I've always liked this letter to Kugelmann. Very Hegelian. Very important stress on the importance of theory for revolutionary transformation.
Whose translation is this?
Andrew Kliman
Progress Publisher, Moscow 1969, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels Selected Works in three Volumes, Volume Two page 418. First Printing.
I had looked up the letter on one of the Marx Archive (for easy copying) and it lacked the first three sentences. The above is not the entire letter, which I do not have a copy of.
I read in the letter a definitive statement on value (magnitude) and exchange value (prices or exchange relations) and the approach to examining "the essence" of phenomena. Thus Marx states:
"The vulgar economist has not the faintest idea that the actual everyday exchange relations cannot be directly identical with the magnitudes of value."
The letter is reproduced below.
Marx to L. Kugelmann in Hanover
London, July 11, 1868
. . . . As for the Centralblatt, the man is making the greatest possible
concession in admitting that, if one means anything at all by value, the
conclusion I draw must be accepted. The unfortunate fellow does not see that,
even if there were no chapter on "value" in my book, the analysis of the real
relations which I give would contain the proof and demonstrations of the real
value relations. All that palaver about the necessity of proving the concept
of value comes from complete ignorance both of the subject dealt with and of
the scientific method.
Every child knows a nation which ceased to work, I will not say for a year,
but even for a few weeks, would perish. Every child knows, too, that the
masses of products corresponding to the different needs required different
and quantitatively determined masses of the total labor of society. That this
necessity of the distribution of social labor in definite proportions cannot
possibly be done away with by a particular form of social production but can
only change the mode of its appearance, is self-evident. No natural laws can
be done away with. What can change in historically different circumstances is
only the form in which these laws assert themselves. And the form in which
this proportional distribution of labor asserts itself, in the state of
society where the interconnection of social labor is manifested in the
private exchange of the individual products of labor, is precisely the
exchange value of these products.
Science consists precisely in demonstrating how the law of value asserts
itself. So that if one wanted at the very beginning to "explain" all the
phenomenon which seemingly contradict that law, one would have to present
science before science. It is precisely Ricardo's mistake that in his first
chapter on value [On the Principles of Political Economy, and Taxation, Page
479] he takes as given all possible and still to be developed categories in
order to prove their conformity with the law of value.
On the other hand, as you correctly assumed, the history of the theory
certainly shows that the concept of the value relation has always been the
same — more or less clear, hedged more or less with illusions or
scientifically more or less definite. Since the thought process itself grows
out of conditions, is itself a natural process, thinking that really
comprehends must always be the same, and can vary only gradually, according
to maturity of development, including the development of the organ by which
the thinking is done. Everything else is drivel.
The vulgar economist has not the faintest idea that the actual everyday
exchange relations cannot be directly identical with the magnitudes of value.
The essence of bourgeois society consists precisely in this, that a priori
there is no conscious social regulation of production. The rational and
naturally necessary asserts itself only as a blindly working average. And
then the vulgar economist thinks he has made a great discovery when, as
against the revelation of the inner interconnection, he proudly claims that
in appearance things look different. In fact, he boasts that he holds fast to
appearance, and takes it for the ultimate. Why, then, have any science at
all?
But the matter has also another background. Once the interconnection is
grasped, all theoretical belief in the permanent necessity of existing
conditions collapses before their collapse in practice. Here, therefore, it
is absolutely in the interest of the ruling classes to perpetuate a senseless
confusion. And for what other purpose are the sycophantic babblers paid, who
have no other scientific trump to play save that in political economy one
should not think at all?
But satis superque [enough and to spare]. In any case it shows what these
priests of the bourgeoisie have come down to, when workers and even
manufacturers and merchants understand my book [Capital] and find their way
about in it, while these "learned scribes" (!) complain that I make excessive
demands on their understanding....
(end of quote)
Melvin P.
