Charles,
the historical material always comes after the theoretical material, in order to illustrate it. Thus, the chapter on the Working Day comes **after** the theoretical presentation of absolute surplus-value. The material on the "so-called primitive accumulation" comes at the very end of Vol. I, giving an account of the emergence of the "worker free in a double sense" that is merely presupposed in the theoretical account. And, again, Marx states explicitly in his preface that he is presenting an account of the capitalist mode of production "at its ideal average." So the burden of proof is on anyone arguing that the sequence of categories in Capital is supposed to depict some "historical" sequence. I think a lot of people's alarm bells go off when they hear that Capital is not a historical work because they mistake that for an assertion that Capital is "ahistorical". But that's not the case. Marx is definitely aware of the historical specificity and contingency of the categories he is criticizing. Contrast this to David Graeber, whose book Debt is a work of history, but a strangely ahistorical one, because Graeber insufficiently pays attention to the historical specificity of categories. This is particularly apparent in his treatment of "money", where he argues that money plays a completely different role in societies in which it is not the mediating instance for the exchange of products, yet he oddly insists on seeing it as basically the same stuff that we call "money". _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
