55.Heinrich, op. cit, pp. 220–33 and in particular in the summarizing paragraphs, p. 250f.
56.Robert Kurz, Geld ohne Wert: Grundrisse zu einer Transformation der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie (Berlin: Horlemann Verlag, 2012). Roswitha Scholz, Differenzen der Krise – Krise der Differenzen: die neue Gesellschaftskritik im globalen Zeitalter und der Zusammenhang von ‘Rasse’, Klasse, Geschlecht und postmoderner Individualisierung (Berlin: Horlemann Verlag, 2005). Scholz and Kurz were married to each other.
57.Historisch-kritisches Wörterbuch des Marxismus (see Wolfgang Fritz Haug, Historisch-kritisches Wörterbuch des Marxismus (Hamburg: Argument, 1994). The work has reached Volume 8:1, but much remains. Wolfgang Fritz Haug, Hightech-Kapitalismus in der grossen Krisen (Hamburg: Argument, 2012).
58.Haug’s latest introduction to Capital is Wolfgang Fritz Haug, Neue Vorlesungen zur Einführung ins Kapital (Hamburg: Argument, 2005). Heinrich’s shorter introduction to Capital is Heinrich 2012. So far, two volumes of the more comprehensive reading guides have been published: Michael Heinrich, Wie das Marxsche Kapital lessen?, vol. I, (Stuttgart: Schmetterling Verlag, 2008) and Michael Heinrich, Wie das Marxsche Kapital lessen?, vol. II (Stuttgart: Schmetterling Verlag, 2013). Johan Fornäs, Capitalism: A Companion to Marx’s Economic Critique (London and New York: Routledge, 2013). Fredric Jameson, Representing ‘Capital’: A Reading of Volume One (London: Verso, 2011). David Harvey, A Companion to Marx’s Capital (London: Verso, 2010) and David Harvey, A Companion to Marx’s Capital: Volume 2 (London: Verso, 2013). Harvey’s lectures can be found on the Internet. Andrew Kliman, Reclaiming Marx’s ‘Capital’: A Refutation of the Myth of Inconsistency (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007).
59.Mark Moiseevitch Rozental, Die dialektische Methode der politischen Ökonomie von Karl Marx (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1973). See above all pp. 311–20.
60.Heinrich, Die Wissenschaft vom Wert, pp. 144–8.
61.The sixth thesis on Feuerbach, CW 5, p. 7.
62.‘Every beginning …’, MEGA II/6, p. 65, CW 35, p. 7.
63.‘Ergänzungen zum ersten Band des “Kapitals”’, MEGA II/6, pp. 22f. Cf. also the publisher’s ‘Einleitung (Introduction)’, ibid., p. 27*.
64.‘mode of existence of value’, ibid., pp. 83 and 60 respectively. In the first edition it reads: ‘Wenn wir künftig das Wort ‘Werth’ ohne weitere Bestimmung brauchen, so handelt es sich immer vom Tauschwert’ (When we use the word ‘value’ below without a more precise determination, it always concerns exchange value). MEGA II/5, p. 19. It is likely this sentence that made Fornäs remark that the distinction is perhaps slightly confusing; Fornäs 2013, 32). The bandying about of the terms ‘use value’, ‘exchange value’ (or ‘value form’) and ‘value’ continue throughout the entire first chapter of Capital. See in particular MEGA II/6, pp. 80–98, CW 35, pp. 58–78.
65.The Aristotle quote, ibid., pp. 91 and 69 respectively.
66.On the history and continued topicality of the concepts of form, substance, and content, see Sven-Eric Liedman, Stenarna i själen: form och materia från antiken till våra dagar (Stockholm: Bonniers, 2006). On Aristotle there, pp. 67–94. Among later interpreters, Gareth Stedman Jones has called attention, though briefly, to the significance of the concepts of form, substance, and content in Capital. Jones, Karl Marx, p. 390
67.The twofold nature of labour, MEGA II/6, pp. 75, CW, pp. 35, 51. The quote reproduced is from Revelation (King James Version). Capital, MEGA II/6, pp. 115f, CW 35, p. 97.
