Grundrisse

So what Linda Obermeier and I are trying to do is to show actually that Marxist social theory in the present has a lot to gain if it actually acknowledges the importance of these critical Hegelian influences in Marx's thought.

particularly his kind of attempt to try to make sense of capitalism as an impersonal system of domination, which nonetheless allows for, as Marx puts it in the Grundrisse, for personal freedom, but one that is founded upon objective or impersonal dependence, right? And in a way, there's been this kind of radical Republican revival attempt at kind of making sense of Marx through this lens.

And one of the things we argue is that it comes at this drawback because it fails to register the extent to which Hegel had such a profound influence on Marx in his critique of what became a far more, I think, complete critique of industrial capitalism that is certainly lacking in Hegel, but the seeds are kind of planted there.

And so Marx could draw on it.

And we see him drawing on it in the Grundrisse as well as in Capital.

So I also find it really interesting when thinking about my, as you put it, radical Republican comrades, why there is this impetus to deny the Hegelian influence, whether it's the work of William Clare Roberts, who I hold in very high regard.

Bruno Leopold, who offered a very well-researched book, Citizen Marx, or of course, Alex Gurevich, who really helped inaugurate this movement towards interpreting Marx as a radical Republican.

only way of reconciling the free development of each with the free development of all, is by prioritizing the free development of each before the free development, rather than collapsing that free development in a community that comes prior to or before the individual.

And second of all, you really have to read all three volumes to get the point of it.

And you need to read other things too, like the Grundrisse.

You know, I was talking with Spencer about this, how Moish Postone taught Marx's Capital several times while we were graduate students at the University of Chicago.

And

It's the critique of political economy, and it's also an imminent dialectical critique, which he chose to do it that way.

And we might question whether that was the best way of doing it.

You know, if the Grundrisse had been the book instead, if his first version had had been the way he went instead, it would not have been an imminent dialectical critique of political economy.

But he went with the imminent dialectical critique of political economy.

It was kind of easy then.

You know, we all read Marx, you read Das Kapital, you read The Grundrisse, you understand dialectical materialism.

You truly understand what the motivation was, right? You, you got it.

They...