---- 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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