68.The commodity ‘an object outside us’, pp. 69 and 45 respectively.
69.‘übernatürlich’ in the original, p. 89. ‘Non-natural’ in CW 35, p. 67.
70.‘Transubstantiation’, pp. 133 and 117 respectively.
71.Capital ‘is not a thing …’, MEW 25, p. 822, CW 37, p. 801. Marx’s own corresponding text can be found in MEGA II/4.2, p. 843. Even if it is less well organized than Engels’s editing, it is for the matter itself more illustrative and the nature/society opposition is more sharply marked.
72.‘Realm of freedom’, ibid., pp. 828 and 807 respectively. In his editing, Engels followed Marx’s manuscript word for word regarding the realms of freedom and necessity, MEGA II/4.2, p. 838.
73.Marx on freedom, equality, and so on, MEGA II/6, p. 191, CW 35, p. 186.
74.‘a dead dog’, MEGA II/6, p. 709, CW 35, p. 19. The relationship between Marx and Hegel has constantly been controversial. Robert Fine, who speaks of Hegel as ‘Marx’s doppelgänger’, makes an attempt at moving Marx much closer to Hegel; Robert Fine, Political Investigations: Hegel, Marx, Arendt (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 79–96. When Marx said that Hegel’s dialectic was the antithesis of his own, he was simply not speaking the truth, Fine maintains; Hegel did not build the kind of idealistic constructions Marx alleged he did at all. Fine obviously does not take the essential differences between Marx and Hegel into sufficient consideration, for example that Hegel’s schematizations are missing in Marx and that there is a structural difference between Hegel’s idealism and Marx’s materialism. Nor is there any equivalent to Marx’s striving after exactitude in Hegel.
75.‘with the precision of natural science’, MEGA II/2, p. 101, CW 29, p. 263.
76.‘Senior’s “Last Hour”’, MEW II/6, pp. 232–6, CW 35, pp. 233–8. On the portion of necessary work time in the whole, MEGA II/6, pp. 219, CW 35, pp. 218f.
77.The examples are later developed in the chapters on the rate of surplus value and on the working day, ibid., pp. 221–303 and 221–307 respectively.
78.The law on the mass of surplus value, ibid., pp. 304 and 308 respectively.
79.On the transition from value to price, MEW 25, pp. 164–75, CW 37, pp. 153–65. ‘The cost price’ and ‘Our present analysis …’, MEW 25, pp. 175f, CW 37, p. 164.
80.Marx’s original version in MEGA II/4.2, pp. 230–42. ‘In der Wirklichkeit …’, ibid., p. 234.
81.Ladislaus von Bortkiewicz’s 1907 article is included in Ladislaus von Bortkiewicz, Wertrechnung und Preisrechnung im Marxschen System (1907, Lol- lar/Giessen: Achenbach, 1976).
82.Paul M. Sweezy, The Theory of Capitalist Development: Principles of Marxian Political Economy (New York: Modern Reader Paperbacks, 1970), p. 123.
83.Michael Heinrich, Die Wissenschaft vom Wert: Die Marxsche Kritik der politischen Ökonomie zwischen wissenschaftlicher Revolution und klassischer Tradition (Verlag Westphälisches Dampfboot, 2011), pp. 270f.
84.Andrew Kliman, Reclaiming Marx’s Capital: A Refutation of the Myth of Inconsistency (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007) provides a history of the controversies around the transformation problem (pp. 41ff), presents his method of interpretation (pp. 55ff), and attacks competing interpretations (pp. 75ff). One of Kliman’s most important targets of attack is what he calls ‘physicalism’ (not to be confused with the physicalism developed by certain representatives of neopositivism). By physicalism, he means that value is determined both by the technology (the machines) that are put to use in production, and by workers’ wages. It is easy to agree with Kliman here. The strict boundary Marx drew between nature (including machinery) and the societal level (‘supernatural’) squares with an interpretation of this kind.
