From: Jerry Levy (Gerald_A_Levy@MSN.COM)
Date: Sun Oct 09 2005 - 14:47:09 EDT
Hi Hanno, The passage >>> "In our description of how production relations are converted into entities and rendered independent in relation to the agents of production, we leave aside the manner in which the interrelations, due to the world-market, its conjunctures, movements of market-prices, periods of credit, industrial and commercial cycles, alternations of prosperity and crisis, appear to them as overwhelming natural laws that irresistibly enforce their will over them, and confront them as blind necessity. We leave this aside because the actual movement of competition belongs beyond our scope, and we need present only the inner organisation of the capitalist mode of production, in its ideal average, as it were." <<< is _very_ consistent with the passage I called your attention to: >>> "The phenomena under investigation in this chapter assume for their full development the credit system and competition on the world market, the latter being the very basis and living atmosphere of the capitalist mode of production. These concrete forms of capitalist production, however, can be comprehensively depicted only after the general nature of capital is understood; it is therefore outside the scope of this work to present them -- they belong to a possible continuation." <<< (Penguin ed., Vol. 3, Ch. 6, Section 2, p. 205). Note that in both passages he explicitly and unambiguously states that the study of *competition* lies beyond the scope of _Capital_. Additional references to a "possible continuation" on competition appear in Vol 3, Ch. 10, about 8 paragraphs before the end of the chapter (p. 298 in Penguin ed.) and Ch . 18, about 9 paragraphs before the end of the chapter (in a para. that begins (3); p. 426 in Penguin ed.). Given the above, there is every reason to believe that the scope of _Capital_ was limited, like the _Grundrisse_, to the general nature of capital (capital in general). In solidarity, Jerry
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