[lbo-talk] Trinity Formula, Corrected

Angelus Novus fuerdenkommunismus at yahoo.com
Wed Apr 25 06:05:26 PDT 2012


A comrade of mine did a cut-and-paste job on his blog to correct Engels' mangled editing of the Trinity Formula in Capital Vol. III.

That's actually a pretty good idea, well-suited to the Internet era.

Here's the link:

https://reificationofpersonsandpersonificationofthings.wordpress.com/2012/04/24/marxs-version-of-the-trinity-formula/

Michael Heinrich mentions the following in Engels’ Edition of the Third Volume of Capital and Marx’s Original Manuscript: "At this stage, a serious error of Engels has to be mentioned. Marx wanted to begin his seventh chapter, “Revenues (Income) and their Sources,” with “1) The Trinity Formula.” Engels believed he had found three independent fragments concerning this point, two smaller ones which he labelled I and II, and a longer one, labelled III. This last fragment also had a gap, which Engels pointed out to the readers. As Larissa Miskewitsch and Witali Wygodski (1985) managed to show after an exact analysis of the manuscript even before the MEGA volume was published, these are not three independent fragments: The fragments labelled I and II by Engels form a continuous text which exactly fills the gap in fragment III." Yet I haven’t come across any English editions of The Trinity Formula that rectify this problem. This is where I step in with power of cut and paste. Unfortunately, I lack the  the ability to correct all the translation errors. However,  I can point out that the translation I am using from Marxists.org translates: (1) verdinglichung as “the conversion of social relations into things” instead of reification. (2) Versachlichung in ways such as “production relations are converted into entities” instead of objectification/reification.



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