[OPE-L:7133] Re: Frederick Engels at Highgate Cemetary -- March l7, l883

From: gerald_a_levy (gerald_a_levy@msn.com)
Date: Wed May 08 2002 - 19:05:41 EDT


Re Chris's [7l30]:

> strongly supports the GLA solution, which shows increasing wealth at one
> pole and increasing misery at the other, as its result.

Hi Chris.
Given Marx's planned structure for _Capital_,  how could the "economic
law of motion of modern society"  have been revealed in Volume One?
That is,  how could Marx have thought that  the "law of motion"   would be
revealed at the level of abstraction of Volume One  where the process of
capitalist production is considered prior to an exposition of the process of
capitalist circulation and the process of capitalist production as a whole?

_If_ Marx _did_ think that the "law of motion" could be revealed in Volume
One then that might strongly suggest that _Capital_ was a less consistent
systematic dialectical presentation than even most VFT writers  have
suggested, no?

>  I do not think this is entirely true for a number of reasons.

I agree that, on the whole, my "climax" argument was not all that
convincing, but your reasons raise even more questions:

> 1. the chapter on colonies in V1 is an anti-climax, almost certainly to
> confuse the censor.

What is the evidence that the chapter on colonies was so placed for
that reason?  I'm guessing that you must be aware of some pretty strong
evidence otherwise you wouldn't have written that it was included and
become the last chapter of VI "almost certainly"  to confuse the [German]
censors.

> 2. The true climax is brought forward to V1,namely the historical tendency
> stuff.

The "historical tendency stuff" ?  That's not _a_ [singular] climax.

> 3. Marx's method is not linear but involves transitions to more concrete
> and detailed explorations of what had already been done abstractly. So it
> is not clear in these circumstances where any 'climax' is.

On the whole, I agree.

> Lukacs said the  whole of Capital is in ch 1 sec 4.

Do you agree with Lukacs that the "whole of Capital" is in the section on
"The Fetishism of the Commodity and its Secret"?

> So I think the details after the LFRP do not contain any sort of climax.

The "details after the LFRP" include the greater bulk of Volume 3. If
it is misleading to call the LFRP a  "climax", then  isn't it even _more_
misleading to suggest that the remainder of Volume 3 -- which concerns
mostly the distribution of surplus value -- "details"?

Moreover, I think also that an  argument could be made that since a rather
large purpose in writing _Capital_ was to critique political economy that
Part Seven -- Chapters 48-5l was a "climax" of sorts.  Of course, the actual
ending, Ch. 52,  was *very* anti-climatic but I have suggested previously
how  that  Chapter should be viewed not as a "climax" but as a "transition"
-- in  true Hegelian fashion -- to the next Book.

In solidarity, Jerry



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