From: Rakesh Bhandari (bhandari@BERKELEY.EDU)
Date: Thu Aug 10 2006 - 09:09:22 EDT
Dear Rakesh Bhandari, Thanks for your interesting query which I found in my Sussex mailbox - that is however only a convenience address, I am an independent scholar in fact and this is the address you should use in future. I am intrigued by the idea that people still do discuss these issues. As far as answering your question goes, I would probably stand by the arguments I made in 1974, with some qualification. I think it would be true to say that from the later 1970s until last year I had looked at Marx's writings no more than two or three times - I find Max Weber a far more interesting analyst, of capitalism as well. However, last year I retranslated the Zasulich letters for Cambridge UP and I was shocked at what I read. I knew in the 1970s that Marx's analytic capacities waned, the Ethnographic Notebooks make this clear, but the Zasulich drafts just go round and around. Poorly structured, poorly argued. He refers to the French edition of Capital to conceal his change of mind on the universality of his analysis of capitalism, I have looked again at the material in the Shanin collection Late Marx but incline to the view that Marx refers to the French edition to effect this concealment, since, so far as I know, he does not revise the text in the same way for the second German edition. I am a bit hampered in all this since there is no French edition in any British library so far as I can tell (I have an online version now but it is the wrong edition, a reprint and not the original); the second edition is only in the British Library, not in Oxford or Cambridge; and there is no copy of the newer Gesamtausgabe in Oxford, my nearest source. I have the Dietz Werke but that is useless, it is the wrong edition of Capital and the editors have modernised the text - I do have a facsimile of the first edition and was surprised to see that in the Werke reprint of the preface to the first edition all emphases have gone and it has been reparagraphed. So that rather makes you think they would have done other things as well. So far as reading Capital goes, you need to use only the first and second German editions read against the (original) French edition. Anything else is a waste of time. The second German edition revises the structure and ordering of material (within chapters) quite heavily, drawing attention to the fact that the argument is not especially tight in the first place. (This is the sort of thing you latch on to as a translator searching for a cited passage - the text keeps on looking as though it is about to come out with the formulation you are looking for, and then it veers away and starts again). I have not had a chance to look at how the Gesamtausgabe deals with all this editorially, but hope to get to London this month and will go to the BL and take a look. In the 1980s I read a paper which argued very convincingly that Marx had intended there to be two volumes to Capital and that the two further volumes that Engels generated ran together duplicate material from the different attempts Marx made to complete the project, summarised in his own words some original material, and even in some cases wrote bridging sections of his own. One can argue of course about Engels' understanding, but if we are arguing about Marx's Capital there is in fact only one volume, in the three versions I note above. Marx certainly had all sorts of ideas about extending his work - most writers do - but the evidence, even from Grundrisse, is that he was never very good at organising his material in an effective way and so the one volume he did complete is the best he could do with all his plans. (Alfred Marshall had a similar problem!) I'd be interested in your reaction to these comments, and look forward to hearing from you, Keith Tribe -----Original Message----- From: Keith Philip Tribe [mailto:kt51@sussex.ac.uk] Sent: 08 August 2006 19:00 To: tess@dircon.co.uk Subject: Fwd: Grossman on Capital ----- Forwarded message from Rakesh Bhandari <bhandari@berkeley.edu> -- --- From: Rakesh Bhandari <bhandari@berkeley.edu> To: kt51@sussex.ac.uk Subject: Grossman on Capital Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2006 07:44:23 -0700 Dear Professor Tribe, I participate on a private list serve (OPE-L) dedicated to the discussion of Marx's political economy. I recently mentioned your piece on Marx's method from 1974. Strong objections have been expressed to the idea that Marx abandoned his six book plan; people are adamant that Capital is in fact a torso of a larger projected work. Enrique Dussel has even suggested that Marx completed only 1/16th of his project. I was wondering whether you would like to discuss these issues again. This was the last message which I wrote. I am wondering whether I have understood you correctly: 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 [Moseley] 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? ----- End forwarded message -----
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Thu Aug 31 2006 - 00:00:03 EDT