After word to the Second German Edition of Capital.
Karl Marx, London, January 24, 1873
“This mystification which dialectic suffered in Hegel’s hands, by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general form of working in a comprehensive and conscious manner. With him it is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell.
“In its mystified form, dialectic became the fashion in Germany because it seemed to transfigure and to glorify the existing state of things. In its rational form it is a scandal and abomination to bourgeoisdom and its doctrinaire professors, because it includes in its comprehensive and affirmative recognition of the existing state of things, at the same time also, the recognition of the negation of that state, of its inevitable breaking up; because it regards every historical developed social form as in fluid movement, and therefore takes into account its transient nature not less than its momentary existence; because it lets noting impose upon it, and is in its essence critical and revolutionary.
“The contradictions inherent in the movement of capitalist society impress themselves upon the practical bourgeois most striking in the changes of the periodic cycle, through which modern industry runs, and whose crowing point is the universal crisis. That crisis is once again approaching, although as yet but in its preliminary stage; and by the universality of its theater and the intensity of its action will drum dialectics even into the heads of the mushroom upstarts of the new, holy Pruuso-German empire.”
K. Marx
The above is quoted from the last three paragraphs of the "After-word" from Capital and given as a preface to the English edition of Capital 1887. In this after-word Marx discusses his presentation of and rewriting - in a didactic manner at the urging of his friend Dr. L. Kugelmann in Hanover, the value form in Capital Volume 1.
Marx states in the second paragraph of “After word,” “
“likewise the connection between the substance of value and the determination of the magnitude of value by socially necessary labor-time, which was only alluded to in the first edition, is now expressly emphasized.”
In the eighteenth paragraph Marx gives a rather detailed exposition of the form of his dialectic and its specific application by quoting a reviewer of Capital. Following this rather lengthy and important quote Marx states:
“Of course the method of presentation must differ in form from that of inquiry. The latter has to appropriate the material I detail, to analyze its different forms of development, to trace out their inner connection. Only after this work is done, can the actual movement be adequately described. If this is done successfully, if the life of the subject matter is ideally reflected as in a mirror, then it may appear as if we had before us a mere a priori construction.”
My presentation is consistent with the actual development of the Marxist movement amongst the proletariat and the spread of the standpoint of Marx by the Soviet government. This specific presentation style should not be abolished but rather, only sublated or at worst and treated as an ideological form expressing a specific quantitative development in industrial relations from the standpoint of the proletariat objective position.
The passing from one distinct quantitative boundary to another in capital and industrial relations calls forth changes in the structure of language whose form – words, may stay static and unchanging while their content – conceptual essence, change.
For instance the word “connection,” belongs – as a theoretical concept and construct used by Marx, to the era of industrial development; and is giving way to the concept “interactivity” or “interactive unity and strife.” This is so because man real life activity reveals a fuller meaning – greater depth, to the idea of material actuality we call “form” and “content” and “mutual penetration of opposites. ”This process of “life activity revealing a fuller meaning” arises out of man and takes shape on the basis of the productive forces.
I have often stated that, “society is formed of the basis of the unity of the productive forces and production relations.” When this formulation was advanced during a theoretical presentation of “African American Liberation and Revolution in the United States,” a full decade ago, I advanced a line of argument against the formulation, stating that “society is constituted” not formed as such. This was a private matter unworthy of public debate and at the time I was undertaking a length amateur study of the transition to homo-sapien-sapien and the emergence of society as a specific form of constituted community, which is collective human activity using tools with a social character.
Then of course I have repeated stated that, “a crisis is an interruption.” Well, a crisis is not literally an interruption as in the halting of/in a process but only appears as an interruption. A crisis denoted a point of transition, generally expressed as a crisis – extreme polarization of and affecting the form in which a given process express itself. The problem on the level of epistemology is that form is not simply “connected” to essence but the surface of a qualitatively distinct matter formation. A concrete analysis of the movement of contradiction in its emergence, development and decay is the only way to knowledge both of the basic laws of the development of a process and of the diverse concrete forms of its appearance at different stages and in different conditions. This “way to knowledge” is inexplicably conditioned and evolved on the basis of the evolution of the productive forces, after the constitution of society.
In Capital Marx begins from the simplest, basic relations of merchant-capitalist social relations – the exchange of products of human labor he calls commodities. The commodity form only emerges at a certain stage in the development of human self realization activity long after society is constituted. Marx presentation is didactic and does not being with the evolution of man, the point at which society is constituted, the emergence of the plow – not fire, as a revolutionary instrument of production and the development of product barter and the subsequent emergence of the commodity form. Marx begins with what the “man on the street” encounters in his daily life affirming activity during the timeframe in which he was a part.
Engels historic contribution is immense in teaching the working class – “the man o the street,” the science of society and buttressing the materialist conception of history on a planetary scale. Engels was the proletariats greatest General.
Earlier Marx was quoted as stating:
“The contradictions inherent in the movement of capitalist society impress themselves upon the practical bourgeois most striking in the changes of the periodic cycle, through which modern industry runs, and whose crowing point is the universal crisis.”
Marx speaks of “the changes of the periodic cycle, through which modern industry runs, . . .” and this “change in the periodic cycle,” has to be grasped on the basis of a specific configuration of the unity of the productive forces and production relations that distinguish one stage of development from another.
