[lbo-talk] Marxology question

negative potential fuerdenkommunismus at yahoo.com
Sun Aug 10 06:30:36 PDT 2008


andie nachgeborenen wrote:


> 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 overlap in part with the unpublished (well, now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

Andie, you are confusing the 1861-1863 manuscripts, from which the Theories of Surplus Value are taken, with the 1863-1865 manuscripts from which the "Results of the Immediate Process of Production" (the so-called "unpublished sixth chapter" of Capital) and Engel's sources for Volume 3 are taken (but not Volume 2; for that, Engels used a number of later manuscripts).


> the manuscripts are a total miss, illegible
> palimpsests. It's amazing that Engels was able to
put > together anything out of those notes.

And just think, the people working on the MEGA2 edition are also combing through all of that illegible scribble-scrabble! That is indeed a heroic task.

Doug Henwood wrote:


> But it's not just a matter of chronology, but of
> scope. The credit system is a much larger-scale
thing > than simple commodity production and exchange.

Oh yes, absolutely, credit and finance are central to Marx's analysis. The main failure of traditional Marxists is an excessive focus on the sphere of production as the "real" economy, and viewing money and finance as derivative spheres.

That is, in fact, one of Marx's core innovations: a break with the pre-monetary value theory of the classical political economists, and an understanding of value as a specific determinate form taken by human labor in a society where production is conducted for exchange.

Unfortunately, this was insufficiently thematized in the classical Marxist tradition, which is why you have all this mischief of viewing "simple commodity production" as a historical stage of society, rather than a logical abstraction.


> Could you expand on this? It sounds interesting, but
> I'm not sure what you're saying.

Well, for one thing, it relates to what I just wrote: commodities never exchange at their "values", since "value" is not an empirically existing category, nor is "simple commodity production". The first chapter of Vol. I is a logical derivation of money from the form of commodity, not a historical account of an actually existing society.

"Abstract labor" is a relation of effective social validity consummated in exchange. The exchange process mediates the relationship of various acts of concrete labor to the total social labor of society. The question of whether the labor expended upon the production of a commodity was "socially necessary" from the perspective of society is contingent upon it finding a buyer.


>From this perspective, the idea of converting value
into price is completely superfluous, since value is not some tangible entity, but rather an analytical category existing at an *extremely* high level of abstraction from actually-existing empirical reality.

And this is where I think chronology plays a role; Marx's mature critique of political economy represents on the one hand a scientific revolution that breaks with the field of classical political economy by working out an analysis of a form of society where the reproduction of society is mediated by money. On the other hand, there are still passages in Marx's work where he formulates things in terms that remain trapped within the field of classical political economy (such as the passages where it seems as if abstract labor is a physical quantity, although some charitable interpreters, such as I.I. Rubin, suggest that this is merely done for the sake of pedagogical simplification).

To the extent that the manuscript that forms the basis for Vol. 3 is the oldest, concepts like the transformation of value into price, or the so-called tendency of the rate of profit to fall, have to be considered in this context.

(note to andie nachgeborenen, as you are also a critic of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall: in the book by Heinrich I am translating, as well as in his more academic book _Die Wissenschaft vom Wert_, he formulates a mathematical critique of the so-called tendency of the rate of profit to fall. Heinrich's undergraduate education was in math and physics.)

On the side, I am also translating an essay by a bright fellow named Ingo Elbe that offers a historical-theoretical sketch of the "Neue Marx-Lektüre" that emerged in West Germany in the 1970s. Adorno students like Hans-Georg Backhaus and Helmut Reichelt kickstarted an attempt to reconstruct Marx's critique of political economy, free of both the dogmatic orthodoxy of Second/Third International Marxism, as well as of the historicist-humanist orientation of Western Marxism. This is the theoretical background of the contemporary "value-form" approach of figures like Postone and Chris Arthur.



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