85.Heinrich develops his interpretation of Capital as a project that had been in progress for many years most consistently in ‘Entstehungs- und Aufl.sungsgeschichte des Marxschen “Kapital”’, pp. 155–93. Marx in a letter to Danielson, 13 December 1881, MEW 35, p. 246, CW 46, p. 161. One economist who often appears in the context is Piero Sraffa, an Italian largely active at Cambridge. His central work is Piero Sraffa, Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities: Prelude to a Critique of Economic Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960). Sraffa certainly took up the transformation problem, but his main business was a reckoning with marginalism. He is usually characterized as a neo-Ricardian, and thus not a Marxist. A number of researchers using matrix algebra have shown that it is not possible to demonstrate a connection between value and prices; see Ian St
eedman, Marx After Sraffa (London: NLB, 1977) and Michio Morishima, Marx’s Economics: A Dual Theory of Value and Growth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973).
86.‘[O]nly in the shape of money’, MEGA II/6, pp. 172, CW 35, p. 165.
87.Helmut Reichelt, Zur logischen Struktur des Kapitalbegriffs bei Karl Marx (Frankfurt am Main: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1970) still deals in detail with the question of the relationship between historical materialism and a critique of capital, calling attention above all to the difference between concretion and precision (pp. 19–72) and also pointing out what is misleading in imagining that Marx, in his particular theory, applied a dialectical method (p. 81). Schanz Til rekonstruktione, p. 693 is significantly more resolute in his rejection of historical materialism (pp. 19ff and passim). Heinrich, in ‘Entstehungs- und Aufl.sungsgeschichte des Marxschen “Kapital”’, is entirely unhesitating in his dismissal.
88.Marx on trade and usury capital, MEGA II/6, pp. 180ff, CW 35, pp. 174–7.
89.Gödel’s First Incompleteness Theorem: ‘Any consistent formal system F within which a certain amount of elementary arithmetic can be carried out is incomplete; i.e., there are statements of the language of F which can neither be proved nor disproved in F.’ See Peter Smith, An Introduction to Gödel’s Theorems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
90.Note 89, MEGA II/6, p. 364, CW 35, pp. 375f.
91.On Marx’s changed view of the relationship between value and money, see Heinrich ‘Entstehungs- und Aufl.sungsgeschichte des Marxschen “Kapital”’, p. 176.
92.On ‘high-tech capitalism’, Wolfgang Fritz Haug, High-tech-Kapitalismus in der grossen Krise (Hamburg: Argument, 2012). Werner Sombart discerned a late capitalist stage back in 1902. A later edition is Werner Sombart, Der moderne Kapitalismus (München and Leipzig: Duncker and Humblot, 1916–28). Sombart gradually distanced himself more and more from Marx. Ernest Mandel, Senkapitalismen (Stockholm: René Coeckelberghs, 1974–5) and Jürgen Habermas, Legitimationsprobleme im Spätkapitalismus (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973). A good account of postmodernism is Krishan Kumar, From Post-Industrial to Post-Modern Society: New Theories of the Contemporary World (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2009). Kumar takes up Marx’s and Marxism’s position in the postmodern debate in particular, for example pp. 114ff and 194ff. Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, pp. xxi and 260–78. Terrell Carver, the assiduous British expert on Marx, even created a postmodern Marx: a Marx who would not (like the modern Marx) be regarded as a thinker with a uniform outlook or theory, and who therefore could have new interpretations evolved depending on what was being focused on in his work. It can be said that Carver succeeds in surveying important changes in Marx’s development, just as he can also show that older text editions create seemingly uniform works. But the question is what use there is of the term ‘postmodern’. Talking about a post-Soviet Marx would probably be more apposite. Terrell Carver, The Postmodern Marx (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998). The principles in The German Ideology, p. 172.
