Marx wasn't finished.

[Ned Kelly]

It's rather inconceivable to believe that Marx had finished his investigation into capital and political economy before he passed away, he developed upon the work of early bourgeois economists such as Ricardo and Smith as well as early utopian socialists such as Saint - Simon. Much like Newton's theories were largely correct and valuable in his field, he was wrong in some areas. Einstein followed up a lot in these fields, but there is a lot he couldn't account for in his time on Earth. I feel the chain will continue, it's anti-materialist to argue otherwise and encroaches onto a 'great man' view of history. Others in time will further Marx's analysis of political economy, just like he took the analysis of others and furthered them.

[Kadir Ateş]

Have you read Marx? I don't get the impression you have judging from your assessment of the man and his works.

[Ned Kelly]

Yes, I have actually. His exposition of value, profit, historical materialism, the dialectical materialist view of history and all aspects of political economy drew upon the ideas of others. Political economy is a science, in all other sciences, nothing is static, new experiences lead to new discoveries. This isn't any different.

[Revolutionair]

Which part of Marxist theory do you deem as incomplete?

edit:
Sorry if I sound like a jackass, not my intention. Just trying to be more specific so we can get to work!

[Ned Kelly]

I'm not pointing anything out in particular . I'm just saying that it's nigh on impossible that someone won't develop on it in future just as Marx developed on the work of others

[Ned Kelly]

I wish I could point something out, we'd be getting a lot closer to our goal.

[Revolutionair]

Well in my opinion, classes could use some work. I can't find the statistics at the moment but the amount of people who work in industry in the Netherlands is around 10-20%. Maybe someone could write something on how the disappearance of industry in the West affects class society in the West. Short-term strategy for socialists could also use some work.

[Ned Kelly]

You're right there. The tendency of the percentage of the working class directly involved in production in the west to shrink needs a deep theoretical exposition beyond that of the general theory of globalisation

[Kadir Ateş]

Well in my opinion, classes could use some work. I can't find the statistics at the moment but the amount of people who work in industry in the Netherlands is around 10-20%. Maybe someone could write something on how the disappearance of industry in the West affects class society in the West. Short-term strategy for socialists could also use some work.


The work class is defined by their relation to the means of production, not whether they are engaged in productive industry or not. You're taking a very sociological understanding. The disappearance of this form of labor can be attributed to the organic composition of capital insofar as that as capital attempts to squeeze out more Value from the worker, due to competition and the drive for profit, the capitalist necessarily employs more constant capital, i.e. machinery, thereby sucking one industry dry until it moves to another more profitable one. This can be seen on a grander scale at the international level, where highly efficient automation and techniques ("post-Fordist" production) make it necessarily for capital to travel to where the labor supply is cheap to basically do the same thing there, notably in the so-called Global South or Third World. How is class impacted in the West? Well, instead of one paycheck from dad going to the factory and mom and the kids staying at home, now the housewife is forced to enter into the workforce, or both parents take up more and more jobs in order to compensate for the one that was lost.

Short-term strategies for socialists? Well, are they working class socialists?

[Ismail]

It's rather inconceivable to believe that Marx had finished his investigation into capital and political economy before he passed away,From the Great Soviet Encyclopedia:

Marx conducted his economic investigations during the 1850’s within the framework of the “six-book plan” that he worked out from 1857 to 1859 (On Capital, Landed Property, Wage Labor, The State, Foreign Trade, and The World Market). Subsequently, Marx elaborated the most important part of this program in the four volumes of Das Kapital; this part formed the content of the section “Capital in General” the first section of the book On Capital. (The other sections of this book are “Competition of Capital,” “Credit,” and “Joint-Stock Capital.”)Marx died before he could write six volumes, so instead we got three with two of those (i.e. not Volume I) being significantly edited by Engels after Marx had passed away.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Which part of Marxist theory do you deem as incomplete?

edit:
Sorry if I sound like a jackass, not my intention. Just trying to be more specific so we can get to work!

