I'd meant, in my earlier post, to offer my kudos to Paul for bringing out the Sieber piece--an excellent service to Marxist scholars far and wide. Well done. I guess what I really was getting at is that I don't understand why Marx's Ricardian roots should be thought problematic. That he built upon what came before doesn't diminish his scientific achievement: what human being starts absolutely from scratch? Sraffa, Gramsci, Wittgenstein, Marx: what sets them apart from the rest of us is that they took nothing for granted, they subjected every premise to critical (and self-critical) scrutiny. But even they had to draw inspiration from the ideas they found on the table when they began their scientific and philosophical investigations. Then they had to evaluate these ideas, discard the bits that didn't withstand critical scrutiny, adopt and modify the bits that did. Can science progress in any other way? Many of the arguments that attempt to reconcile Marx's reaction to Sieber with interpretations that try to distance him from Ricardo seem to me to boil down to some variation of: "Marx was trying to be polite." That doesn't jibe with anything we know about his personality or his rhetorical style. And the suggestion that Marx didn't really grasp the extent to which he had broken from the classicals does a disservice to his critical powers. For what it's worth, I think he'd rather have been caught out in an error than have been accused of not fully understanding his own intellectual agenda. Gary -----Original Message----- From: Paul Zarembka [SMTP:zarembka@ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU] Sent: Friday, February 01, 2002 7:17 AM To: ope-l@galaxy.csuchico.edu Subject: [OPE-L:6491] RE: Re: N. Sieber on Ricardo and Marx mongiovg <mongiovg@stjohns.edu> said, on 01/31/02 [OPE-L:6473]: >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 Gary, I cannot gainsay our point. That is, while I am among those who defend the break between Ricardo and Marx, the Sieber episode is not consistent with it (David Smith's remark RE Marx on Wagner to read Sieber seems to me to reinforce the 1873 Afterword). On the other hand, there are alternative interpretations such as the one Jerry offered a year or more ago that Marx wanted to support someone who supported him (i.e., politics -- to which I objected at the time) or that Sieber's weaknesses paled next to his achievements as far as Marx was concerned (which is probably where I am for the time being). There is also the fact that Engels' Preface to the 4th Edition is perhaps clearer than Marx himself on Marx's achievement (see Engels on the history of chemistry as it relates to Marx) so that Marx may not have been fully aware of the extent of his own break from the classicals. I have wanted to get Sieber out in any Western language so that these problems can see the light of day, as well as helping more clearly understand the importance of Sieber for Russian marxism (both positive and negative effects). Paul ************************************************************************ Paul Zarembka, editor, RESEARCH IN POLITICAL ECONOMY at ********************* http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/PZarembka
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Sat Mar 02 2002 - 00:00:04 EST