Re: [PEN-L] FW: Eurocentrism and capitalism

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Marx-Engels Correspondence 1895 Engels to Conrad Schmidt In Zurich Abstract "The reproaches you make against the law of value apply to all concepts, regarded from the standpoint of reality. The identity of thought and being, to express myself in Hegelian fashion, everywhere coincides with your example of the circle and the polygon. Or the two of them, the concept of a thing and its reality, run side by side like two asymptotes, always approaching each other yet never meeting. This difference between the two is the very difference which prevents the concept from being directly and immediately reality and reality from being immediately its own concept. But although a concept has the essential nature of a concept and cannot therefore prima facie directly coincide with reality, from which it must first be abstracted, it is still something more than a fiction, unless you are going to declare all the results of thought fictions because reality has to go a long way round before it corresponds to them, and even then only corresponds to them with asymptotic approximation. Is it any different with the general rate of profit ? At each moment it only exists approximately. If it were for once realised in two undertakings down to the last dot on the i, if both resulted in exactly the same rate of profit in a given year, that would be pure accident; in reality the rates of profit vary from business to business and from year to year according to different circumstances, and the general rate only exists as an average of many businesses and a series of years. But if we were to demand that the rate of profit--say 14�876934...--should be exactly similar in every business and every year down to the 100th decimal place, on pain of degradation to fiction, we should be grossly misunderstanding the nature of the rate of profit and of economic laws in general--none of them has any reality except as approximation, tendency, average, and not as immediate reality. This is due partly to the fact that their action clashes with the simultaneous action of other laws, but partly to their own nature as concepts. Or take the law of wages, the realisation of the value of labour power, which is only realised as an average, and even that not always, and which varies in every locality, even in every branch, according to the customary standard of life. Or ground rent, representing a superprofit above the general rate, derived from monopoly over a force of nature. There too there is by no means a direct coincidence between real superprofit and real rent, but only an average approximation.  . . . From this indeed it follows from the very first that the total profit and the total surplus value can only approximately coincide. But when you further take into consideration the fact that neither the total surplus value nor the total capital are constant magnitudes, but variable ones which alter from day to day, then any coincidence between rate of profit and the sum of surplus value other than that of an approximating series, and any coincidence between total price and total value other than one which is constantly striving towards unity and perpetually moving away from it again, appears a sheer impossibility. In other words, the unity of concept and appearance manifests itself as essentially an infinite process, and that is what it is, in this case as in all others. Did feudalism ever correspond to its concept? Founded in the kingdom of the West Franks, further developed in Normandy by the Norwegian conquerors, its formation continued by the French Norsemen in England and Southern Italy, it came nearest to its concept--in Jerusalem, in the kingdom of a day, which in the Assises de Jerusalem left behind it the most classic _expression_ of the feudal order. Was this order therefore a fiction because it only achieved a short-lived existence in full classical form in Palestine, and even that mostly only--on paper? Or are the concepts which prevail in the natural sciences fictions because they by no means always coincide with reality? From the moment we accept the theory of evolution all our concepts of organic life correspond only approximately to reality. Otherwise there would be no change: on the day when concepts and reality completely coincide in the organic world development comes to an end. full:http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1895/letters/95_03_12.htm