As Ismail wrote above, Marx intended to write extensively on capital, land ownership, wage labour, the state, international trade, and the world market. He only got to work on the first subject. Whatever he wrote on the last five subjects, he only related them to the first.

[Q]

From the Great Soviet Encyclopedia:
Marx died before he could write six volumes, so instead we got three with two of those (i.e. not Volume I) being significantly edited by Engels after Marx had passed away.

I heard about this before, but given how long Marx took to complete Capital volume 1, which is only a part of the planned first section of On Capital, which in turn was only one of six planned books... How long did Marx thought to take to complete this library? I mean, we're talking about Capital times 24 or so. If he planned on being as extensive in the other parts as he was in Capital, surely his timetable ran into the centuries...

So, was he like the worst timeplanner ever?

[Revolutionair]

So, was he like the worst timeplanner ever?

It says in my version of capital, that Marx got sick which hindered him from completing it. I even read somewhere that the book publicer threathned Marx by saying he would find someone else to write Capital if he didn't hurry up. Can you imagine that, Capital written by someone else? :laugh:

[Dave B]

I think the major error, if you want to call it that, was not so much his or their economic theory but the ‘political’ for the want of a better expression. They thought that socialist consciousness would develop along with and in tandem with capitalism and the numerical growth of the working class.

That clearly hasn’t happened and if anything socialist consciousness has with the development of capitalism, particularly over the last hundred years, regressed.

A hundred years ago people talked openly of a moneyless and wage less society; at least as an objective, now it is very much a minority position even amongst so called revolutionaries.

Fred himself noticed it as a paradox in the 1880’s as regards the ‘English’ working class (who despite being, as regards the development of capitalism, theoretically the most advanced) were less ‘revolutionary’ than say the workers in Germany.

The original idea was that the peasants and artisans etc were atomised and that their economic base tended to make them compete with each other and thus they had an individualistic and ‘petty bourgeois’ competitive ideology.

With the development of capitalism, peasants and artisans would be forced into wage slavery and the ‘people’ in the process would end up working together co-operatively albeit for the capitalist class.

Working co-operatively together and with ‘everyone’ being in the same economic position (dispossessed of the means of production and egalitarian-ised as a class) that would, so it was thought, provide the material fertile ground for a communist consciousness.

Thus this economic base of the working class would lead to their own superstructural ideology.


Now, despite the dubious concept of ‘anti capitalist radicalisim’, it does appear to be a trend that workers are more ‘revolutionary’ in countries etc were capitalism has only recently been introduced.

It is possible I suppose that peoples recently released from the cultural ideological ‘torpor’ of feudalism etc (Lenin) hadn’t quite got used to or taken on board the ideological ‘torpor’ of capitalism.

And that Karl and Fred hadn’t anticipated the power that capital in the form of Fox News etc could exercise over working class consciousness.

I think Chomsky with his ‘manufacturing consent’ has made a valuable materialist contribution to that.

Something that probably had its equivalent in feudalism with feudal religious institutions etc.

I think we may be entering a new era with that as regards internet type technologies which may be one of the worst things for itself that capitalism ever came up with.

One of the most interesting predictions that they made I think was on the development of finance capital or interest bearing capital or as it is now ‘Wall Street’.

First of all Karl in volume III anticipated, from theory, that there may arise a kind of division of ideology amongst the capitalist class between the ‘functioning capitalist class’ who get on with the business of making things in the process of exploiting workers (‘profiteers of enterprise’ vol III).

And the interest bearing capitalists who more palpably play no part in the production process and become a parasitical class par excellence, a bit like the old ‘gangster’ feudal aristocracy.

You can actually see this kind of division amongst, albeit confused, with pro capitalist pundits like the ‘Keiser Report’ on Russia Today.

And obviously as well in the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ movement were the focus is on gangster bankers creaming of the rest of society through a state that is under their control.

