[lbo-talk] Marxology question

[andie nachgeborenen]

No, the point that these notes predated Cap 1 and were put together by Engels in an awesome and brilliant job of editing -- you have to see what a Marx manuscript looks like to appreciate the magnitude of the achievement, isn't to dismiss them as some hack job chunked together by a second rater. Rather, because they were unfinished, the ideas are more or less by definition less worked out; because they are earlier than Cap 1, they do not fully reflect the insights Marx had attained when he got around to actually finishing that book. Engels did a Herculean job of making two books out of the notes (Caps 2 and 3) and trying to do this in a way that reflected the ideas of Cap 1 as best he could without distorting what Marx actually wrote too much,  but he had to strike a lot of compromises and in the end what he had to work with was a bunch of unfinished and somewhat underdeveloped notes. While the notes and the books Engels made of them reflect "mature"

 thought in a way that, say, the Paris Manuscripts don't, they are incomplete and less articulated than Cap 1. They can't be ignored in understanding Marx, any more than can the Theories of Surplus Value or the Grundrisse, but Cap 1 has to take precedence as reflecting Marx's considered views as stated in a form he found satisfactory and including his final insights into the subjects. Cap 2 and 3 are extremely suggestive, rich, and interesting, but should be treated as somewhat tentative. Therefore it is correct to say, so understood, that they are not theoretically up to the level of Cap 1, you wouldn't expect them to be. 

I don't see, btw, how there is any contradiction between saying there's a transformation problem and saying that the deviation of price from value is not a theoretical defect but an essential feature of the capitalist economy. The second statement suggests that there is a transformation problem, to show that the deviation isn't a defect.

--- On Sat, 8/9/08, Shane Mage <shmage at pipeline.com> wrote:


> From: Shane Mage <shmage at pipeline.com>
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Marxology question
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Date: Saturday, August 9, 2008, 2:55 PM
> 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
> 
> 
> 
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