On Tue, 18 Mar 1997, andrew kliman wrote:
> Paul wrote: "Marx claimed to be uncovering the 'laws of
> motion' of capitalist society. "
> I'm saying that this phrase does not appear in the Preface
> to the 1st edition of *Capital*.
Quotation from on-line 1867 edn.
"And even when a society has got upon the right track for
the discovery of the natural laws of its movement -- and it
is the ultimate aim of this work, to lay bare the economic
law of motion of modern society -- it can neither clear by
bold leaps, nor remove by legal enactments, the obstacles
offered by the successive phases of its normal development."
What is Andrew talking about?
> And while we're at it, Marx did not want to dedicate *Capital* to Darwin.
> This myth was destroyed by Margaret Fay maybe 15-20 years ago.
Whatever the truth of that, there's no doubt that Marx had
great admiration for Darwin and his method: "Not only is a
death blow dealt here for the first time to 'Teleology' in
the natural sciences but their rational meaning is
empirically explained" (quoted in Rachels, Created from
Animals: The Moral Implications of Darwinism, Oxford, 1991).
Allin Cottrell