consumed product, consumption creates the subject for whom the product is produced.

Consumption produces production in that 1. a product becomes a real product by being consumed (a garment is only a garment if it is worn), and 2. consumption is the presupposition or ideal cause of production, it produces the need for new production.

Production produces the object, manner and motive of consumption: 1. by creating the material for it—production furnishes the material for consumption and thus in a sense produces consumption, by 2. by determining the manner of consumption—it gives consumption its particular character, and thus in a sense produces the consumer. Production and consumption give each other their “finish” (German?). 3. By creating the products in the form of a need felt by the consumer---production supplies a material for the need, but also a need for the material. The need which consumption feels for the object is created by the perception of it (92).

Thus the identities between consumption and production appear threefold: 1. Immediate identity Consumptive production, productive consumption. 2. Mutual mediation each provides in one case the material, in another the motive for the other; here the relation is still external. 3. Each creates the other in completing itself. Thus production and consumption are moments of a single act, with production the “predominant moment” (94).

Distribution: “In society, however, the producer’s relation to the product, once the latter is finished, is an external one, and its return to the subject depends on his relations to other individuals. He does not come into possession of it directly. Nor is its immediate appropriation his purpose when he produces in society. Distribution steps between the producers and the products, hence between production and consumption, to determine in accordance with social laws what the producer’s share will be in the world of products” (94)

Political Economy posits its categories doubly: they appear once under production, once under distribution. (P: land, labor, capital; D: rent, wages, interest). Thus the structure (Gliederung) of distribution is determined by the structure of production (95).

“To the single individual, of course, distribution appears as a social law which determines his position within the system of production within which he produces, and which therefore precedes production” (96). Social distribution determines the individual’s place in the economy, but this itself is as a result of capital and property, i.e. agents of production.

Distribution, before it is the distribution of products, is 1. the distribution of the instruments of production, which is further specified as 2. the distribution of the members of society among the different kinds of production (96). This distribution is an original moment of production.
Thus, production is the predominant category; questions of distribution and consumption reduce themselves in the last instance to questions of moments of production, or, hence forth, Production.


Circulation is exchange regarded in its totality. It mediates between production and consumption, i.e. between moments of Production. 1. There is no exchange without division of labor, 2. private exchange presupposes private production, 3. the intensity, extension, and manner of exchange are determined by the development and structure of production.

Production, distribution, exchange and consumption are not identical, but they form an articulated unity. “A definite production thus determines a definite consumption, distribution and exchange as well as definite relations between these different moments (99). Mutual interaction between production, distribution, exchange and consumption determine Production.