Carrol Cox:
>Do you mean that no one can understand Marx without owning the
>Verso/Vintage edition of _Capital_?
>
>Or do you merely mean the final chapter of _Capital_, entitled
>differently in that edition?
The chapter at the end of the Verso/Vintage edition is based on a manuscript
"chapter 6" that was left out of the original published editions of capital.
So, yes, you would have to have that edition to read that chapter.
Could one understand Marx without reading the resultate? Yes, but it would
also be much easier to egregiously *mis*read Marx, just as it would be
easier to miss the point of Capital if one skips the section in chapter 1 on
the fetishism of commodities. Of course, you could read both and still
misread Marx.
>I doubt that very many people are going to bother unless you give us
>some bait better than your own blank assertion to explore the matter.
Oh, well, I doubt that my giving some bait will motivate very many people to
bother, either. Marx probably had cogent reasons for leaving the chapter out
of the published version -- it is not highly "accessible". That is not to
say that it is particularly dense or hard to follow. Rather Marx's
uncompromising thoroughness of analysis there is hard to swallow.
People don't want to know how deeply implicated in the system everything
they do is. If they are critical of the system, they would prefer to stand
outside it, so they delude themselves into thinking they do. This fantastic
outsider stance is one of the most resilient defensive features of the
system. The stance of outsider is functional for the system in much the same
way that the persona of the outsider is functional for the novel.
The distinction between the formal and the real subsumption of labour under
capital denies that labour can challenge capital from outside as an
autonomous being. The collective worker is the product of the capitalist
production process and thus indelibly bears the stamp of that process and
all its inequities. The dawn doesn't come when Frankenstein's monster
magically matures into Mary Shelley. Nor does the working class become its
own author.
My bait would be to insinuate that if you read the chapter you will find out
how the story ends. But if you read the chapter, you will not find out how
the story ends.
Tom Walker
Bowen Island, BC
604 947 2213
