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Marx's Capital After One Hundred Years

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 November 2014

Thomas Sowell
Thomas Sowell*
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Cornell University
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A recurring lament in commemorations of classic works is that they are so well known that little remains to be said about them. This is certainly not true of Marx's Capital. Its difficult method of presentation, the numerous myths about it which have grown up over the years, and recent tendencies to mathematicize popular conceptions of Marxian economics in lieu of digging into Marx's own writings have together made this work almost as little understood today as it has ever been. Böhm-Bawerk's famous “refutation” of Marx's “labour theory of value” continues to be reproduced, along with the economic “breakdown” of capitalism theory, the “dialectical” forces at work, and all the old familiar cast of fictitious characters. If one accepts the cynical definition of a classic as a work that everyone talks about and no one reads, there is certainly no more classic work in economics than Capital. The hundredth anniversary of its publication seems an appropriate time to reexamine not only the book itself but also the beliefs about it which have acquired a life-almost an immortality-of their own.

L'éternelle complainte au sujet des ouvrages classiques est qu'ils sont tellement bien connus qu'il reste assez peu à dire à leur propos. Ceci n'est certes pas vrai du Capital de Marx. Sa présentation ardue, les mythes croissants à son sujet et les tendances récentes à formuler en termes mathématiques les conceptions populaires de l'économique marxiste au lieu de recherches en profondeur dans les écrits mêmes de Marx sont autant de fadeurs qui expliquent que cette oeuvre n'est pas plus comprise aujourd'hui qu'elle l'a jamais été.

L'influence de Hégel sur Marx est surtout terminologique, mais ceci n'implique pas qu’elle doive être négligée. Pour comprendre Marx il est souvent essentiel de comprendre le langage et la méthode de Hégel empruntés par Marx pour exprimer ses propres idées.

La théorie marxiste des cycles économiques n'implique ni la sous-consommation, ni la chute des taux de profits, ni même l'écroulement éventuel du capitalisme. Même les arguments voulant que la théorie ait impliqué ces éléments, si Marx avait vécu pour compléter le Capital, sont très ténus. La correspondance entre Marx et Engels révèle que les deux hommes considéraient le Capital comme une oeuvre complète du point de vue de son contenu analytique, mais non publiable du point de vue de sa forme littéraire.

Marx n'avait pas de théorie de la valeur-travail. Il expliqua à plus d'une reprise qu'il avait une « définition » de la valeur dans le Capital et dans sa Critique of Political Economy. Marx et Engels ont explicitement rejeté l'idée d'un gouvernement socialiste qui fixerait les prix selon le travail ou autrement.

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Articles
Information
Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science/Revue canadienne de economiques et science politique , Volume 33 , Issue 1 , February 1967 , pp. 50 - 74
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Political Science Association 1967

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References

1 There is, of course, nothing wrong with rendering the theories of an economist of the past in a more rigorous or mathematical manner than in the original, where this can be accomplished without doing violence to their meaning. But modernity can never be a substitute for knowing what you are talking about. Surely it is the ultimate in a new concept of scholarship when articles can be written on Marxian economics without a single citation of anything that Marx ever said! Cf. Samuelson, Paul A., “Wages and Interest: A Modern Dissection of Marxian Economic Models,” American Economic Review, 12 1957, 884–912 Google Scholar; Bronfenbrenner, Martin, “Das Kapital for the Modern Man,” Science & Society, Fall 1965, 419–38.Google Scholar

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3 (New York: International Publishers, 1963), 105, 107, 150, 151.

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5 For example: “These three events—the so-called Revival of Learning, the flourishing of the Fine Arts and the discovery of America and of the passage to India by the Cape—may be compared with that blush of dawn, which after long storms first betokens the return of a bright and glorious day.” Hegel, G. W. F., The Philosophy of History, trans. Sibrée, U. (New York, 1956), pp. 410–11.Google Scholar “The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production.” Capital (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Company, 1906), 823.Google Scholar The pagination of this edition is the same as that of the Modern Library Giant edition.