93.Humanity’s labour in relation to nature and in contrast to the activities of animals; MEGA II/6, pp. 192f, CW 35, p. 187. In the English translation, the important German word Stoffwechsel has often been replaced by the meaningless ‘material actions’. One of the pioneers in the area was the great chemist Justus von Liebig, of whose work Marx was a zealous reader. Justus Liebig, Die Thierchemie, oder die organische Chemie in ihrer Anwendung auf Physiologie und Pathologie (Braunschweig: Verlag Vieweg, 1842), which was also published in many later editions, was of particular significance for the doctrine of metabolism.
94.On Marx’s naturalism, see Johan Fornäs, Capitalism: A Companion to Marx’s Economic Critique (London: Routledge, 2013), pp. 297f.
95.The French translation, MEGA II/7, pp. 145f.
96.François Mitterrand, L’abeille et l’architecte: chronique (Paris: Flammarion, 1978).
97.‘Ich arbeite wie toll die Nächte durch’, Marx to Engels, 8 December 1857, MEGA III/8, pp. 210, MEW 29, p. 225, CW 40, p. 217.
98.‘Mir war das Ekelhafteste die Unterbrechung meiner Arbeit’, Marx to Engels 10 February 1866, MEW 31, p. 174, CW 42, p. 223. On the expanded concept of labour, see for example Pierre Jaccard, Histoire du travail de l’antiquité à nos jours (Paris: Payot, 1960).
99.‘Nach Hobbes ist die Wissenschaft, nicht die ausführende Arbeit, die Mutter der Künste’, MEGA II/3.4: Beilagen, MEW 26, pp. 1, 329.
100.On technicians in Germanophone Europe as against Great Britain, see Mikael Hård, Machines Are Frozen Spirit: The Scientification of Refrigeration and Brewing in the Nineteenth Century: A Weberian Interpretation (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1994), pp. 97ff and passim.
101.‘the soul of capital’, MEGA II/6, pp. 239, CW 35, p. 241. ‘You may be a model citizen …’, ibid., pp. 241 and 242 respectively.
102.The reserve army, ibid., pp. 573–83 and 623–34 respectively.
103.On the British census, ibid., pp. 427f and 449f respectively.
104.The interrupted chapter on classes is now found in a critical edition after Marx’s manuscript in MEGA II/4.2, pp. 901f. It turns out that Engels did not make any changes, MEW 25, pp. 892f, CW 37, pp. 870f. In Marxian traditions, on the other hand, the interest in his concept of class has often been great. It is still so in the post-Soviet epoch. Erik Olin Wright’s Class Counts is an ambitious work, in which the author strives to capture the class structure of present-day capitalist society, with its great, diffuse middle class, on the basis of certain fundamental ideas in Marx. Erik Olin Wright, Class Counts: Comparative Studies in Class Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
105.On factory legislation and the demands in it, MEGA II/6, pp. 460–75, CW 35, pp. 483–505; the quote, pp. 463 and 486 respectively.
106.Robin Small, Karl Marx: The Revolutionary as Educator (Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2014) is an account of Marx’s ideas on education and his polytechnic ideal. The book unfortunately has a somewhat devout tone and never goes into detailed analysis.
107.Marx to Engels, 25 February 1867, MEW 31, p. 278, CW 42, pp. 347f.
108.Balzac’s 1840 comedy was christened by its author as Le faiseur but was performed on stage after his death under the name Mercadet. See Étienne Balibar, La philosophie de Marx (Paris: Éditions La Découverte, 1993). ‘Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu’ was originally included in the second edition of Balzac’s 1831 debut, Romans et contes philosophiques. ‘Melmoth réconcilé’ was first published in 1835 in the collection Le livre des conteurs. Honoré Balzac, Le livre des conteurs, vol. 6 (Paris: Lequien ls, 1835). On the story as a parody of the fantastic novels of the Romantic period, see Ruth Amossy, ‘Melmoth réconcilié ou la parodie du conte fantastique’, L’année balzacienne (Paris: P.U.F., 1978), pp. 149–67. Marshall Berman, Allt som är fast för yktigas: modernism och modernitet (Lund: Arkiv förlag, 1987) provides a convincing account of Faust’s period of capitalistic entrepreneurial spirit.
