From: Rakesh Bhandari (bhandari@BERKELEY.EDU)
Date: Fri Aug 04 2006 - 01:13:22 EDT
>At 22:38 01/08/2006, rakesh wrote: >>Another way of looking at this argument is provided by Allen Oakley. In his >>Making of Marx's Critical Theory he lays out three ways to relate Marx's >>six book plan to the four volumes of Capital. I think the last way >>is correct. >>That is, there was an important theoretical break and that Marx >>did realize a complete theory of his object. I know this is very >>controversial. >>I remember Michael Lebowitz's debate with Kenneth Lapides. >>Yours, Rakesh > >You may want to look at my Deutscher Lecture in the latest Historical >Materialism. Incidentally, I don't recall that as a 'debate'; it was >more like a contradiction. No, it wasn't; Yes, it was. > m I don't remember the specifics, but there is the possibility of talking at cross purposes. Marx certainly did not say all that needs to be said about wage labour, so I agree with you in many ways. One question though is whether Marx said what he meant to say about wage labour within the constraints of the actual plan of his work. So what was the plan of his work? What is the relation between the six volume and four volume plan? I think Tribe/Grossman are correct that the latter represents a break with the previous six volume plan. To see this we can't reduce Marx's debt to Quesnay to the reproduction schema only. This is what Fred has done, I think. The debt to Quesnay is present in the architectonic of of the three volumes of Capital as a whole. The first volume studies the production of the net product; the analysis of the net product depends on distinction between constant and variable capital, and the second volume focuses on the interdependence between the two productive departments of means of production and wage goods as realized in exchange; the third volume then studies the process of reproduction as a whole, including both the limits to that process of reproduction (FROP) and the integration of the new elements-- the credit mechanism, the other forms of capital (commercial and banking) and landed property. Marx moves successfully from an abstracted study of the production of the net product to a theory of the reproduction of capital as a whole. The third volume is dynamic and concrete, and the dis-simulating surface appearances of capitalist society (e.g. the trinity formula) are indeed theoretically explained. Marx's Capital is thus a theoretical whole, not a torso. But to say this is not to say that more need not be said about wage labor or credit or landed property or the world market. Marx did however complete the study of the very object his study created--an "ideal-typical" capitalist mode of production. But what is the nature of this ideal type? Weberian or not? What do we think of the Unonist interpretation? Or Leswak Nowak's? These are of course fundamental questions which I think the archive will show have been understudied on OPE-L. In many ways this is the fundamental question about Marx's method--what is the relationship between the six and four volume plans? Which one of Oakley's possibilities is correct? Rakesh
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