6 “We have expressed ourselves in various places regarding our relation to Hegel, but nowhere in a comprehensive, connected account. … a short, connected account of our relation to the Hegelian philosophy, of how we proceeded from it as well as how we separated from it, appeared to me to be required more and more.” Friedrich Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, reprinted in Feuer, Lewis S., ed., Basic Writings on Politics ir Philosophy (New York, 1959), 195, 196.Google Scholar

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8 Capital, I, 25.Google Scholar Marx observed elsewhere that “to bring a science to the point where it can be dialectically presented is an altogether different thing from applying an abstract ready-made system. …” Correspondence, 105.

9 Herr Eugen Dühring's Revolution in Science (1878) (New York, International Publishers, 1939), 145.Google Scholar Cited hereafter as Anti-Dühring.

10 Ibid., 147.

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20 Ibid., 147.

21 Ibid., 310.

22 “Communism is the necessary form and the active principle of the immediate future, but communism is not itself the aim of human development or the final form of human society.” This statement in a manuscript left unpublished in Marx's lifetime and printed in Bottomore, T. B. and Rubel, M., eds., Selected Writings in Sociology and Social Philosophy (London, 1956), 246 Google Scholar, only states succinctly what was clearly implied in his published writings. For example, The Poverty of Philosophy closed (p. 175) with the assertion that in Marx's society of the future social evolution could take place without political revolution. Engels similarly rejected any idea of “socialist society” as “a stable affair fixed once and for all.” Correspondence, 473.

23 Correspondence, 353.

24 Ibid., 354.

25 lbid., 360–1.

26 Ibid., 513–14. This is not to claim that Marx's and Engels' analyses of Russia were always acute. For example: “A few days ago a Petersburgh publisher surprised me with the news that a Russian translation of Das Kapital is now being printed.… My book against Proudhon (1847) and the one published by Duncker (1859) have had a greater sale in Russia than anywhere else. And the first foreign nation to translate Kapital is the Russian. But too much should not be made of all this.” Marx, Karl, Letters to Dr. Kugelmann (New York: International Publishers, 1934), 77.Google Scholar

27 Hegel, G. W. F., The Science of Logic, transl. Wallace, W. (London, 1892), 223.Google Scholar See also Marcuse, , Reason and Revolution, 143.Google Scholar

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29 For example, “like a butterfly from the chrysalis, the bourgeoisie arose out of the burghers, of the feudal period.…,” Anti-Dühring, 117. See also Marx, Karl, Wage Labour and Capital (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1947), 22 Google Scholar; Marx, Karl, Theories of Surplus Value, transl. Bonner, G. A. and Burns, Emile (New York: International Publishers, 1952), 186 Google Scholar; Engels on Capital, ed. and transl. Mins, Leonard E. (New York: International Publishers, 1937), 60 Google Scholar; a similar metaphor involving the metamorphosis of crabs was also used (Correspondence, 485) and reference to metamorphosis in general is even more common.

30 Theories of Surplus Value, 377, and, for example, chap, rv of vol. I (“Contradictions in the Formula for Capital”) and chap, xv of vol. III (“Unravelling the Internal Contradictions of the Law” of the falling rate of profit) of Capital.

31 “Contradiction” was explicitly cited as the basis for this interpretation in Shoul, Bernice, “Karl Marx and Say's Law,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 11 1957, 626n.Google Scholar

32 For example, Martin Bronfenbrenner cites Paul M. Sweezy, who in turn cites a number of other economists—not including Karl Marx. Bronfenbrenner, , “Das Kapital for the Modern Man,” 419 Google Scholar; Sweezy, Paul M., The Theory of Capitalist Development (New York, 1956), chap. xi.Google Scholar

33 Capital, III, 568.Google Scholar

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35 Theories of Surplus Value, 373n.

