In a previous mail about the use of books, I wrote: "Rosa Luxemburg, Isaac Deutscher and Ernest Mandel all remarked upon the fact, that even among selfstyled Marxists in the 1920s, Marx's magnum opus had mostly not been read beyond the first volume or extracts thereof."
In fact, Rosa lived from 1871 to January 15, 1919, when she was murdered by the Freikorps. Therefore she could not have commented on Marxist intellectual activity in the 1920s, and I was wrong there. Nevertheless, she did make a point along these lines. See for instance her essay "Stagnation and Progress of Marxism" (1903), first published in 1927 by David Riazanov, the original director of the Marx-Engels Institute founded in 1920 in Moscow. Specifically, Rosa says: "The third volume of Capital, with its solution of the problem of the rate of profit (the basic problem of Marxist economics), did not appear till 1894. But in Germany, as in all other lands, agitation had been carried on with the aid of the unfinished material contained in the first volume; the Marxist doctrine had been popularised and had found acceptance upon the basis of this first volume alone; the success of the incomplete Marxist theory had been phenomenal; and no one had been aware that there was any gap in the teaching. Furthermore, when the third volume finally saw the light, whilst to begin with it attracted some attention in the restricted circles of the experts, and aroused here a certain amount of comment - as far as the socialist movement as a whole was concerned, the new volume made practically no impression in the wide regions where the ideas expounded in the original book had become dominant. The theoretical conclusions of volume 3 have not hitherto evoked any attempt at popularisation, nor have they secured wide diffusion. On the contrary, even among the social democrats we sometimes hear, nowadays, re-echoes of the "disappointment" with the third volume of Capital which is so frequently voiced by bourgeois economists - and thus these social democrats merely show how fully they had accepted the "incomplete" exposition of the theory of value presented in the first volume. How can we account for so remarkable a phenomenon? Shaw, who (to quote his own expression) is fond of "sniggering" at others, may have good reasons here, for making fun of the whole socialist movement, insofar as it is grounded upon Marx! But if he were to do this, he would be "sniggering" at a very serious manifestation of our social life. The strange fate of the second and third volumes of Capital is conclusive evidence as to the general destiny of theoretical research in our movement. From the scientific standpoint, the third volume of Capital must, no doubt, be primarily regarded as the completion of Marx's critique of capitalism.Without this third volume, we cannot understand, either the actually dominant law of the rate of profit; or the splitting up of surplus value into profit, interest, and rent; or the working of the law of value within the field of competition. But, and this is the main point, all these problems, however important from the outlook of the pure theory, are comparatively unimportant from the practical outlook of the class war. As far as the class war is concerned, the fundamental theoretical problem is the origin of surplus value, that is, the scientific explanation of exploitation; together with the elucidation of the tendencies toward the socialisation of the process of production, that is, the scientific explanation of the objective groundwork of the socialist revolution. Both these problems are solved in the first volume of Capital, which deduces the "expropriation of the expropriators" as the inevitable and ultimate result of the production of surplus value and of the progressive concentration of capital. Therewith, as far as theory is concerned, the essential need of the labour movement is satisfied. The workers, being actively engaged in the class war, have no direct interest in the question of how surplus value is distributed among the respective groups of exploiters; or in the question of how, in the course of this distribution, competition brings about rearrangements of production. That is why, for socialists in general, the third volume of Capital remains an unread book. But, in our movement, what applies to Marx's economic doctrines applies to theoretical research in general. It is pure illusion to suppose that the working class, in its upward striving, can of its own accord become immeasurably creative in the theoretical domain." Source: http://www.redflag.org.uk/frontline/one/rosa.html
