Introduction: Reading the Grundrisse today—Totality and contradiction

Marx wrote the Grundrisse in the months after the crash of 1857, and left the notebooks unfinished. This Symposium reads them through two of their organizing concepts: totality and contradiction. In these papers, capital appears as a “moving contradiction” whose moments—production, distribution, exchange, consumption, and the natural and reproductive conditions on which they depend—form a unity that is also a site of conflict. Each locates a point where the logic of capital meets a limit specific to its object, a contradiction it keeps reproducing: nature and social reproduction, the ecological and affective costs of extractivism, fixed capital and dependency, financialization and international subordination, alienation, the totality of production, and species-being under artificial intelligence. Together, these seven papers take the incompleteness of the notebooks as a resource, positing that the questions Marx left open remain ones worth pursuing contemporaneously.