36 Capital, I, 837.Google Scholar

37 Quoted in Marcuse, , Reason and Revolution, 124.Google Scholar Engels cited the same definition of “negation”: Dialectics of Nature, 225.

38 Letters to Dr. Kugelmann, 111–12. See also Marx, Karl, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Company, 1904), 292–4Google Scholar; Correspondence, 204.

39 Marx, and Engels, , The Communist Manifesto, 29.Google Scholar

40 Theories of Surplus Value, 379. The distinction between the factors making for the possibility of crises and those actually producing them was made repeatedly: ibid., 381, 383–4, 386; Capital, I, 128.Google Scholar

41 Capital, III, 303.Google Scholar

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44 Ibid., II, 86, 362, 475; III, 359, 528, 567.

45 Ibid., II, 475–6.

46 Sweezy, Paul M., The Theory of Capitalist Development, 176.Google Scholar

47 Marx complained of his “continual relapses” (Correspondence, 215) and of having been “on the verge of the grave” (219) among numerous references to his poor health. See also his Letters to Dr. Kugelmann, 35, 90, and Mehring, Franz, Karl Marx: The Story of His Life (New York, 1935), 275.Google Scholar

48 Correspondence, 105–9, 129–33, 137–8, 153–6, 238–45, 266–74.

49 Ibid., 129–33.

50 Ibid., 232. Engels' work had appeared in the Deutsch-Französiche-Jahrbücher in 1844.

51 Engels' “Preface” to Capital, II, 9.Google Scholar

52 Correspondence, 204.

53 Ibid., 205. After Marx's death, Engels noted that “The 3rd book is complete since 1869–1870 and has never been touched since.” Engels, Frederick, Paul, and Lafargue, Laura, Correspondence (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1959), I, 134.Google Scholar This appears to contradict Engels' lament elsewhere that the manuscript of the third volume was “incomplete” ( Capital, III, 11 Google Scholar). However, the specifics of this lament indicated that it was a literary incompleteness to which Engels referred, or the incomplete working out of theories which were present rather than the absence of theories which Marx had not gotten around to mentioning at all.

54 Say, Jean-Baptiste, A Treatise on Political Economy, transl. Prinsep, C. R. (Philadelphia, Grigg & Elliot, 1846), 135 Google Scholar; Ricardo, David, The Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo, ed. Sraffa, Piero (Cambridge, 1953), I, chap, xixGoogle Scholar; II, 306, 415; VIII, 277.

55 See note 40.

56 “In conditions in which men produce for themselves, there are in fact no crises, but also no capitalist production.” Theories of Surplus Value, 380.

57 Necessity and chance were among the polar opposites which dialectical thinking refused to accept as mutually exclusive in reality. Chance affected the most necessary results and certain necessary relationships could be discovered in the pattern of events which were individually the result of chance. Thus “dialectics reduced itself to the science of the general laws of motion… these laws assert themselves unconsciously, in the form of external necessity in the midst of an endless series of seeming accidents.” ( Engels, , Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, 226 Google Scholar). Again, “chance is only one pole of an interrelation, the other pole of which is called necessity. In nature, where chance also seems to reign, we have long ago demonstrated in each particular field the inherent necessity and regularity that asserts itself in this chance.” ( Engels, , “The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State,” Marx, Karl and Engels, Frederick, Selected Works [Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1955], 322.Google Scholar See also Dialectics of Nature, 38, 223; Correspondence, 484, 518). This doctrine was applied to economics: “The mutual confluence and intertwining of the reproduction or circulation processes of different capitals is on the one hand necessitated by the division of labour, and on the other is accidental.…” Theories of Surplus Value, 385. See also Capital, III, 220.Google Scholar

