Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Penguin Classics)

Great book. Very eye-opening!

I think it is the fault of customs office of Turkey but amazon should consider sending books in a way that even though customs offices open the package, they will not able to damage the books.

This book helps set the tone for later ideas expressed in Marx's more popular work. Don't just read what other have to say about Marx's work, read it firsthand. this is a perfect start.

Read this Title years ago, though it would be good to re-read.

Excellent quality

The Grundrisse was largely unavailable until the late 1960s. It provoked something of a rediscovery of Marx-- along with the publication of the 1844 manuscripts-- in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The Grundrisse revealed a smoother transition between the early and later Marx than critics like Louis Althusser and others imagined. In particular, in spite of its rough form, the Grundrisse offers much more nuance to core Marxist concepts than many of his finished texts. Its opening salvo problematizes any clear division between production and consumption. Although feminist critics are correct in observing that Marx typically often under-analyzed unwaged labor, the Grundrisse draws these other forms of labor in relationship to the circuits of capital. For example, he writes, "Consumption is also immediate production . . . This is also true of every kind of consumption which in one way or another produces human beings in some particular aspect. Consumptive production." Housework could clearly apply within such an observation, which is exactly what Italian feminists began to analyze during the 1970s.Much like Gramsci's prison notebooks, the Grundrisse offers much less of a well-systematized argument than a problematic towards understanding the processes of capitalism and the vitality of living labour. Disjointed in many parts, the Grundrisse opens itself up to multiple interpretations.Perhaps most importantly, the Grundrisse draws attention back to class struggle in ways that Das Kapital minimizes. Marx heeds particular close attention to the alienating conditions produced not by capitalism but by laborers themselves. Capital merely extracts surplus value from living labor, but it masquerades itself as the originator of its own profits. Marx writes, "The worker produces the conditions of necessary labour as conditions belonging to capital; but also the value-creating possibility, the realization which lies as a possibility within him, now likewise exists as surplus value, surplus product, in a word as capital, as master over living labour capacity, as value endowed with its own might and will, confronting him in his abstract, objectless, purely subjective poverty. He has produced not only the alien wealth and his own poverty, but also the relation of this wealth as independent, self-sufficient wealth, relative to himself as the poverty which this wealth consumes, and from which wealth thereby draws new vital spirits unto itself, and realizes itself anew" (453). The vampiric image of capital manifests itself fully in the aforementioned passage. Furthermore, it suggests that laborer has a certain power over capitalism in refusing to allow its living labor be extracted by it.The Italian Autonomists made a lot of Marx's famous fragment on machines section within the Grundrisse. A particularly astute reading is found within Antonio Negri's *Marx Beyond Marx*. This section is where Marx imagines production extending from mere wage labor into the general intellect, abstract knowledge. It is a world no longer defined by necessary labor time, but instead where free time reigns and is constantly harnesses by capital in the search for surplus-value. He writes how capital "on the one side, [wants] to create disposable time, on the other, to convert it into surplus labour" (708). He asserts "general social knowledge has become a direct force of production, and to what degree, hence, the conditions of the process of social life itself have come under the control of the general intellect and been transformed in accordance with it." The General Intellect siphons off the surplus-value of social life, free time. One needs only to reflect on the ways in which social networking sites like twitter or facebook (or amazon reviews even) operate from harnessing the living labor of people's free time to operate and generate their valorization.And hence the rub of how we are both subsumed and negotiating such dialectal twists where capital attempts to valorize our activity, but our activity always exceeds the bounds of capitalism, too, forcing it to reroute itself and respond to our actions. For Marx, the first step that needs to occur is recognition of us being the sources of our alienating conditions, recognizing their historical contingency and uncertainty rather than their seeming transhistorical presence. Marx writes, "The recognition of the products as its own, and the judgment that its separation from the conditions of its realization is improper-- forcibly imposed-- is an enormous [advance in] awareness, itself the product of the mode of production resting on capital, and as much the knell to its doom as, with the slave's awareness that he cannot be the property of another" (463).Of course, like any notebooks, there is a lot of gibberish, too. One doesn't so much read the Grundrisse as navigate it. It clearly should not be one's first foray into Marx. And it is strongly recommended that one reads Das Kapital, Vol 1 and the 1844 manuscripts first to see how the Grundrisse serves as a pivot between the two texts. But it is essential reading for anyone who truly wants to understand Marxist thought and delve into some of the nuance that none of his other texts possess.

Cdfecd

Because that's what you're doing. Reading Marx's unedited notebooks. You can understand his thought process, but know also that it is frequently roundabout, repetitive, and unclear.