michael a. lebowitz (mlebowit@sfu.ca)
Fri, 22 Oct 1999 21:23:26 -0700
At 11:39 PM 10/22/1999, paul wrote:
>Jerry and Mike both respond to the same sentence of mine concerning the
>Grundrisse relative to Capital. Mike asks "Do you think that the
>Grundrisse was simply notebooks in a building process toward Capital?"
>[OPE-L 1549]. Jerry's reaction is below my signature.
>
>Mike, the Grundrisse are notebooks, they were NOT published by Marx nor
>even intended for publication, and the subject matters discussed almost
>always appear somewhere in Capital (4 volumes). How is it possible to
>think these notebooks are not a building process toward Capital?
Paul,
Given that when Marx wrote those notebooks, they were part of the 6-book
project (no one disputes this!), when I asked if you thought they were part
of a ilding process _simply_ toward Capital, I was asking if you believed
there was nothing in the Grundrisse that related to anything _other_ than
Capital. Sorry if I was obtuse.
>If I may offer an intepretation, I think the Mike and Jerry sense that
>Marx is progressively jettisoning Hegel as he climbs theoretically and are
>calling "Marx, come back" [allusion to the old movie "Shane"]. I notice
>that the chapter in Mike's book Beyond Capital "The One-sideness of
>Capital" STARTS from Lenin's famous quote on the importance of reading
>Hegel to understand Marx (reading this quote with its obvious rendering,
>without recognizing that Lenin may very well have seen what Marx was
>struggling AGAINST).
Nice allusion, Paul, but I think if you read Lenin's Philosophical
Notebooks (Volume 38 of the Collected Works), you'll see that Lenin's
famous "aphorism" was a conclusion and summing up rather than an isolated
aphorism. In fact, for you to make this statement makes me wonder if you
have read this volume.
>
>So, let's raise the temperature of this discussion a bit (even for Volume
>1):
>
>"In theoretical work as in art, I value only the simple, the tranquil and
>the bold. This is why, for example, the famous first volume of Marx's
>Kapital, with its profuse rococo ornamentation in the Hegelian style, now
>seems an abmondation to me (for which, from the Party standpoint, I must
>get 5 years' hard labor and 10 years' loss of civil rights....)"
> -- Rosa Luxemburg, 3/8/17 from prison.
>
A very nice quote. What's the source? Also, what's your point--- that
revolutionaries shouldn't read Vol.I?
cheers,
mike
Michael A. Lebowitz
Economics Department
Simon Fraser University
Burnaby, B.C., Canada V5A 1S6
Office: Phone (604) 291-4669
Fax (604) 291-5944
Home: Phone (604) 872-0494
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