[lbo-talk] Michael Heinrich: The Current Financial Crisis

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Tue Jun 10 09:15:34 PDT 2008


Angelus Novus wrote:
>
> The passage quoted by Seth Ackerman is another reason
> why, as fascinating and suggestive as the Grundrisse
> may be, they cannot be understood as Marx's final word
> on *anything*.


>From a review in HM of a current German edition of the 'original' Vol.
III (prior to Engels's editing) it would seem that Marx's "final word" is awfully difficult to come by. My eyes went bad just as I was in the middle of the review and I haven't gotten back to it, hence the tentativeness of this post.

Now _if_, as I have been assuming, Marx's (unfinished) Critique of Political Economy is a scientific theory (in a sense of science & theory close to Jerry's restricted sense), _then_ of course a final word is/was a contradiction: there is no final word in science. (That is not to say that mere empirical research within a different framework can be very relevant to either expanding or contradicting the theory. I'm thinking of what seems to me the irrelevance of empirical research within any given historical period to the concepts of productive/unproductive labor, which is a high-order abstraction.)

Carrol



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