On Jul 14, 2010, at 7:51 AM, Angelus Novus wrote:
>
> Engels did a lot of mischief, because he didn't just compile Marx's
> manuscript (which was actually the oldest of all the manuscripts,
> the French edition of _Capital_ Vol. I being the most up to date),
> but really functioned as a sort of co-author. For more on this, see
> this article from Science and Society:
>
> http://www.oekonomiekritik.de/303Engels%20Edition%20Engl.htm
>
Mr. Heinrich, in that article, questions Engels's ability to
understand Marx's theoretical approach to Capitalism--a theoretical
work in which for forty years (Engels was dealing with political
economy *before* Marx) he had been intimately involved. As for his
own level of understanding he gives us this critique of Engels:
"He cites an incidental remark made by Marx to prove that this was also Marx's opinion ("it is quite appropriate to regard the values of commodities as not only theoretically but also historically prius to the prices of production", Capital Vol. III, p.896).
Marx and Engels were merely stating the obvious. Capitalist production (commodity production using wage-labor), and therefore the value form, has existed for as long as the monetary economy itself even though its generalization, as the capitalist *mode of production* , is a very recent phenomenon. "Prices of Production," entirely premised on equal rates of return to all capitals, meanwhile are an abstraction within an abstraction--they are meaningful only insofar as the system is characterized by perfect competition (the absence of barriers to the immediate flow of capital from less profitable to more profitable forms of enterprise). Under all the contemporary forms (monopolistic and/or oligopolistic, corporate and/or statified) of capitalism, actual prices deviate much more from "prices of production" than the latter do from "labor-time values."
That is quite enough reason not to replace Marx/Engels with Marx/ Heinrich.
Shane Mage
"All things are an equal exchange for fire and fire for all things, as goods are for gold and gold for goods."
Herakleitos of Ephesos, fr, 90