Hari Kumar wrote: "I think you are picking and choosing what version of a less 'bloody' > social change you prefer."
Hari, There is no question that I prefer a less bloody social change. But my position is not based on finding an isolated phrase that suits my priors. I have "read it all" and in the process tried to make connections and follow threads from earlier to later, from philosophical to political. I have no bone to pick with Friedrich Engels. He has even provided some important clues and clarifications that I have relied on. My reading of Marx has been a journey that started over a half century ago. My then wife gave me the three volumes of *Capital* for Christmas 1974. I considered Mandel's *Late Capitalism* and Harry Braverman's *Labor and Monopoly Capital *two of the most coherent modern interpreters of Marx. Reading the previously unpublished Chapter Six "*Resultate,*" I became fascinated with Marx's distinction between formal and real subsumption and the relation between absolute and relative surplus value; and the eras of manufacture and large scale industry. The *Grundrisse* took me behind the scenes to watch how Marx worked out these profound insights into the workings of capital. For decades hence I sought out books and articles that addressed formal and real subsumption. In the late 1990s, Moishe Postone's *Time, Labor and Social Domination, *took me back to a passage in the *Grundrisse* that had thrilled me two decades earlier when I had first read it. Capital itself is the moving contradiction, [in] that it presses to reduce > labour time to a minimum, while it posits labour time, on the other side, > as sole measure and source of wealth. Hence it diminishes labour time in > the necessary form so as to increase it in the superfluous form; hence > posits the superfluous in growing measure as a condition--question of life > or death--for the necessary. Postone quoted that passage *twice* in TLSD. Harry Braverman had impressed upon me the importance of always reading the footnotes and following the citations to their original sources. In the *Grundrisse*, the paragraph that contains the passage Postone quoted concludes with a quote (a paraphrase, actually) from "*The Source and Remedy* etc. 1821, p.6" ‘Truly wealthy a nation, when the working day is 6 rather than 12 hours. > Wealth is not command over surplus labour time’ (real wealth), ‘but rather, > disposable time outside that needed in direct production, for every > individual and the whole society.’ Marx obviously thought *The Source and Remedy* was worth quoting and since I had never heard of it before I sought it out. I found it in a microfilm collection in the basement of the UBC library and diligently printed out each page, took the stack of paper to Kinkos where I had them optically character recognized and then painstakingly checked the OCR results against the text in the prints from the microfilm. I was somewhat disappointed and amused that Professor Postone had not mentioned *The Source and Remedy* and its relation to the passage he found so compelling. Fred Engels mentioned *The Source and Remedy* in his preface to volume 2 of *Capital*. He was defending Marx from charges of plagiarism leveled by a disciple of Karl Rodbertus and pointing out that surplus value had an older pedigree. Engels wrote that Marx had rescued the anonymously published 1821 pamphlet from its oblivion. Not quite. Marx developed *his* concept of surplus value largely in notebooks IV and VII of the *Grundrisse*, which include several citations of *The Source and Remedy *and around a dozen mentions of 'disposable time,' including one paragraph in notebook VII in which he repeats the term, in English, seven times. One could be forgiven for getting the impression that disposable time was central to Marx's concept of surplus value. Because it is. Notebooks IV and VII of the *Grundrisse *are to me what the 1859 Preface to *A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy* is to "traditional" Marxism. Mainly because the 1859 Preface is simply a vague and ambiguous summary of the argument developed in notebooks IV and VII. In the Preface Marx referred to the fetters on the development of the productive forces; in notebooks IV and VII he defined and described those fetters. Now I am admittedly partial to a particular lineage of Marx's analysis that runs from those notebooks of the *Grundrisse* to, particularly, chapter 10 of vol. I of *Capital* on The Working Day, The Inaugural Address, and the passage in volume III, in the chapter on the Trinity Formula, where Marx discussed the preconditions for the realm of freedom. These "pickings and choosings" define, describe, and summarize Marx's analysis of surplus value, formal and real subsumption, the forces and relations of production, necessary and superfluous labour time, and socially necessary labour time. They present a microcosm of the whole analysis. So when I cite "the political economy of the working class" from the Inaugural Address it is not simply that I have found a phrase I prefer but that I have identified a phrase that for me (and in my view presumably for Marx) sums up so much that he is saying in a vast corpus. Cheers, Tom Walker (Sandwichman) -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. 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