It was the same in essence when ‘capitalism’ operated within feudalism; it was just that the mechanism of extortion of the robber aristocracy was slightly different to the present robber financial class.

And as Fred said in Anti Duhring the interest bearing and finance capitalist class would be seen to no longer have a ‘social function’; apart from sponging off the rest of us, they become to be seen as something more than a nuisance and object of envy.

The ‘functioning capitalists’ as ‘salaried’ employees probably wish to remain as both; even after having fulfilled their delusional dreams and ambition of freeing themselves from the finance capitalists.

The theoretical nirvana for the ‘functioning capitalist’ class, or the aspiring technocratic and co-ordinating class (bourgeois intelligentsia-Bolsheviks) is of course the capitalism of state capitalism, an economic dictatorship over the ‘corrupted and degraded’ ‘swinish multitude’.

Anti-Dühring by Frederick Engels 1877 Part III: Socialism II. Theoretical




If the crises demonstrate the incapacity of the bourgeoisie for managing any longer modern productive forces, the transformation of the great establishments for production and distribution into joint-stock companies and state property shows how unnecessary the bourgeoisie are for that purpose. All the social functions of the capitalist are now performed by salaried employees. The capitalist has no further social function than that of pocketing dividends, tearing off coupons, and gambling on the Stock Exchange, where the different capitalists despoil one another of their capital. At first the capitalist mode of production forces out the workers. Now it forces out the capitalists, and reduces them, just as it reduced the workers, to the ranks of the surplus population,………..

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/ch24.htm

the emile burns translation is far better I think.

[cenv]

Marx would probably have been the first to acknowledge that his theoretical contributions were one aspect of a project that has to be developed over time if. He constantly stressed the need to transcend static ideology alienated from praxis, and he would be rolling in his grave if he could see what some "orthodox Marxists," whatever than means, have done to his ideas. The idea that Marx's work could ever be "finished" except through social transformation doesn't do justice to his insights.


It is possible I suppose that peoples recently released from the cultural ideological ‘torpor’ of feudalism etc (Lenin) hadn’t quite got used to or taken on board the ideological ‘torpor’ of capitalism.

And that Karl and Fred hadn’t anticipated the power that capital in the form of Fox News etc could exercise over working class consciousness.

I think Chomsky with his ‘manufacturing consent’ has made a valuable materialist contribution to that.
Yeah, although the fault lies less with Marx than with self-described Marxists who have trivialized his base-superstructure analogy. Although he probably couldn't have seen how the culture industry would develop in the 20th and 21st centuries, a lot of Marxian ideas that prefigure later analyses of bourgeois culture (commodity fetishism, reification, etc.) were pared away by later applications of Marxism because the implications were much more radical than those of narrowly economistic interpretations of Marxism, sometimes inconveniently so.

That's why people who read Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, and Luxembourg should also read Debord, Lukacs, Marcuse, Adorno, Althusser, Lefebvre, Horkheimer, Vaneigem, etc. This is a central problem for us.


Something that probably had its equivalent in feudalism with feudal religious institutions etc.
For sure. But it's also interesting that modern bourgeois culture was made possible by the disintegration of religion and is so robust precisely because it is rationalistic, fragmentary, anti-religious (at the same time that it takes religion's place). Also, bourgeois technological progress is a key feature here -- "the medium is the message." And in this case, the medium is a fusion of advanced technology and the commodity form, making it something analogous to but fundamentally different than feudal religion.


I think we may be entering a new era with that as regards internet type technologies which may be one of the worst things for itself that capitalism ever came up with.
Exactly. I think the clash between the bourgeois notion of intellectual property and the way information is distributed on the internet is a precursor to a much more structural contradiction that will become apparent (especially if revolutionaries get off their asses) between the market economy and the radical new forms of economic organization made possible by the universal interconnectivity of the internet.

[Tim Finnegan]

I don't think you have to say that "Marx wasn't finished" to maintain that theory must be constantly revisited and revised in keeping with the development of society. He was not uniquely endowed with the ability to undertake such work, as demonstrated by the fact that plenty of others have done so since. That none of them have as broadly canonical a status doesn't change that.

