[lbo-talk] completely confused?

Richard Harris rhh1 at clara.co.uk
Tue Sep 5 13:28:14 PDT 2006


From: Angelus Novus Subject: p.s. (Re: [lbo-talk] completely confused?

I forgot the Notes on Wagner.

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You must not forget the Paris Manuscripts. I'm impressed by the claim that many of Marx's distinctive themes are first worked out in it. I think Margaret Fay makes a compelling case that the Manuscripts are a critical response to Adam Smith: http://home.freeuk.net/lemmaesthetics/

Similarly, I think Oishi shows that Marx's critique of Ricardo was achieved in the Poverty of Philosophy: http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~mu3t-oois/rm.html

i.e., these two texts are the foundations upon which the Critique of Political Economy was constructed.

However, due to MEGA2 I now find Capital much more difficult to make sense of. I was once almost persuaded by Rosdolsky about how the text of Capital was generated and fitted together. But James D White's account of book two has left me unsure what to think. As I can't read German, I cannot just look at the manuscripts in the emerging MEGA2 and make up my own mind. I'm working on the German, though.

I also find that both Cyril Smith and Paresh Chattopadhay make compelling points in their readings of Marx. Yet both disagree in key areas, such as whether Marx was an historical materialist. Both seem to agree in telling me that I cannot rely on the current English translations in key places. I can at least read Capital I in French. And it seems to me that in Marx's French edition there are distinct changes of emphasis from the text I am used to. So I'm persuaded that there might be something behind translation quibbles.

So I am less clear about what the book Capital contains than I have ever been. Michael Heinrich's paper on Engel's editing of Volume III is yet another work that has left me feeling that I do not yet know what Marx actually wrote. All this feels uncannily parallel to the world of Biblical and classical text criticism. I'd really like a scholarly edition of Capital with a critical apparatus.

And I want to see those notes Marx made on the history of the world and the full Ethnological Notebooks (I though comrade David N Smith was going to get them to us in 1996. Does anyone know what is happening?)

Keep well, comrades

Richard



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