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Phil Ferguson:
'Where do you get the idea vol 3 was written first?
Vol 1 was published when Marx was alive, vol 3 was *put together by Engels
after Marx's death*. Engels didn't mistranslate (in either the literal
sense of the word or in the wider meaning). He worked with Marx
with nearly 40 years; he didn't misunderstand or mistake Marx's theory of
crisis.
Moreover, Vol 3 could not have been written first because all the core
concepts it is based on didn't exist without vol 1 and 2.
Also, the three vols play different parts. Vol 1 is about production, vol
2 is about distribution and vol 3 is about the capitalist system as a
whole
and how it actually operates.
Btw, even as early as the Grundrisse, which precedes vol 1, he noted that
LTRPF is 'the single most important law of modern political eocnomy'.
There's no evidence he ever changed his mind. That's why vol 3 spends 50
pages on the subject.
'Magnitude over form' has nothing to do with it.'
* * *
Not strictly true in terms of the order of Marx's writing of Capital. I
happen to be working on an article on this point, and its consequences
for understanding Capital. I'm pasting and excerpt from the draft below.
I've written about the rate of profit here:
<https://edgeorgesotherblog.wordpress.com/2013/07/04/but-still-it-falls-on-the-rate-of-profit/>;
I also deal with it here:
<https://edgeorgesotherblog.wordpress.com/2015/05/04/where-did-all-that-stuff-come-from-marx-surplus-profit-and-the-seemingly-inexhaustible-rise-in-the-productivity-of-labour-in-capitalist-production-2/>.
https://readingmarx.wordpress.com/
@edwardbgeorge
* * *
In 1857, the outbreak of economic crisis jolted Marx into an attempt to
set out his thinking in something resembling systematic form. In
December he wrote to Engels like this: ‘I am working like mad all night
and every night collating my economic studies so that I at least get the
outlines clear before the déluge.’ [1] He wrote a relatively polished
‘Introduction’, which he later discarded, replacing it with the
‘Preface’ to the Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy he
would write in 1859, and a vast (around 1,000 pages in the current
paperback English translation), sprawling draft outline of his thinking
on economics, in turn fascinating in the insights it offers on Marx’s
subsequent work and infuriating in its dense intelligibility. [2]
This outline – the Grundrisse – is considered by many as the ‘first
draft’ of Capital; it was, of course, as a rough draught, completely
unpublishable. During the first half of 1858, a deal was reached with a
German publisher to bring Marx’s work to light. Marx envisaged a plan of
six books, dealing with (in Marx’s own words [3]): ‘1. On Capital
(contains a few introductory chapters). 2. On Landed Property. 3. On
Wage Labour. 4. On the State. 5. International Trade. 6. World Market’.
The publishing deal envisaged the publication of the work in
instalments, the first one covering, in three chapters (again in Marx’s
own words [4]), ‘1. Value, 2. Money, 3. Capital in General (the process
of production of capital; process of its circulation; the unity of the
two, or capital and profit; interest)’. As tended to be the case with
Marx, however, the project, as he drafted, grew to unwieldy size;
eventually seeing the light of day as a two-chapter (money and
commodities) book introduced by a ‘Preface’ (in which Marx elaborates
his famous ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’ metaphor, and which is arguably
the most interesting part of the book), under the title A Contribution
to a Critique of Political Economy, in 1859. The slightness of the
work’s content, amid such expectation among Marx’s admirers, led to its
eventual appearance being met with indifference on one end of the scale
and intense disappointment on the other.
Nevertheless, following the publication of the Critique, Marx’s
intention was to set to work on drafting the chapter on capital. As was
his custom, however, he soon found himself distracted by other matters –
in this case a sectarian squabble within German émigré politics (the
‘Herr Vogt’ case) to which Marx devoted far more time and energy than it
deserved – and work was interrupted for around eighteen months.
It is clear that the draft that Marx produced over the next two years
(23 notebooks, known as ‘The Manuscript of 1861-3’, only published in
full by the MEGA project [5] between 1977 and 1982 [6]) was intended, at
least at the outset, as a continuation of the Critique (the first
notebook is headed ‘chapter three’). But after five notebooks – which do
indeed deal with the transformation of money into capital – Marx broke
off and began to sketch a history of preceding economic thought, a
digression that (again, characteristically) would grow to enormous
proportions. [7]
Following this digression, Marx returned to themes that would be
explored (posthumously) in volumes two and three of Capital (merchants’
profit and rent), and that he would return to in volume one
(‘subsumption’ of labour).
