Michael Pollak wrote:
> I what to stress this is not Marx's fault in the least. This is a premise
he completely shares with mainstream economists. It is in fact the one
belief economists of all schools share no matter how heterodox.
Except that -- and pardon the capital letters, this is not intended to be shouting, but rather emphasis -- MARX DOES NOT SHARE THAT ASSUMPTION WITH MAINSTREAM ECONOMISTS.
The value-form analysis in Vol. I, Chapter One, is *NOT* a historical account of the emergence of money from barter.
It is a **logical derivation** of the necessity of money as the measure of abstract labor.
I've cited quotations from other works of Marx supporting this argument, unpublished manuscripts from the MEGA, secondary literature in German, etc. I don't want to bore people by busting out the same material again, but it's in the archives if you want to look it up.
Lot's of Marxists got this wrong and went with the "historical" interpretation of Engels and Kautsky. This was Ernest Mandel's interpretation in his _Marxist Economic Theory_.
Other Marxists, however, had the correct logical reading, for example, Paul Sweezy in _The Theory of Capitalist Development_.
With the expansion of the MEGA edition and the coming to light of many of Marx's preparatory manuscripts, the debate really does seem to support the "logical" interpretation against the "historical" one.
>From the beginning of page one of Vol. I up until the end of Vol. III, Marx is discussing **capitalist** societies, first at a high level of abstraction, and then with successive levels of concretization.
_Capital_ is not a **history** of capitalism.
There is rich historical material in _Capital_, for example on the working day or on the so-called primitive accumulation, but this material is illustrative. If you pay attention to the sequence of _Capital_, the illustrative historical chapters are always placed after the theoretical categories are introduced which they illustrate.