Gerald Levy (glevy@pratt.edu)
Sun, 17 Oct 1999 09:26:37 -0400 (EDT)
Re Jurriaan's [OPE-L:1489]:
I emphasized previously that Marx wrote of a "law of motion" rather than
"laws of motion". I chose to emphasize the singular -- Marx's own
expression -- because of the important *context* of this statement in
_Capital_.
Marx wrote in the "Preface to the First Edition" (with EMPHASIS added,
JL):
IT IS THE ULTIMATE AIM OF THIS WORK TO REVEAL THE ECONOMIC LAW
OF MOTION OF MODERN SOCIETY" (Penguin ed., p. 92)
Notes:
1) Marx very kindly has stated boldly what we often ask in advance of
writers, planners, etc. -- i.e. he has told us what his ***SUCCESS
CRITERIA*** is.
Thus, if he has been successful in revealing the economic law of
motion of modern society", then he has achieved his own stated "aim".
If not, then not.
2) It is unclear -- to me at least -- even though he wrote this statement
as a "Preface" to Capital, Volume 1, whether "this work" refers to:
a) Volume 1 of _Capital_;
b) All of _Capital_ (i.e. what he anticipated in 1867 to be the
completed version of _Capital_: all 3+ volumes in their final
form);
c) All 6 books in the "6-book-plan" (since the historical evidence
is unclear whether Marx still intended to write the other books and
saw the book on "Capital" as only the first book in that sequence).
3) Marx *never tells us* what the "economic law of motion of modern
society" is!
Nonetheless, some believe that the "law of motion" is:
a) a misnomer since there are instead "laws of motion" (I think that
Kautsky was the first one to present this interpretation);
b) the law of value (I believe, in context, that this might have been
the interpretation of Engels);
c) the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation (this appear to
have been the [early] position of Raya Dunayevskaya [Hi Ted! Hi
Andrew K!] in her early [mid-1940's] pamphlet _Outline of Marx's
Capital: Volume One_. For her, the the AGLCA represented, it
seems, the "law of development of capitalism" and that _"The law of
motion of capitalist society is therefore the law of its collapse_
[underlined in original, JL]);
d) the law of the tendency for the general rate of profit to decline,
as presented by Marx in the unfinished drafts of what was to become
Volume 3. My sense is that this is the interpretation of a number of
contemporary writers.
***** But, the bottom line is that Marx doesn't tell us what the
"economic law of motion of modern society" is and we therefore have no
way of determining whether he met his own "success criteria"*****!
This fact alone should give all those who view _Capital_ as a
"complete" work, pause for contemplation.
I apologize to Jurriaan if the above does not deal directly with the
thrust of his previous post, but I will return to discuss that subject
(including his listing of "laws of motion") if others want to discuss that
as well.
In solidarity, Jerry
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