I am reading an essay published by Martin Niclaus from an old issue of New Left
Review about the Grundrisse ("The Unknown Marx," March/April 1968), which was a
kind of rough draft of Kapital, email me if you want the PDF of the whole thing:
>
>
>
> Immediately after the completion of his critique of Hegel’s philosophy of
> law, in which he had concluded that the anatomy of society was not to be
> found in philosophy, Marx began to read the political economists. In this
> project he was preceded and no doubt also guided by the young Engels, who
> had published his Umrisse zu einer Kritik der Nationalökonomie in Marx’s
> and Ruge’s Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher for the same year, 1844. Engels
> argued in this article that the development of the bourgeois economy for
> the last century, as well as the development of the economic theory which
> corresponded to it, could be summarized as one long, continuous, and
> increasingly outrageous affront to all fundamental principles of morality
> and decency, and that if a rationally ordered, moral economic system were
> not immediately installed, then a monstrous social revolution must and
> ought to occur shortly. The brunt of Engels’ attack was directed at what
> he considered the fundamental principle of the bourgeois economy, namely
> the institution of the market. All moral bonds in society have been
> overthrown by the conversion of human values into exchange-values; all
> ethical principles overthrown by the principles of competition; and all
> hitherto existing laws, even the laws which regulate the birth and death
> of human beings, have been usurped by the laws of supply and demand.
> Humanity itself has become a market commodity. (
> https://newleftreview-org.providence.idm.oclc.org/issues/i48/articles/martin-nicolaus-the-unknown-marx#note-10
> )
>
>
>
> With one significant difference, this line of reasoning was taken up and
> developed by Marx throughout his economic writings from 1844 to 1849. The
> difference is that (as is plain from his 1844 Manuscripts ) Marx
> immediately rejected the one-sided moralism of Engels’ critique to replace
> it with a dialectical basis. He threw out the categorical imperatives
> which lurked beneath the surface of Engels’ paper. Competition and the
> market, he wrote, were not so much an affront to morality as rather a
> fragmentation and surrender of the developmental potentialities inherent
> in the human species. Within the society based on private property, the
> products of human labour belong not to the labourer for his own enjoyment;
> rather, they become the property of alien persons and are used by them to
> oppress him. The clearest symptom of this fact, Marx wrote, is that the
> labourer does not produce the things most useful to him, but instead the
> things which will fetch the highest exchange-value for their private
> owner. Thus the process of material creation becomes fractured into
> segments, and the product itself becomes fractured into use-value and
> exchange-value, of which the latter alone is important. ‘The consideration
> of division of labour and exchange is of the greatest interest, since they
> are the perceptible, alien ated expression of human activity and capacities
> . . . .’ In sum, from an entirely different philosophical starting-point,
> Marx arrived at the same critical perspective as Engels, namely that the
> crux of bourgeois society was to be found in competition, supply and
> demand, the market; that is, in its system of exchange.
>
>
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