Jim Devine wrote: > > > I disagree (though not completely). I think the reason why PA appears > at the end of volume I is primarily that he organized the book > starting with the abstract (the most general phenomenon of capitalism, > the commodity) and worked toward the concrete. [Frankly, I think his > mode of presentation may have been a mistake, since it deters a lot of > readers and encourages misinterpretations.]
There is either another reason or another way of putting the same point Jim puts here. I cite my favorite sentence in the Grundrisse, "The anatomy of man is a key to the anatomy of the ape." AND he does NOT say (because it would be false) that the anatomy of the ape is a key to the anatomy of man. It would be false for reasons Stephen Jay Gould in particular was to make central to his thought more than a century later, expressed in the metaphor that if the tape of life was to be replayed it would NOT be the same. That is, the ape did NOT _necessarily_ lead to homo sapiens, for an indefinite series of events could have completely changed the following 5 million years, leading to a 'present' world empty of any species of primate. So (as Ollman puts it) one has to do history backwards, for only in that way can one perceive the past accurately. And of course _my_ quarrel with Jim Blaut was only incidentally whether he was right or wrong about the origins of capitalism; it was essentially that he was terribly wrong about the essence of capitalism _now_, and one reason for his error was his inability and/or refusal to read history backwards. Carrol
