On Aug 9, 2008, at 7:32 AM, negative potential wrote:
>
> 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.
The suggestion that vols. 2 and 3 are based on less "mature" materials and really represent Engels's animadversions rather than Marx's mature thought is nonsense. It suggests that Marx and his collaborator Engels did no theoretical work for the last 15 years of the life of the greatest theorist of the century and that for the next decade Engels was no more than a copy-editing hack.
> 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.
Except that Marx in vol.1 declares that the deviations of price from value are "no defect" but essential to a market economy, leaving the analysis of those deviations to the later, less abstract, volumes.
Shane Mage
"Thunderbolt steers all things...it consents and does not consent to be called Zeus."
Herakleitos of Ephesos