From: Rakesh Bhandari (bhandari@BERKELEY.EDU)
Date: Thu Aug 10 2006 - 09:16:52 EDT
Dear Rakesh Bhandari, Thanks very much for your response. I have no objection to your circulating my comments to anyone you think might be interested. Attached a couple of pieces which might help you understand where I am coming from - they are my introduction to a special issue of Max Weber Studies devoted to his Wirtschaftsgeschichte and his interest in economic history, from which my review of Takebayashi also comes. This Beiheft is currently completing copy-editing and will be available electronically in the next month or so. I appreciate that Marx's physical capacities were failing in the 1870s, but I would suggest that the problems I can see in the Zasulich drafts are continuous with those in the first edition of Capital and back to the Grundrisse, except they are much, much worse. A great deal of discussion of Marx seeks to compensate for this rather than recognize it for the patchwork that it in fact is. A brilliant patchwork, but a patchwork all the same. And the failure of Marx scholars to properly situate Marx in his own context, to read him as his contemporaries would have read him, to read what Marx himself read and most importantly, did not read, has dogged discussion of Marx's work through the decades. I can see what you mean with the letter you attach, but I find the entire setup laborious and limited. Granted there are VII sections enumerated, but it looks more or less like two books to me. Certainly Vols. II and III of Capital are bulky books, but that is because everything is included twice, more or less. Vol. II goes round and around a simple problem, and Vol. III is certainly more interesting, but still woolly and wordy. Since we have these big books I think there has been a tendency to think that several more of similar detail and extent could have been put together by Marx, if only he were able, but the kind of outline sketched in this 1868 letter would all have fitted into another volume rather shorter than the one published in 1867. Marx wrote an extraordinary amount, but much of it was repetition and variation, since that was just the way he wrote and thought things out. In case you were wondering, I find modern neo-Ricardians just as blinkered, so far as I am concerned I am with Jevons - Smith's Wealth of Nations was a brilliant work (heavily dependent on French work, not simply the Physiocrats) which the English Classicals derailed into arcane arguments about value and distribution which lead nowhere. Ricardo's own detailed arguments about value were superficially clear but internally muddled, as Malthus pointed out. Nobody took them very seriously for very long. My problem with Marx is that he picks up on the worst bits of Classical economics because it looks as though they provide the key to understanding "the laws of motion" of capitalism, a kind of internal mechanism of value creation. But this is a mechanism which, to use Steuart's metaphor, is like a clock which constantly goes wrong. Capitalism is certainly a system which produces both wealth and paradox, but this is not the way to an understanding of it. Max Weber was taught all the English stuff by Knies but he was chiefly influenced so far as economics goes by Menger's students, Böhm-Bawerk, Wieser at al. Although he was critical of their construction of an abstract "economic man", the GdS kicked off in 1914 with Bücher on stages, Schumpeter on the history of economics, and Wieser on the "new economics". Coupled with a stunning capacity to conduct detailed studies of agrarian labour relations, property forms in the ancient economy, the forms and functions of contemporary stock and commodity markets, land tenure, labour relations, the contemporary media - quite apart from all the more well-known studies from which his "sociology" was later constructed by others - Weber's insights into modern politics, economics and culture turned on the "problems of capitalism" in a way that retains its originality (though often misunderstood and inadequately appreciated). I agree that your summary of the Stedman Jones position is mistaken, although I have not yet read his newer work. When I last talked to him we were discussing the Communist Manifesto and he seemed a little hazy on the provenance of the translation they used for the Penguin edition. Anyway, it is a bit of a change for me to think about Marx, these days! Best wishes, Keith
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