From: jmilios@hol.gr
Date: Mon Jan 13 2003 - 23:23:49 EST
Chris, you ask: "Very importantly Marx completely ignored Engels request for historical illustration in his development of the value form. Two questions i) does not this support the 'systematic' reading of the argument? ii) why did not Marx explain to Engels why he ignored the request for history?" I understand your first question as rhetorical, and I agree with you. The second question raises the big issue of the differences between Marx's and Engels' approach. Anyway, Marx compendiously explained his position to Engels. I quote from their aforementioned correspondence: Engels writes to Marx on June 16, 1867: "Your philistine really is not accustomed to this kind of abstract thinking and will certainly not torment himself for the sake of the form of value. At most, you could provide rather more extensive historical evidence for the conclusions you have here reached dialectically, you could, so to speak, apply the test of history, although you have already said what was absolutely necessary in that respect; but you have so much material that you can surely still write quite a good excursus on it, which will by historical means demonstrate to the philistine the need for the development of money and the process by which this takes place". On June 22, 1867, Marx answers to Engels: "It is not only the philistines that I have in mind here, but young people, etc., who are thirsting for knowledge. Anyway, the issue is crucial for the whole book. Messieurs Economists have hitherto overlooked the very simple fact that the form: 20 yards of linen fabric = 1 coat is only the base of 20 yards of linen = £2, and thus that the simplest form of a commodity, in which its value is not yet expressed in its relation to all other commodities but only as something differentiated from its own natural form, embodies the whole secret of the money form and thereby, in nuce, of all bourgeois forms of the product of labour". John
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