Critique, history, and emancipation in Karl Marx's Grundrisse

• Grant number: 20/16260-5
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate (Direct)
• Start date: June 01, 2021
• End date: January 31, 2026
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Philosophy - History of Philosophy
• Principal Investigator: Ricardo Ribeiro Terra
• Grantee: Lutti Mira Salineiro
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Associated scholarship(s): 21/13490-2 - Critique and presentism in Karl Marx's Grundrisse (1857-58), BE.EP.DD

Abstract

Based on materials recently published in Mega², we argue that it is possible to encounter in Karl Marx's 1857-58 manuscripts - afterward titled Grundrisse - a method of exposition that, albeit without the development level present in Capital's presentation, still holds certain determinate conceptual articulations, conforming one of the various expositions of the critique of political economy. Thus, we intend to develop the idea according to which the Grundrisse develops a particular critical model, demanding an internal textual analysis in which posterior texts such as Capital are not employed. Our analysis of Grundrisse's critical model is based on the knot between critique and history made by the notion of emancipation. We aim to study how these concepts are connected in the 1857-58 manuscripts in three ways: (I) primarily, we show, through an investigation of the 1857 Introduction, in which manner the emancipatory interest works as a determining element of Marx's antidogmatic critique, grounding the distinction between the doctrine that results from the critique of political economy and the doctrines deriving from that discipline. Secondly, we present the equally antidogmatic position of history: if, on one hand, carrying out an immanent and antidogmatic critique of political economy leads Marx to an exposition of capital's categorial genesis, on the other hand, we will see that the author intends to promote a methodic insertion of elements that directly resemble capital's historical genesis, highlighting capitalism as a contingent historic result, uncovering emancipation's second role: the analysis of pre-capitalism enables one to think about the "overcoming [Aufhebung] of the current configuration of the relations of production". Thirdly, we study the excerpt on the machinery present in the Grundrisse, in order to establish how Marx understood the measurement subversion of the type of wealth that rests upon the exchange value, trying also to point out the position of revolutionary subjectivity inside the process of development of the productive forces. We maintain, lastly, that the entanglement of the notions of critique, history, and emancipation offers both an interpretation about the critical and expositive unity of the Grundrisse, and a first glance at the Marxian conception of dialectic. (AU)