> > >CB: The difference between Marx and others is the Russian, Chinese >and other socialist revolutions. We are studying Marx because of >the Bolsheviks and the Russian Rev.
Please Charles speak for yourself. For one thing, I do not think Marx developed a theory of the transfer of value in and through the world market that gives expression to revolutionary aspirations of national revolts in which peasants, petty bourgeoisie and the proletariat have been engaged. The Cuban revolution was not waged against a pure advanced capitalism by a pure proletariat of the sorts imagined by Marx in his theoretical work. This has erroneously led some Marxists to dismiss outright such revolutions (say the Cuban and Sandinista revolutions) as nationalist reaction and to ridicule first world supporters of them as "third worldists", but to combat this view one has to in fact go beyond Marx's theory of a pure capitalism (no trade, only two classes, etc) to show that without protection in the real world market weaker national capitals are as a result of the tranfer of value in circulation subject to devaluation and endemic crisis, which in turn lead to financial/debt crises. Some orthodox Marxists would dismiss this kind of theory of dependency because it is "circulationist", but it is in fact a development of Marx's theory of production price in the third volume of Capital. The reason why so many Marxists have difficulty in understanding the progressive thrust of many third world revolutions has been that they only study Marx, and do not beyond him. Two people who have tried to go beyond Marx here are Guglielmo Carchedi and Enrique Dussel from whose latest book (edited by the way by Fred Moseley) I draw in the above. Second, it is patently absurd to say that Marx was not studied before the revolutions that you mention and imply that people would have ceased studying Marx if not for those revolutions. Rakesh Towards An Unknown Marx: A Commentary on the Manuscripts of 1861-63 (Routledge Studies in the History of Economics, Volume 34) by Fred Moseley, Yolanda Angulo (Translator), Enrique D. Dussel