109.On the significance of the story for Marx, see Isaiah Berlin, Karl Marx: His Life and Environment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 2; Jerrold Seigel, Marx’s Fate: The Shape of a Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), p. 388; Jacques Attali, Karl Marx ou l’esprit du monde (Paris: Fayard, 2005), p. 250; Francis Wheen, Karl Marx: en biografi (Stockholm: Norstedts, 2006), pp. 1–6 and 111.
12Twin Souls or a Tragic Mistake?
1.The phrase is alluded to in the title of Norman Levine’s The Tragic Deception: Marx Contra Engels (Oxford: Clio Books 1975).
2.After Marx died, Engels became uneasy about suddenly being forced to play a leading role. ‘I have spent a lifetime doing what I was fitted for, namely playing the second fiddle,’ he wrote to one of Marx’s most zealous followers, the Swiss revolutionary Johann Philipp Becker (15 October 1884, MEW 36, p. 218). ‘And I was happy to have so splendid a first fiddle as Marx.’ But now the matter had become more difficult: now, he suddenly had to take over Marx’s role,
and he trembled at the thought.
3.Letter from Engels to Marx, 3 August 1859, MEGA III/9, p. 534, MEW 29, p. 468.
4.The first edition of Engels’s notes was called Natur und Dialektik. Only later was it changed to the title we know today. Critical edition MEGA I/26, in English CW 25, pp. 313–588.
5.Letter from Marx to Engels, 31 May 1873, MEW 33, p. 82, CW 44, p. 504.
6.Marx’s mathematical manuscripts, see Karl Marx, Matematičeskie rukopisi (Moscow: Izdatel’stwo ‘Nauka’, 1968). The German edition, Marx, Mathematische Manuskripte (Scriptor, 1974). Endemann’s foreword and introduction, pp. 7–49. The polemic with Yanovskaya, p. 7; inner connections, p. 11.
7.The negation of the negation, ibid., p. 51.
8.‘only a symbolic indication’, ibid., pp. 85f.
9.He devoted twenty-seven pages, ibid., pp. 102–29, to a historical review.
10.Engels’s vain search for a manuscript by Marx on the dialectic, letter to p. L. Lavrov, 2 April 1883, MEW 36, p. 3, CW 47, p. 3.
11.Engels to Marx, 18 August 1881, MEW 35, pp. 23ff, CW 46, pp. 130ff. According to Engels, Marx’s innovation was that dy/dy could be replaced with 0/0.
12.The origins of mathematics, MEW 20, p. 35, CW 25, p. 36. Zero is not devoid of content but the centre of the number series, MEW 20, p. 524, CW 25, pp. 539f.
13.On Mao and the transformation of Beijing, Johan Lagerkvist, Tiananmen redux: den bortglömda massakern som förändrade världen (Stockholm: Bonniers, 2014), p. 104.
14.On Marx’s early contact with the natural sciences, see John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature (New York: Monthly Review Books, 2000), pp. 117f.
15.MEGA I/1, p. 16, CW 1, p. 18.
16.‘liebes Männchen von der Eisenbahn’, letter from Jenny von Westphalen to Karl Marx, 10 August 1841; MEGA III/1, p. 365, CW 1, p. 709.
17.William Thomson and Peter Guthrie Tait, Treatise on Natural Philosophy, vol. I (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1867). Thomson later became Lord Kelvin, the name by which he is still remembered. Gustav Wiedemann, Die Lehre vom Galvanismus und Elektromagnetismus, vol. I–II (Braunschweig: Vieweg, 1872). Engels’s excerpts of these works are in MEGA IV/31, pp. 478–511 and 527–602 respectively.
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