Although I do wish that he'd finished his anthropological monograph. A big jumble of notes isn't quite the same.


Well in my opinion, classes could use some work. I can't find the statistics at the moment but the amount of people who work in industry in the Netherlands is around 10-20%. Maybe someone could write something on how the disappearance of industry in the West affects class society in the West. Short-term strategy for socialists could also use some work.
There's actually quite a lot of that floating around already, if you look for people who can bring themselves to admit that it's not 1930 any more. This is a good start (http://www.amazon.com/Labor-Monopoly-Capital-Degradation-Twentieth/dp/0853459401/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1325896656&sr=8-1) in dealing with the question of class itself, and there's plenty of leftcom and autonomist stuff about that deals with the political implications of it.

[Ismail]

I heard about this before, but given how long Marx took to complete Capital volume 1, which is only a part of the planned first section of On Capital, which in turn was only one of six planned books... How long did Marx thought to take to complete this library? I mean, we're talking about Capital times 24 or so. If he planned on being as extensive in the other parts as he was in Capital, surely his timetable ran into the centuries...

So, was he like the worst timeplanner ever?Well according to Marx's General (a biography of Engels) Engels had to keep encouraging/reminding Marx to complete Volume I since Marx kept on losing interest in actually writing it or being distracted by other things.

That's probably why Marx wrote this (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/letter.htm) in 1867:

“16 August 1867 2 a.m.

“Dear Fred,

“Have just finished correcting the last sheet (49th) of the book. ... So, this volume is finished. I owe it to you alone that it was possible! Without your self-sacrifice for me I could not possibly have managed the immense labour demanded by the 3 volumes. I embrace you, full of thanks! ...

“Salut, my dear, valued friend.

“K. Marx.”Also in Marx's General it is noted that, since Engels owned a factory, Marx was able to ask him how he ran it and other questions which helped him in writing his book.

[Die Neue Zeit]

I heard about this before, but given how long Marx took to complete Capital volume 1, which is only a part of the planned first section of On Capital, which in turn was only one of six planned books... How long did Marx thought to take to complete this library? I mean, we're talking about Capital times 24 or so. If he planned on being as extensive in the other parts as he was in Capital, surely his timetable ran into the centuries...

So, was he like the worst timeplanner ever?

I posted this before, and I'll post this again: I think he should have just written one big book on the six topics.

[It's also a shame that the leading Marxists of the Second International era didn't collaborate to write such a work.]

Question for Ismail: Why didn't Soviet economists unite to write a unified "Marxist-Leninist" work on capital, land ownership, wage labour, the state, international trade, and the world market? That was another lost opportunity.

[Ismail]

Question for Ismail: Why didn't Soviet economists unite to write a unified "Marxist-Leninist" work on capital, land ownership, wage labour, the state, international trade, and the world market? That was another lost opportunity.Because such would be a gigantic undertaking. If it would have taken Marx six volumes (who knows, he may have finished it halfway and decided he needed more) then I don't see how you can condense all those subjects into one book. There were basic political economy texts, though.

[Die Neue Zeit]

I am of the opinion that such work would have been more useful than the likes of Zdhanov saying that Stalin's Short Course was the be-all-and-end-all of party cadre "education."

Given Marx's Grundrisse, I think that all those subjects could be "condensed" into one (big) book first, then expanded on into volumes. There was never any Soviet undertaking on one mere book.

[Ismail]

I am of the opinion that such work would have been more useful than the likes of Zdhanov saying that Stalin's Short Course was the be-all-and-end-all of party cadre "education."Well in Albania the History of the Party of Labour of Albania was also considered the basic text for cadre for the same reason as the Short Course: it detailed the history of the Party, its trials, tribulations and triumphs. In fact in his diaries Hoxha criticized Mao and the CCP for not compiling a historical text on their party.

