From: Rakesh Bhandari (bhandari@BERKELEY.EDU)
Date: Fri Aug 04 2006 - 10:57:01 EDT
Hi Fred To respond productively I shall need time that I won't have until Monday. So please accept my delay, and I do hope that others discuss this question of the relationship of the six to four volume plan. Marx does say about this latter plan that the third volume is a study of the "capitalist process of a production taken as a WHOLE". The whole has been theorized, not only part of it with fifteen more books waiting to be written! Rakesh In Book I we analysed the phenomena which constitute the process of capitalist production as such, as the immediate productive process, with no regard for any of the secondary effects of outside influences. But this immediate process of production does not exhaust the life span of capital. It is supplemented in the actual world by the process of circulation, which was the object of study in Book II. In the latter, namely in Part III, which treated the process of circulation as a medium for the process of social reproduction, it developed that the capitalist process of production taken as a whole represents a synthesis of the processes of production and circulation. Considering what this third book treats, it cannot confine itself to general reflection relative to this synthesis. On the contrary, it must locate and describe the concrete forms which grow out of the movements of capital as a whole. In their actual movement capitals confront each other in such concrete shape, for which the form of capital in the immediate process of production, just as its form in the process of circulation, appear only as special instances. The various forms of capital, as evolved in this book, thus approach step by step the form which they assume on the surface of society, in the action of different capitals upon one another, in competition, and in the ordinary consciousness of the agents of production themselves.
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