[OPE-L:6487] Re: N. Sieber on Ricardo and Marx

From: gerald_a_levy (gerald_a_levy@msn.com)
Date: Thu Jan 31 2002 - 20:24:26 EST


---- Original Message -----

From: "Smith, David Norman" <emerald@ku.edu>
Subject: RE: [OPE-L:6473] Re: N. Sieber on Ricardo and Marx

Actually, in his 1879 notes on Wagner, Marx cites Sieber as a source of
insight into the DIFFERENCE between Marx's views and Ricardo's:  "Mr. Wagner
could have acquainted himself with the difference between Ricardo and me not
only from CAPITAL but (if he knew Russian) from Sieber's work..."

About the vexed question of Marx & Ricardo more generally:  Though there are
plainly many other dimensions to this vexed question that merit attention,
it's hard to gainsay the significance of Marx's difference from Ricardo over
the very DEFINITION of value.  As Marx writes in Capital, the "springpunkt"
of his own originality vis-à-vis value is that he construes value as
abstract labor; whereas, for Ricardo and Smith, among many others, value is
conceived as labor pure and simple.  "Ricardo's investigations are concerned
exclusively with the MAGNITUDE OF VALUE," as Marx writes in Zur Kritik der
politischen Ökonomie (1859) -- not, that is, with the SUBSTANCE of value.
"For the rest," he continues, "the bourgeois form of labour is regarded by
Ricardo as the eternal natural form of social labour." (See the Progress
Publishers edition, Ryazanskaya translation, 1970, p. 60).

 These, I'd say, are pretty fundamental differences.

 David Smith

 -----Original Message-----
From: mongiovg
To: ope-l; Paul Zarembka
Cc: David Smith; James White
Sent: 1/31/02 12:46 PM
Subject: RE: [OPE-L:6473] Re: N. Sieber on Ricardo and Marx

Doesn't Marx, in his Afterward to the Second German Edition of Capital, more
or less endorse Sieber's view of the connection between Marx and Ricardo?
However slippery Marx's grasp of Russian may have been, he understands
Sieber to have posited a continuity between Marx and Ricardo, and in
referring to  Sieber Marx's tone is unambiguously approving.  I have been
criticized for overstating the affinity of Marx and Ricardo, and I take the
point. But surely it is a mistake to deny that there was a substantial
continuity esp. in light of Marx's own acknowledgment of it?

Gary



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