58 Capital, I, 391.Google Scholar

59 Correspondence, 247.

60 Capital, II, 362.Google Scholar

61 Ibid., III, 140.

62 Ibid., II, 86.

63 The Poverty of Philosophy, 68.

64 Capital, II, 578.Google Scholar

65 Reprinted as an appendix in Marx, , Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, 195.Google Scholar

66 Ibid., 196.

67 Ibid., 195.

68 Theories of Surplus Value, 368.

69 Engels, , “Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy,” 195.Google Scholar

70 Wage Labour and Capital, Marx, Karl and Engels, Frederick, Selected Works (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1955), vol. I, p. 87.Google Scholar

71 Capital, I, 391 Google Scholar; III, 745, 1026; Correspondence, 246; Engels' “Preface” to The Poverty of Philosophy, 18. For essentially the same analysis without specific use of the term “law of value,” see Capital, I, 114–5; III, 220–1.Google Scholar

72 “Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy,” 196.

73 The Condition of the Working Class in England (London, 1952), 82.Google Scholar

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75 Theories of Surplus Value, 408.

76 Ibid., 387.

77 Ibid., 381.

78 Capital, I, 128.Google Scholar

79 Theories of Surplus Value, 379.

80 Ibid., 390.

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82 Ibid., 155n.

83 Ibid., 154, 155; Theories of Surplus Value, 386, 389.

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85 Ibid., 155.

86 Theories of Surplus Value, 386.

87 Ibid., 389.

88 Capital, III, 543, 602 Google Scholar; Critique of Political Economy (Chicago, 1904), 198.Google Scholar

89 Theories of Surplus Value, 392.

90 Ibid., 393.

91 Ibid., 390–1.

92 Ibid., 401.

93 Ibid., 408, 393.

94 Ibid., 393.

95 “One may assume that this life-cycle, in the essential branches of great industry, now averages ten years. However, it is not a question of any one definite number here.” Capital, II, 211.Google Scholar

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97 Capital, III, 574n–5nGoogle Scholar; Engels', “Preface” to The Poverty of Philosophy, 20n.Google Scholar

98 Capital, III, 272.Google Scholar Similarly, Marx said that “the same rate of surplus-value, with the same degree of labor exploitation, would express itself in a falling rate of profit…” Ibid., 248 (emphasis added).

99 Ibid., III, chap, xiv, passim.

100 Ricardo viewed wages as a relative share only as an analytical device. Marx attributed to Ricardo a social philosophy in which the relative position of the classes was more important than their absolute living standards (Theories of Surplus Value, 320). In fact, however, Ricardo's social philosophy made the absolute standard of living more important (The Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo), II, 249–50. See also Sowell, Thomas “Marx's ‘Increasing Misery’ Doctrine,” American Economic Review, 03 1960, 111–20.Google Scholar

101 Robinson, Joan, An Essay on Marxian Economics (London, 1957), 36 Google Scholar; Samuelson, , “Wages and Interest,” 892–5.Google Scholar

102 “if a falling rate of profit goes hand in hand with an increase in the mass of profits, as we have shown, then a larger portion of the annual product of labor is appropriated by the capitalist under the name of capital (as a substitute for consumed capital) and a relatively smaller portion under the name of profit.” Capital, III, 288.Google Scholar

103 Ibid., 249.

104 Ibid., 292–3.

105 Correspondence, 244.

106 Capital, III, 283.Google Scholar

107 Ibid., 294.

108 Ibid., 278, 300.

109 Correspondence, 220–1; Mins, , ed., Engels on Capital, 125.Google Scholar Similarly in reviewing an earlier abstract of Marx's Critique of Political Economy, Engels had described it as “a very abstract abstract indeed,” and expressed the hope that the “abstract dialectical tone” would disappear as the work developed (Correspondence, 110). Engels was much more cognizant than Marx of the difficulties presented by the Hegelian presentation. Of one of his own early works he said: “The semi-Hegelian language of a good many passages of my old book is not only untranslatable but has lost the greater part of its meaning even in German.” Marx, Karl and Engels, Frederick, Letters to Americans, transl. Mins, Leonard E. (New York: International Publishers, 1953), 151.Google Scholar

110 Capital, I, 82.Google Scholar Like most doctrines in Capital, this appeared also in Marx's earlier writings: “In principle there is no exchange of products—but there is the exchange of the labour which co-operated in production.” The Poverty of Philosophy, 78.

