From: Jurriaan Bendien (adsl675281@TISCALI.NL)
Date: Sun Oct 08 2006 - 10:15:00 EDT
I think Marx completed, at least in manuscript form, the analysis of capital in general which he projected, because - as I quoted - he considered that it was most important to get clear about the social meaning of capital, that was the priority, and from that all else followed. His book is indeed called "Das Kapital". The theory of foreign trade would presumably discuss the principles of that trade, which followed from the analysis of the capitalist mode of production and the theory of value. Initially, from the 16th century up to the 19th century - foreign trade had fueled original accumulation, but the development of capitalist production created new principles of foreign trade. Presumably Marx would have wanted to criticize the theories of foreign trade and colonialism by the political economists, in terms of how that trade actually occurred and who benefited from it, distinguishing between trade in money and capital and trade in commodities. For a useful study of the theories of the political economists, see e.g. Donald Winch, Classical political economy and colonies (1965) and by the same author, Riches and poverty : an intellectual history of political economy in Britain, 1750-1834 (1996). The theory of the world market would presumably empirically analyse the world economy in its real totality, i.e. the relations between nations who are increasingly integrated into a world market, and what the dynamics behind their trade were. (In 1900 Franz Mehring partly attempted to sketch such an analysis, in an article in Vorwärts, titled "Weltkrach und Weltmarkt. Eine weltpolitische Skizze"["World crash and world market. A worldpolitical sketch"). There were also various debates in the journal Die Neue Zeit. However, when Marx lived, the available data he could use for this were sparse. Many West European as well as US official institutions provided some estimates of exports and imports of goods, national income estimates as well as data on currency exchange, but there were no integrated accounts of national and international capital and currency flows. Consequently the world market project was in a sense beyond Marx at that time, even if he had had the time for it - he got as far as journalistic analyses (about 24 articles or so) and letters on the topic. In the 1970s and 1980s, there was a spate of Marxian analyses of the world market by Prokla authors like Busch, Neususs, Kohlmey, Schoeller, Seelow, Tiegel, Altvater and so on, but their work was never translated into English. Jurriaan
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