You do have a point, but again it would have been a gigantic undertaking. There were plenty of disputes in the 40's between Soviet economists over various subjects, and I don't think they could really make such a comprehensive text without serious study and effort. Part of the problem, which was acknowledged in the early 50's, was that various professors had only a superficial or otherwise limited grasp of economics, philosophy, etc. Political education was still quite low for the vast majority of party cadre.

[A Marxist Historian]

It's rather inconceivable to believe that Marx had finished his investigation into capital and political economy before he passed away, he developed upon the work of early bourgeois economists such as Ricardo and Smith as well as early utopian socialists such as Saint - Simon. Much like Newton's theories were largely correct and valuable in his field, he was wrong in some areas. Einstein followed up a lot in these fields, but there is a lot he couldn't account for in his time on Earth. I feel the chain will continue, it's anti-materialist to argue otherwise and encroaches onto a 'great man' view of history. Others in time will further Marx's analysis of political economy, just like he took the analysis of others and furthered them.

Well sure, things change. Rudolph Hilferding's Finanzkapital was a further development of Marx's analysis in Vol. 3 of the financial world into the modern bank dominated era of financial capitalism. It's the theoretical basis for Lenin's famous pamphlet on imperialism, despite its quite significant errors on the nature of money (which had great political significance actually, but let's not get into that just yet.)

And there was some great work done in the 1920s by Soviet economists on the economics of a workers state, which you can read about in English in Alexander Ehrlich's famous book, "The Soviet Industrialization Debate." A lot of Preobrazhensky's writings from it have been translated into English.

But further development of Marxist economic theory basically came to a stop with the victory of Stalin in the USSR. In the USSR, it froze into dogmatic "red" bible-thumping "Marxism-Leninism," and "Western Marxism" is all too often more interested in culture and other superstructural stuff than economics.

However, the basic outlines of the world economy haven't changed that much since 1914, except of course for the rise and fall of the Soviet bloc. It's still all bank-dominated corporate monopoly capitalism ruled by the stock and other financial markets, as Hilferding described it so well a century ago.

There have been huge changes in technology, and capitalism has replicated everywhere, making some of Marx's economic analyses not very relevant anymore. Small scale peasant agriculture, the dominant feature of the world in his day, is rapidly disappearing for example.

But the basic structures and contradictions are pretty much the ones laid out by Lenin in his imperialism pamphlet so long ago. It's still an era of economic crisis, depression, and ever-increasing immiseration of the population.

If anything, "globalization," the big economic buzzword of the '90s, turned out to be a return to the old imperialist colonialism of the era before the Russian, Chinese and general colonial revolutions, rather than something new.

That imperialism is all about export of capital seeking superprofits through superexploitation of workers in the Third World is far more obvious than in Lenin's time, what with corporations jumping from country to country seeking ever newer, cheaper sweatshop labor.

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

Well in my opinion, classes could use some work. I can't find the statistics at the moment but the amount of people who work in industry in the Netherlands is around 10-20%. Maybe someone could write something on how the disappearance of industry in the West affects class society in the West. Short-term strategy for socialists could also use some work.

Key words here are "in the West." As the proletariat decreases in percentage in imperialist countries, it is growing extremely rapidly in the Third World.

The percentage of the world population that is proletarian is far, far greater than in Marx's time, or Lenin's for that matter.

This is happening because the basic driving feature of imperialism as explained by Lenin makes that inevitable. A hundred years of capital export seeking superprofits inevitably led to what you describe.

-M.H.-

[o well this is ok I guess]

Because such would be a gigantic undertaking. If it would have taken Marx six volumes (who knows, he may have finished it halfway and decided he needed more) then I don't see how you can condense all those subjects into one book. There were basic political economy texts, though. In the same way every other introductory text is written, probably. You know, everything is said, the details are omitted, the proofs are omitted, the counterpoints are omitted, and it ends with "though you should probably read up this shit yourself".

