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Phillip Ferguson: > What's your source for this? MEGA and its editors. This is not even a matter of dispute. This is purely banal Marxology. Unfortunately Anglophone Marx research is a few decades behind the state of things in Germany. HM/Brill is compensating for this by publishing much that attempts to make use of MEGA, and Monthly Review has published John Bellamy Foster's excellent research into Marx's investigations of natural science, but in general, there is still a tendency in the Anglosphere to not keep up with the state of MEGA or make use of it. > According to the MIA, for instance, vol 3 consists of material written by > Marx from 1863-1883. MIA does a valuable service by providing free digital access to public domain texts, but it is not an authority on anything as far as Marx philology. The claim is absolutely wrong. The manuscript that Engels edited to create a third volume of Capital is from 1864/65, and as I said, was discovered by Helena Demuth among Marx's papers after his death. > it could not have been written before vol 1 and 2 because it *brings together* Except that the manuscript was, in fact, written before both Volume I (the only actual volume of Capital in terms of actual finished manuscripts by Marx) _and_ the manuscript that constitutes the basis for "Volume II". There were _also_ manuscripts that Marx wrote between 1874-1878 that were intended for an eventual Volume III, but what Engels used for his edition of "Volume III" was the 1864/65 manuscript. > but the working out of much of the material in vol 1 comes even earlier - > 1857-8 (what became the Grundrisse). This is absurd reasoning, for numerous reasons. One, the 1857-1858 manuscript (Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie) is not even part of the Capital project, but of Marx's earlier, abandoned project of a six-book "Critique of Political Economy." On purely philological grounds, you are talking about a manuscript that belonged to a different project, let alone a different volume. Second, there are numerous conceptual changes that Marx made in subsequent years; for example, the distinction between abstract and concrete labour is not really present in the 1857/58 notebooks. So we're talking about discrete stages of conceptual advance throughout Marx's lifetime, which you are amalgamating into a single theoretical complex. > So, to use your logic, a chunk of vol 1 was written in 1857-8, therefore > preceding by five-six years the date you give for vol 3. No, this is not my logic at all, this is your absurd logic. See above, not only are the 1857-58 manuscripts not part of Vol. I, they are not even part of the Capital project; they are the preparatory notebooks for the 6-book plan (_not_ Capital). > You're so dogmatic about Marx having to be wrong about LTRPF Um, I haven't said a single thing about LTRPF. The only previous intervention I've made on this thread was to point out your absolutely false claim about the Volume I and the 1868-1881 manuscript preceding the 1864/65 manuscript. Perhaps you're confusing me with somebody else. I generally think the philological evidence that Michael Heinrich has given for Marx abandoning the "LTRPF" is rather convincing, but I don't feel particularly passionate about it either way, because it's neither the lynchpin of Marx's writing about crisis, nor do I regard it as a particularly fruitful or even interesting subject of debate. Self-described Marxists who advocate for the validity of LTRPF should just try, as Roberts sort of does, to muster evidence and arguments for its validity independent of textual exegesis by Marx, like, you know, how actual economists also work in the real world (and every branch of science, for that matter). (or that it isn't Marx's crisis theory) that you have got yourself in a bind re the _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
