Grundrisse. 3. Production and Consumption

Marx lays out the phases of economic life. They are: production, distribution, exchange and consumption.

For bourgeois economists, incapable of grasping relations of a totality (dialectics), each phase appears as separate entities.

I'll be quoting much from Marx. He states it better than I can, and more succinctly. I'm hoping these posts to be commentary or summarization when the original text is enough on its own. This section serves as an almost guide to economics anyway, assailable even by folks unfamiliar with economic vocabulary. For other more obtuse parts of the text, I'll give more of a commentary on it. For this section, I'll be quoting a lot from Marx in full.

The obvious, trite notion: in production the members of society appropriate (create, shape) the products of nature in accord with human needs; distribution determines the proportion in which the individual shares in the product; exchange delivers the particular products into which the individual desires to convert the portion which distribution has assigned to him; and finally, in consumption, the products become objects of gratification, of individual appropriation. Production creates the objects which correspond to the given needs; distribution divides them up according to social laws; exchange further parcels out the already divided shares in accord with individual needs; and finally, in consumption, the product steps outside this social movement and becomes a direct object and servant of individual need, and satisfies it in being consumed

There are four phases of economic life: production, distribution, exchange, consumption. In contemporary capitalist society, consumption is seen as the primary point of existence. Consumption is divine. The ability to consume determines one’s self worth: consuming in extravagance is seen as the definition of success.

To reiterate the definitions.

Production: transforming nature into a product in accord with human need
Distribution: the proportion of individual shares in the social product
Exchange: delivering the product in proportion as distribution has determined
Consumption: product as object of gratification, individual appropriation

Thus production, distribution, exchange and consumption form a regular syllogism; production is the generality, distribution and exchange the particularity, and consumption the singularity in which the whole is joined together. This is admittedly a coherence, but a shallow one. Production is determined by general natural laws, distribution by social accident, and the latter may therefore promote production to a greater or lesser extent; exchange stands between the two as formal social movement; and the concluding act, consumption, which is conceived not only as a terminal point but also as an end-in-itself, actually belongs outside economics except in so far as it reacts in turn upon the point of departure and initiates the whole process anew.

This syllogism, of a beginning and clear end, is shallow in its grasp of totality. Marx responds to each component of the bourgeois syllogism and explains why each part is in truth its opposite. This section is a good example of a dialectical method in action.

Production
Production is also consumption. There are two aspects of that consumption: subjective and objective.

Subjective consumption refers to the way the individual laborer expends their own energy while producing a commodity. This should be well understood by anyway exhausted after the work day.

Objective consumption refers to the consumption of the means of production when producing a commodity. This is evident to anyone who has worked in a kitchen, for example. The use of a kitchen knife, over and over, re-sharpening it each time the blade dulls, eventually leads to a thin replica of what it once was.

Or, more simply, machines break down.

Production is also objective consumption in the sense that the natural elements available to the laborer are used up. They are consumed by the labor process in the production of a commodity.

A wooden table consumes trees to create the wood.

The act of production is therefore in all its moments also an act of consumption. But the economists admit this. Production as directly identical with consumption, and consumption as directly coincident with production, is termed by them productive consumption. This identity of production and consumption amounts to Spinoza’s thesis: determinatio est negatio. [11]

Determinatio est negatio. Determination is negation. Determination, declaring something as X, is negation. How can determination be something negative, and not positive? Calling a ‘cat’ a ‘cat’ is declarative, positive, right? In order for something to BE, it has to NOT BE something else. Being is negation of not-being. This kind of thinking, of how something can become its opposite, is dialectics.

Production, creating something, as consumption, negating something, is an example of how something can be its opposite.

1. Consumption
   Just as production is consumption, the opposite is also true. Consumption is production. Consuming chemical and elements through metabolic processes, the plant produces more of itself and grows. This would be ‘consumptive production’. There is a mediation between consumption and production. You can only consume what is produced. The manner of production determines the manner of consumption (in order to ‘consume’ a gun, you need to pull the trigger). Consumption also mediates production, as consuming (using) the commodity is what realizes the productive process as production. Consumption is the moment of realization. If a commodity is never consumed, the entire chain of production/distribution/exchange is not REALIZED.

A railway on which no trains run, hence which is not used up, not consumed, is a railway only δυνάμει (potentially)

So consumption mediates production by realizing it as production. Consumption is the action through which the product becomes a product. Consumption also creates the need for new production. When you eat something, its gone, and a new commodity is required to be produced.

If it is clear that production offers consumption its external object, it is therefore equally clear that consumption ideally posits the object of production as an internal image, as a need, as drive and as purpose. It creates the objects of production in a still subjective form. No production without a need. But consumption reproduces the need

Production and consumption mediate one another. They are each other’s opposites, and at the same time, related in a unity. Production determines how consumption acts. Consumption also determines how production occurs.

Firstly, the object is not an object in general, but a specific object which must be consumed in a specific manner, to be mediated in its turn by production itself. Hunger is hunger, but the hunger gratified by cooked meat eaten with a knife and fork is a different hunger from that which bolts down raw meat with the aid of hand, nail and tooth. Production thus produces not only the object but also the manner of consumption, not only objectively but also subjectively. Production thus creates the consumer

The need which consumption feels for the object is created by the perception of it. The object of art – like every other product – creates a public which is sensitive to art and enjoys beauty. Production thus not only creates an object for the subject, but also a subject for the object. Thus production produces consumption (1) by creating the material for it; (2) by determining the manner of consumption; and (3) by creating the products, initially posited by it as objects, in the form of a need felt by the consume

The consumer is created by production. Consumption creates the need through which production can satisfy. The material basis for consumption is satisfied through production, which is always a specific production satisfying a specific need. There is never production in general, as that can only ever be an abstraction, just as there is no general consumption. A commodity creates its own use-base, just as an audience is created by the production of an art piece. Before that art, there was no audience for it.

each supplies the other with its object (production supplying the external object of consumption, consumption the conceived object of production);

...but also, each of them, apart from being immediately the other, and apart from mediating the other, in addition to this creates the other in completing itself, and creates itself as the other

Production and consumption have a mutual dependence. One can’t exist without the other. They supply the object for one another. Production gives the external object of consumption. Consumption gives the object of production (to be used).

Producers, however, do not freely consume their own product of labor. The product is outside them, external to them. They consume the products of their labor as mediated through distribution and exchange.