[A Marxist Historian]

From the Great Soviet Encyclopedia:
Marx died before he could write six volumes, so instead we got three with two of those (i.e. not Volume I) being significantly edited by Engels after Marx had passed away.

A lot of what he intended to write can be found, I am told, in the Grundrisse, his first draft, and much of which got tucked away in one corner or another of Vols. 3 and 4, which have plenty of stuff about foreign trade and the world market tucked in here and there. Capital, landed property and of course wage labor are covered quite adequately.

But it's a damn shame Marx never got around to writing his intended volume on the state.

Of course, by the end of his life Marx had changed his original attitude to the state considerably, especially after the Paris Commune.

Actually, I'm not sure Marx could have written a really good analysis of the capitalist state in the 19th Century, as the capitalist state was in a pretty early stage of its evolution, compared to its Leviathan-like flowering in the 20th and 21st.

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

I posted this before, and I'll post this again: I think he should have just written one big book on the six topics.

[It's also a shame that the leading Marxists of the Second International era didn't collaborate to write such a work.]

Question for Ismail: Why didn't Soviet economists unite to write a unified "Marxist-Leninist" work on capital, land ownership, wage labour, the state, international trade, and the world market? That was another lost opportunity.

Wage labor is of course covered in Vol. 1, and landed property very well handled in Vol. 3. As is financial capital, collecting interest, dividends etc., which Marx didn't even mention in the original six volume prospectus, a glaring gap, far more important than an analysis of international trade for example.

The six book prospectus was an early notion that Marx basically abandoned. The four-volume structure adopted was a better idea.

Though Vol. 4 is problematic, as its a critique of the bourgeois economists up to his time, which is almost useless nowadays as nobody ever reads any of them any more except Adam Smith. Mostly useful for his digressions into matters not covered elsewhere from the original 6-volume schema.

Now, a really good critique of Marshall, Keynes, the Austrians, the monetarists like Friedman, etc. would be a great thing, and various contemporary Marxist economists have taken stabs at it.

My favorite being Bukharin's Economic Theory of the Leisure Class on the Austrians and, by implication, all marginalists including Marshall himself. MR published in in English, I have a copy. Great read!

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

Marx would probably have been the first to acknowledge that his theoretical contributions were one aspect of a project that has to be developed over time if. He constantly stressed the need to transcend static ideology alienated from praxis, and he would be rolling in his grave if he could see what some "orthodox Marxists," whatever than means, have done to his ideas. The idea that Marx's work could ever be "finished" except through social transformation doesn't do justice to his insights.


Yeah, although the fault lies less with Marx than with self-described Marxists who have trivialized his base-superstructure analogy. Although he probably couldn't have seen how the culture industry would develop in the 20th and 21st centuries, a lot of Marxian ideas that prefigure later analyses of bourgeois culture (commodity fetishism, reification, etc.) were pared away by later applications of Marxism because the implications were much more radical than those of narrowly economistic interpretations of Marxism, sometimes inconveniently so.

That's why people who read Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, and Luxembourg should also read Debord, Lukacs, Marcuse, Adorno, Althusser, Lefebvre, Horkheimer, Vaneigem, etc. This is a central problem for us.


For sure. But it's also interesting that modern bourgeois culture was made possible by the disintegration of religion and is so robust precisely because it is rationalistic, fragmentary, anti-religious (at the same time that it takes religion's place). Also, bourgeois technological progress is a key feature here -- "the medium is the message." And in this case, the medium is a fusion of advanced technology and the commodity form, making it something analogous to but fundamentally different than feudal religion.


Exactly. I think the clash between the bourgeois notion of intellectual property and the way information is distributed on the internet is a precursor to a much more structural contradiction that will become apparent (especially if revolutionaries get off their asses) between the market economy and the radical new forms of economic organization made possible by the universal interconnectivity of the internet.
[/SIZE]

Eh? If you think there is a contradiction between the market economy and the internet, you are not paying enough attention. The internet facilitates capitalism and is a major profit center nowadays.