Marx then began a full draft of Capital as we know it. This phase of
writing is conceptually categorised under the rubric ‘Manuscripts of
1863-5’ (to what degree Marx would have understood this project as one
distinct from the ‘Manuscript of 1861-3’ is unclear, yet the distinction
is necessary for these previously-unpublished manuscripts form part of
the ‘unknown Marx’ that is coming to light under the auspices of the
MEGA). Over this period, Marx wrote a full draft of volume one of
Capital (except the opening chapters, which had anyway been covered in
the Critique), most of which has not survived (the assumption being that
Marx destroyed it as he prepared the final version of volume one for
publication in 1867); began a draft of volume three, broke off to draft
volume two, and then returned to finish volume three.
Marx then returned to volume one, and prepared a final draft for
publication (interestingly, the first part, dealing with the commodity
and money, the same subject matter as the Critique, was written last).
Capital volume one was finally published in 1867. A revised second
edition was published in 1871, while between 1865 and 1870 he was
constantly redrafting volume two (and tinkering with volume three). Over
1872-5 Marx supervised the French translation of volume one (which
contains important material additional to the German edition).
The last years of the 1860s and the first of the 1870s saw Marx dedicate
an enormous amount of time and energy to the International Workingmen’s
Association (the ‘First International’); during the last half of the
1870s he devoted great energy to the study of the history of Russian
agricultural development (teaching himself Russian in the process) both
in relation to the material on ground-rent in volume three of Capital
and with regard to the question of patterns of capitalist development
different to that (based on English-British experiences) depicted in
volume one (on Marx’s death, Engels discovered two cubic metres of
documents of economic statistics in Russian among his papers). [8]
In 1878 Marx had allowed for the possibility of volume two to appear in
print ‘before the end of 1879’. [9] In fact, when Marx died, in 1883,
volumes two and three of Capital remained not only unpublished but, as
it was to turn out, a very long way from existing in publishable form.
It fell on Engels to edit the final versions from Marx’s manuscripts, a
far from easy labour. In August 1883, he grumbled in a letter to Bebel
about the ‘enormous task’ volume two confronted him with:
‘Alongside parts that have been completely finished are others that are
merely sketched out, the whole being a brouillon [rough draft] with the
exception of perhaps two chapters. Quotations from sources in no kind of
order, piles of them jumbled together, collected simply with a view to
future selection. Besides that there is the handwriting which certainly
cannot be deciphered by anyone but me, and then only with difficulty.
You ask why I of all people should not have been told how far the thing
had got. It is quite simple; had I known, I should have pestered him
night and day until it was all finished and printed. And Marx knew that
better than anyone else.’ [10]
It took Engels two years to prepare a print-ready version of the volume.
In doing this, he based himself principally on the manuscript that Marx
had completed by 1870, although, according to Engels’ introduction to
the volume, additional and reworked material dating as late as 1878 was
also incorporated into the final version. [11] Despite these
difficulties, Engels was optimistic about the rapid appearance of volume
three: ‘The preparation of this book for publication is proceeding
rapidly,’ he noted in the Preface to volume two. ‘So far as I am able to
judge up to now, it will present mainly technical difficulties […].’
[12] His optimism was misplaced: basing himself on the draft contained
in the 1863-5 manuscript left by Marx, it took in fact a further eleven
years for Engels to deliver volume three. He outlined the difficulties
he had come across in its preface:
‘When I published the second volume, in 1885, I thought that except for
a few, certainly very important, sections the third volume would
probably offer only technical difficulties. […]. […] But I had no idea
at the time that […] the most important parts of the entire work, would
give me as much trouble as they did […].
'In the case of the third volume there was nothing to go by outside a
first extremely incomplete draft. The beginnings of the various parts
were, as a rule, pretty carefully done and even stylistically polished.
But the farther one went, the more sketchy and incomplete was the
analysis, the more excursions it contained into arising side issues
whose proper place in the argument was left for later decision, and the
longer and more complex the sentences, in which thoughts were recorded
in statu nascendi. In some places handwriting and presentation betrayed
all too clearly the outbreak and gradual progress of the attacks of ill
health, caused by overwork, which at the outset rendered the author’s
work increasingly difficult and finally compelled him periodically to
stop work altogether. […]
'The greatest difficulty was presented by Part V which dealt with the
most complicated subject in the entire volume [interest-bearing
capital]. […] Here, then, was no finished draft, not even a scheme whose
outlines might have been filled out, but only the beginning of an
elaboration – often just a disorderly mass of notes, comments and
extracts. […] I had no other choice but to […] confin[e] myself to as
orderly an arrangement of available matter as possible, and to mak[e]
only the most indispensable additions.’ [13]
In the same preface Engels announced his intention to produce a further
volume of Capital, basing himself on the historical material (titled by
Marx ‘Theories of Surplus-Value’) Marx had written as a digression in
the manuscript of 1861-3. Engels did not live to complete the task; he
died in 1895. Instead it was Karl Kautsky, leader of the German SPD, who
published an abridged (and not in the order that Marx had written)
version between 1905 and 1910.
