From: Andrew Brown (Andrew@LUBS.LEEDS.AC.UK)
Date: Tue Mar 23 2004 - 05:58:44 EST
Hi Jerry, Your question is eloquently and challegingly put. All your points are well taken. But at the end of the day, you are relying on a few letters to make a case, where you have a finished text, viz. Capital Vol. 1, telling you the opposite story. That is, the sections on the working day (and you don't mention primitive accumulation but this is also important) are there and carry rather more weight than a letter or two of Marx. An interpretation that makes sense of the intrinsic place of these aspects of 'Capital' is preferred to one that doesn't, don't you think? Marx's letters to which you refer indicate that some sections are longer than they would otherwise have been; they do not indicate the sections have no intrinsic place in the text. They do not even indicate that lengthening the sections was not in accord was the intrinsic structure (the 'underlying architechtonic') of 'Capital'. Rather, Marx would surely lengthen sections which could *legitimitely* be lengthened without doing injustice to that intrinsic structure? He would not add superfluous material, surely. But the real point is not about the interpretation of Marx, of course, it is about the role of empirical and historical material in theorising capitalism. It seems to me that systematic dialectics has, in arguing against the prevalent 'logical-historical' interpretation, bent the stick rather to far in the opposite direction, in seperating system and history. To grasp a system entails grasping how the system comes in to being just as much as it entails grasping how, once it has come into being, it 'posits its own presuppositions', don't you think? Another thought: what of the masses of historical detail in the Contribution to the Critique? Many thanks, Andy
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Mar 24 2004 - 00:00:01 EST