The Making of Marx’s ‘Capital’ by Roman Rosdolsky, Pluto Press, 1977.
There has never been a time when the conditions for a transformation to a Socialist society have been so ripe. Socialism has never been as indispensable and economically feasible as it is today, (p.488)
This is certainly not a book for the dilettante or the dabbler, but for the dedicated Marxian buff. We have here a systematic comparison of the seven large notebooks compiled by Marx during fifteen years exhaustive study of the bourgeois economists, with the published product, the Critique of Political Economy and Capital.
These notebooks came to light, somewhat mysteriously, in 1931. The source, presumably, was the archives of the German Social Democratic Party, known to be Marx’s (and Engels’) literary executors. They next turned up in Moscow at the Marx-Engels Institute, which published them, but they were not translated into English until 1973.
They are now published by Penguin under the title Die Grundrisse, referred to as ‘the rough draft of Capital’, and reading like a telephone directory or railway timetable. Here is no Karl Marx the brilliant political literateur whose searing epigrams made Capital world famous, but Dr. Marx the methodical, painstaking craftsman systematically cutting down sequentially P. Proudhon, David Ricardo, Adam Smith, J.S. Mill, J.B. Say et al.
Rosdolsky’s work is no slavish recap of Marx but a rigorously critical reappraisal. He claims that a mistake was made in The Communist Manifesto in stating that capitalism could “no longer maintain its own paupers”, and that Marx was unduly influenced by the crises of the 1850s. Leafing through Rosdolsky’s copious quotations, we can almost hear Marx’s cerebrum ticking over, following his devastating onslaught on the orthodox and radical economists to his positive conclusion — Surplus Value. Item: Adam Smith, who never understood the real nature of creative labour, calling it all ‘pain’. Item: David Ricardo, who could never accept the existence of constant capital. Item: P.J. Proudhon, with his pathetic ‘free credit’, and many others.
Not content with all this, he then embarks upon a rasping re-evaluation of the whole of the ‘Golden Age’ of Marxian literature, from 1890 to 1925. He reviews and challenges almost every writer of note: the Germans — Kautsky, Bernstein and Luxemburg; the Austrians — Hilferding and Bauer; the Russians — Plekhanov, Tugan, Lenin, Trotsky, Bukharin; Joan Robinson (Britain); and Sweezy and Baran, the Americans, are all taken to the cleaners.
It is difficult to follow Martin Nicolaus’s somewhat obscure, if not peevish, stricture in a footnote reference to Rosdolsky in his foreword to Die Grundrisse. He calls Rosdolsky’s book “quotation- ridden” and complains that ‘Ros’ has “not taken the science [of Marxism] a single step further”. How you evaluate Marx’s work without quotations is a secret known only to Mr. Nicolaus. Seeing that Rosdolsky was exposing the Stalinist economists (?) for the sycophantic fakes they were when Mr. Nicolaus was writing rubbishy pamphlets about the ‘Workers’ State’, we are satisfied that it was Rosdolsky who ‘took the science further’.
An intriguing sidelight of Die Grundrisse is the further evidence it gives on the notorious Bohm-Bawerk controversy, that is, Bohm’s claim that Marx ‘invented’ Production Price in the third volume of Capital to explain away the ‘discrepancy’ between average profit and the Labour Theory of Value in the first. We now know not merely that Marx wrote (as Hilferding proved) Production Price before Volume I was finished, but that it was in Grundrisse years before Capital was even started.
Incidentally, the little old SLP (now defunct) published Hilferding’s reply to Bohm in 1920, much to its credit; and Eden and Cedar Paul, the English translators, sparked off what Rosdolsky called a ‘splendid polemic’ between Bernstein and Hilferding (in Die Neue Zeit) over the use of the German word ‘daher’ — ‘consequently’ or ‘therefore’. Hilferding claimed that Bernstein left it out deliberately to distort Marx (p.519), but Rosdolsky points out that Engels had already put it in (in Volume I).
Rosdolsky is slightly suspect in accepting what he calls “Luxemburg’s breakdown theory”. This all turns on the precise translation of the German word ‘Zusammenbruch’ which means ‘collapse’. (Whether he means this or ‘break-down’ is arguable.)
The section on the Law of the Falling Rate of Profit and the almost complete recap of Marx’s private ruminations on the nature of the Law of Value and Labour in socialist society, are well worth re-publishing in the Socialist Standard.
‘Ros’ suggests that the notorious ‘increasing misery’ thesis refers to the industrial reserve army only, and corrects common fallacies regarding the proportion of Surplus Value to increases in Constant Capital, which is inverse.
As a result of this book, and the ‘rough draft’ on which it is based, we now know considerably more about the origin of Marx’s Capital. Certainly Lenin, Hilferding, Luxemburg and Franz Mehring (Marx’s biographer) were all unaware of its existence, as were the founders of the SPGB. Despite this, we were able (in 1904) to get it all absolutely right. Everything in Die Grundrisse proves this.
Horatio
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