From: Rakesh Bhandari (bhandari@BERKELEY.EDU)
Date: Sat Sep 23 2006 - 15:42:25 EDT
On the missing books about foreign trade and the world market, I would refer to Quesnay's analysis of foreign trade (I had the pleasure of re-reading II Rubin on the Physiocrats as I was interested in why Duncan Foley referred to Adam's rather than Quesnay's fallacy). According to Rubin, Quesnay argued that free trade would stimulate expanded reproduction by raising agricultural prices in the singularly productive sector and depressing the prices of sterile mfgs. The point is that the analysis of foreign trade was theoretically controlled by the question of expanded reproduction. Even though he did not collect his comments in one place, Marx did in fact derive the necessity of foreign trade from the expanded reproduction of capital and demonstrate the multiple ways in which foreign trade can affect the expanded reproduction of capital. There is good evidence that Marx completed the theory of foreign trade from the theoretically controlled perspective of expanded reproduction. See here Tony Smith's and Grossman's writings. Even Enrique Dussel who (Fred notes) argues that there are fifteen missing books says that the essence of dependency can be found in the redistribution of value implicit in the formation of global prices of production. But this suggests the completeness of Marx's theoretical argument! Marx certainly did not write a book length empirical history of foreign trade (or landed property), but he abandoned the six book plan in which such a history was called for. But this does not mean that there is no empirical work to do at all. Quite the opposite. Given that Marx theoretically disclosed how foreign trade can affect the expanded reproduction of capital, we can then set study just this question empirically. Which is what Grossman attempted in his time as Carchedi has attempted in our time. So we have an open and always already incomplete book but Marx's Capital is not an open book--it is a self-enclosed and completed theory of its object. Rakesh
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