mongiovg@stjohns.edu (Mongiovi Gary, [6500]) said, on 02/01/02: >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? Did Lavosier 'build' on phlogistic chemistry? I don't think so. Engels in his 'Preface' to Capital, Volume 2, posed the question of what separates Marx from the classical economists, i.e., "what is there new in Marx's utterances on surplus-value?". To answer that question, first he recalls the theoretical revolution Lavoisier produced in chemistry through the discovery of a new chemical element -- oxygen. Phlogistic theorists Priestly and Scheele had produced the fact of oxygen without recognizing what they had, while Lavoisier produced the new category, i.e., discovered the new element, and so placed "all chemistry, which in its phlogistic form had stood on its head, squarely on its feet". Engels then says that Marx stands in the same revolutionary relationship to his predecessors in classical economics. While the fact of "that part of the value of products which we now call surplus-value had been ascertained long before Marx", Marx saw that he had to explain this fact. And, therefore, Marx first "had to find out what value was". ... >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. I agree and such a reconciliation is not where I'm going with this. >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. I'm unsure of this one and it seems to be rather contradictory to your feeling that Marx "built on" Ricardo. If his distance from Ricardo is not all that great -- cf, Lenin's reading, "Adam Smith and David Ricardo, by their investigations of the economic system, laid the foundations of the labor theory of value. Marx continued their work; he provided a proof of the theory and developed it consistently" -- then Marx's 'critical power are not so very extraordinary. Engels' was writing two years after Marx's death and he did have an opportunity to get some 'distance'. But the question cannot be fully answered by such speculations, but rather by our own work in understanding and developing marxist (class) theory. Paul ************************************************************************ Paul Zarembka, editor, RESEARCH IN POLITICAL ECONOMY at ********************* http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/PZarembka
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