Philosophy and Religion, Part 7a
“Capital”: Not a Doctrine, but a Critique In the year following the 150th anniversary of the 1848 “Communist Manifesto”, Cyril Smith took on Marx’s premier work, “Capital” in his “Hegel, Economics, and Marx's Capital” (linked below). Smith showed how generations of Marxists have got it very wrong. In particular, Smith shows us how “Capital” is not about “economics” or about what even Great Lenin mistakenly called “Marx’s Economic Doctrine”, but is really what it says it is: “A Critique of Political Economy”. Equally mistaken, Smith shows, is the vulgar conception of the relation between Hegel’s work and Marx’s, and here Smith could have drawn support from E. V. Ilyenkov’s [Image, above] Ilyenkov’s “The Dialectics of the Abstract and the Concrete in Marx’s Capital” was published in the Soviet Union in 1960. No doubt, Smith is not the first to rediscover the real Marx, and he will not have been the last. Apart from giving us a very good reminder to pay proper attention to what we are reading, Smith is also validating the CU policy of reading the original work more than the commentators and the analysts (see, e.g., the CU Generic Course on Capital, Volume 1), currently being run on the CU Africa blog and forum. The next post will deal decisively and comprehensively with Stalin and Stalinism. It will lift the Stalinist load from off the back of Karl Marx, and refresh Marx’s legacy. The full Cyril Smith archive on MIA can be found here. There is excellent stuff there. Please download the main text below and read. Download:Hegel, Economics, and Marx's Capital, 1999, Cyril Smith (7803 words) Further reading:How The Marxists Buried Marx, 1998, Smith (13629 words)Karl Marx and the Origins of ‘Marxism’, 1998, Smith (4670 words)The Communist Manifesto after 150 years, 1998, Smith (8285 words) Previous main Communist University posts: Channel [members] Course Archive Weeks Last Posted SADTU Pol Ed [436] Development, Rural and Urban 3/10 5 August 2010 CU Africa [230] Marx’s Capital, Volumes 1, 2 & 3 8/33 3 August 2010 CU [2837] Philosophy and Religion 7/10 5 August 2010 Courses completed in 2010 to date: SADTU Pol Ed Lenin’s The State & Revolution 6 June - July National Democratic Revolution 12 March - June Basics 10 January - March SADTU Pol Schools 3-Day School 3 days 2-4 June CU No Woman, No Revolution 10 March - June Basics 10 January – March Click here to visit Marxists Internet Archive -- Posted By DomzaNet to Communist University on 8/06/2010 02:22:00 PM -- You are subscribed. This footer can help you. Please POST your comments to [email protected] or reply to this message. You can visit the group WEB SITE at http://groups.google.com/group/yclsa-eom-forum for different delivery options, pages, files and membership. To UNSUBSCRIBE, please email [email protected] . You don't have to put anything in the "Subject:" field. You don't have to put anything in the message part. All you have to do is to send an e-mail to this address (repeat): [email protected] .