* * *
[1] CW vol. 40, p. 217.
[2] The ‘Introduction’ was first published in 1903; astonishingly, the
draft text was only discovered in 1923, when David Ryazonov, the
Director of the Moscow-based Marx-Engels Institute happened upon it
while undertaking an audit of the those of Marx’s papers which had been
deposited in the archive of the German SPD – where, in the words of
Marcello Musto (‘The Dissemination and Reception of the ‘Grundrisse’ – A
Contribution to the History of Marxism’,
<http://links.org.au/node/1833>) they were treated with the ‘utmost
neglect’ – and finally published in complete form, in a limited edition
of only 3,000 copies (most of which never left the Soviet Union), in
1939, under the title Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie
(Rohentwurf) 1857–1858.
[3] Writing to Ferdinand Lassalle (CW vol. 40, p. 270).
[4] CW vol. 40, p. 287.
[5] <http://mega.bbaw.de/>. A reasonably objective overview of the
project may be read here:
<http://marxdialecticalstudies.blogspot.com.es/2010/09/marx-engels-gesamtausgabe-mega-project.html>.
[6] An edited version is published in English in volumes 30 to 34 of the
Collected Works.
[7] It is from this section of the manuscript that the material for
Theories of Surplus-Value were extracted.
[8] Engels commented thus: ‘In the seventies Marx engaged in entirely
new special studies for […] [the] part [of volume three of Capital] on
ground rent. For years he had studied the Russian originals of
statistical reports inevitable after the “reform” of 1861 in Russia and
other publications on landownership, had taken extracts from these
originals, placed at his disposal in admirably complete form by his
Russian friends, and had intended to use them for a new version of this
part. Owing to the variety of forms both of landownership and of
exploitation of agricultural producers in Russia, this country was to
play the same role in the part dealing with ground rent that England
played in Book [i. e. volume] I in connection with industrial wage
labour.’ (CW vol. 37, p. 10) The considerable significance of this work
in the context of Marx’s thinking is empahasised in Teodor Shanin, ‘Late
Marx: Gods and Craftsmen’, in Teodor Shanin (ed.), Late Marx and the
Russian Road: Marx and the ‘Peripheries of Capitalism’ (New York, 1983).
[9] CW vol. 45, p. 241.
[10] CW vol. 47, p. 53.
[11] Cf. CW vol. 36, pp. 6-9.
[12] CW vol. 36, p. 9.
[13] CW vol. 37, pp. 5-9. Although there is no doubt as to Engels’
well-meaning intentions in carrying out this wor, his editorial
decisions are far from controversial (see, for example, Michael
Heinrich, ‘Engels’ Edition of the Third Volume of Capital and Marx’s
Original Manuscript’,
<https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/editorial/heinrich.htm#1>.
[14] Although it is clear that Marx did intend to write such a volume
(see the letter to Engels in 1865, where he refers to a ‘4th book, the
historical-literary one, to be written’ which would reproduce ‘the
problems […] resolved in the first 3 books, […] by way of repetition in
historical form’ (CW volume 42, p. 73, my italicisation), it is far from
clear that the ‘Theories of Surplus-Value’ could have been that book.
For Enrique Dussel, Marx’s intention was ‘to perform a precise
theoretical task: to confront his discoveries […] with the categorial
structures of the most important and relevant bourgeois economists prior
to him. […] It was […] a matter of comparing, testing, launching his
hypothesis and evaluating his capacity to answer and to test other
economists and himself. With this confrontation, […] Marx will not only
demonstrate the force, the resistance of his categories already
construced , but will also be forced to develop new categories.’
(Towards an Unknown Marx: A Commentary on the Manuscipts of 1861-63
(London and New Yor, 2001), p. 44) I agree with Dussel. The Theories of
Surplus-Value needs to be read, but it is more productively read with
this important point borne in mind.
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