OTOH, the Internet would also tremendously facilitate a real democratic centralist planned economy, with the entire world able to participate in economic discussion and debate, what with PCs and laptops in every African village.

-M.H.-

[Die Neue Zeit]

Key words here are "in the West." As the proletariat decreases in percentage in imperialist countries, it is growing extremely rapidly in the Third World.

You're beginning to sound like a Maoist Third Worldist. Define "proletariat."


Wage labor is of course covered in Vol. 1, and landed property very well handled in Vol. 3. As is financial capital, collecting interest, dividends etc., which Marx didn't even mention in the original six volume prospectus, a glaring gap, far more important than an analysis of international trade for example.

The six book prospectus was an early notion that Marx basically abandoned. The four-volume structure adopted was a better idea.

What I meant was that the three or four volumes of Capital covered just one theme in a larger work. All the others were mentioned only insofar as they were tied to the theme of capital.

Wage labour would have its own volumes, where capital and landed property and more would be mentioned only insofar as they were tied to the hypothetical theme of wage labour.

[blake 3:17]

It hasn't been mentioned but the single greatest book in the 20th century to continue Marx's work is Harry Braverman's Labor and Monopoly Capital.

[Ismail]

In the same way every other introductory text is written, probably. You know, everything is said, the details are omitted, the proofs are omitted, the counterpoints are omitted, and it ends with "though you should probably read up this shit yourself".There's a big difference between books on political economy (which the USSR had no shortage of) and books which are basically breaking some new ground by expanding upon what Marx wrote. Again, there were plenty of debates in the 40's-50's USSR.

Stalin was asked a lot of times to intervene on economic matters, and here's a particularly detailed example of conversations with economists (which mainly consists of criticisms): http://revolutionarydemocracy.org/rdv4n2/5convers.htm

In these Stalin talks about all sorts of things and it's an interesting read. Again, though, this was just about drafting basic political economy textbooks.

[A Marxist Historian]

You're beginning to sound like a Maoist Third Worldist. Define "proletariat."

Pretty much any definition of "proletariat" you like works here. In fact, let's use the old fashioned, not terribly scientifically correct definition of the proletariat that was generally used by, say, Karl Kautsky a hundred years ago. Only because that is about as far away from Maoist Third Worldism as you can get.

Where is steel produced these days? Where is coal mined? Where is oil pumped? Where are computers and other electronic stuff actually manufactured? And where is car production headed, as Detroit declines further day by day? In the Third World of course, by and large.

Right now, in the San Francisco Bay Area, they are rebuilding the Bay Bridge for earthquake protection. How are they doing it? Well, big pieces of the new bridge are being built in China, by Chinese proletarians, and are going to be shipped here and assembled!



What I meant was that the three or four volumes of Capital covered just one theme in a larger work. All the others were mentioned only insofar as they were tied to the theme of capital.

Wage labour would have its own volumes, where capital and landed property and more would be mentioned only insofar as they were tied to the hypothetical theme of wage labour.

That was a structure Marx was thinking about using early on, but he discarded it. Why would it be really necessary to have a separate volume about labor barely mentioning capital? What could it that was *really* critical for understanding the workings of the capitalist system not already covered in vol. 1?

(and in fact Braverman's book, previously mentioned, does in fact nicely treat many of the additional issues that might be nice in such a volume--though his Sweezyite "neo-capitalism" mars the book somewhat.)

Vols. 1, 2 and 3 have an excellent dialectical structure, from capital in itself relating directly to labor, the heart of the system, to capital in the circulation process relating to other capitals in vol. 2, to vol. 3 which synthesizes the whole system into a whole. Thesis-antithesis-synthesis in fact, just as Hegel would have liked it. And incorporating in one place or another just about the whole basic workings of the capitalist system in Marx's time.

Besides Vol. 1 covering wage labor very well, Vol. 3 covers landed property quite adequately for Marx's immediate purpose.

-M.H.-