Roman Rosdolsky, The Making of Marx's Capital. London: Pluto Press, 1977
I haven't read it in a while, but my recollection is that the notes that form the basis of vols 2 and 3 overlap in part with the unpublished (well, now published, but never as a finished product) Theories of Surplus Value, and these date from the mid 1850s (before the 1859 Introduction to the Critique of Pol Econ, an early summary distillation of the results that were published in Capital, Vol. 1 in 1867) to the mid 1860s. Marx hoped to return to the notes and work up Capital 2 and 3 to a level with 1, but never did.
Someone is supposed to have asked him when his complete works would be published. "Wenn Sie geschrieben werden," When they are written, he said bitterly. But he was wrong about that, as Cap 3 shows, Lots were published though never written.
You think I jest, but I have seen and handled some some Marx's manuscripts, earlier ones, when I was thinking about attempting a critical edition of the Paris manuscripts of 1844, a project long abandoned (this was like 1981), and one reason that I abandoned the project is that the manuscripts are a total miss, illegible palimpsests. It's amazing that Engels was able to put together anything out of those notes.
Given the history of these writings, which are Engels' as much as Marx's in a way that Cap 1 is not, it's pure Marx, and the unfinished and incomplete state in which Engels found them, and the fact that they predate the more considered results of Cap 1, the weight that has been put on them, especially the crises theory sketches in Cap 3, is probably mistaken. The ideas are undeveloped and unclear, Marx's commitment to them is very uncertain; they represent Engels' judgment (of course he was in a the best position after Marx to know) that these were not mere sketches like the Theories of Surplus Value but a semi-complete book draft.
However, the use of the tendency of rate of profit to fall, for example, as a sort of Marxist litmus test, or the desperate attempts to figure out how it is supposed to work and whether some version of it might be true, is probably misguided unless you think the idea is plausible on wholly independent grounds.
--- On Sat, 8/9/08, negative potential <fuerdenkommunismus at yahoo.com> wrote:
> From: negative potential <fuerdenkommunismus at yahoo.com>
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Marxology question
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Date: Saturday, August 9, 2008, 6:32 AM
> SA wrote:
>
> > As I understand it, Vol. 3 of Capital was edited by
> > Engels on the basis of Marx's notes and published
> in
>
> > 1894. So do we know more or less in what period Marx
>
> > wrote those notes?
>
> The manuscript that forms the basis for Vol. 3 is
> actually the chronologically *oldest* of the
> manuscripts for the three volumes. So in that sense,
> it is theoretically not up to the level of the
> monetary theory of value developed by Marx in chapter
> one of Vol. 1. This raises a lot of interesting
> problems/questions concerning issues such as, for
> example, the "transformation problem", since the
> idea
> of a conversion of value into production prices seems
> a bit incompatible with a conception of abstract labor
> as a "real abstraction" consummated in exchange.
>
> There is an older article by Michael Heinrich in
> _Science & Society_ that deals with Engels'
> editorship
> of Vol. 3:
>
> http://www.oekonomiekritik.de/303Engels%20Edition%20Engl.htm
>
>
>
>
>
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