111 Capital, I, 95n.Google Scholar

112 Ibid., 43; Theories of Surplus Value, 203, 261.

113 Theories of Surplus Value, 261.

114 “… exchange value, generally, is only the mode of expression, the phenomenal form, of something contained in it, yet distinguishable from it.” Capital, I, 43.Google Scholar

115 Capital, III, 56 Google Scholar, refers to surplus value; value was also considered “invisible” (ibid., I, 107). Marx referred to “surplus value in general as distinct from its determinate forms” which were “determined by quite different laws.” Theories of Surplus Values, 133.

116 Capital, I, 95n.Google Scholar

117 Ibid., 57n.

118 Ibid., 82n.

119 Ibid., 185n.

120 “ … if profits as a percentage of capital are to be equal, for example in a period of one year, so that capitals of equal size yield equal profits in the same period of time, then the prices of commodities must be different from their values.” Theories of Surplus Value, 231; see also 212, 214, 221, 224, 232, 249, 250, 282; Correspondence, 243. Cf. von Böhm-Bawerk, Eugen, Karl Marx and the Close of His System (New York, 1898), 61 and chap, in passim.Google Scholar

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122 “We can see by the example of the Ricardian school that it is a mistake to attempt a development of the laws of the rate of profit directly out of the laws of the rate of surplus-value, or vice-versa.” Capital, III, 59 Google Scholar; see also Theories of Surplus Value, 231, 282, 329, 342.

123 Theories of Surplus Value, 231.

124 Ibid., 202.

125 Correspondence, 227.

126 Theories of Surplus Value, 202.

127 Capital, III, 951.Google Scholar

128 Critique of Political Economy, 292.

129 Ibid., 293–4.

130 (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, no date), 21. All other references herein are to the Kerr edition.

131 Capital, III, 38.Google Scholar

132 Correspondence, 245 (emphasis in the original here as throughout, unless specifically noted to the contrary).

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134 Correspondence, 232.

135 Ibid., 220.

136 Engels on Capital, 126–7. It is difficult to escape the suspicion that Marx was overly concerned with “setting traps,” particularly in view of the fact that some of the most important clues as to what he was about-including his stark repudiation of Smith and Ricardo on the labour theory of value-were contained in footnotes in the first volume of Capital. See notes 116–119 above.

137 Capital, III, 220–1.Google Scholar

138 Ibid., I, 391.

139 Ibid., III, 1026.

140 Ibid., 745.

141 Ibid.

142 Correspondence, 234.

143 Capital, I, 45.Google Scholar

144 Correspondence, 106.

145 Ibid., 232.

146 Engels on Capital, 127; Correspondence, 219. Additional material prepared by Marx and discovered by Engels after his death were enough to “swell the 2nd volume into a 2nd and a 3rd.” Engels, , Lafargue, , Correspondence, I, 178.Google Scholar

147 Correspondence, 246–7.

148 “… for his system he needed a formal proof. … So he turned to dialectical speculation. …” Böhm-Bawerk, , Karl Marx and the Close of His System, 151–2.Google Scholar Böhm-Bawerk made the claim, often echoed since, that Marx had attempted “a stringent syllogistic conclusion allowing of no exception” (ibid., 63), that Marx was making “a logical proof, a dialectical deduction” (ibid., 131). This “proof” continues in some unspecified way to be linked to dialectics or Hegelianism. Cf. Gordon, Donald F., “What Was the Labor Theory of Value?” American Economic Review, 05 1959, 471.Google Scholar

149 Anti-Dühring, 147.

150 Correspondence, 157.

151 Ibid., 220n.

152 Letters to Dr. Kugelmann, 24. Despite this, Marx repeatedly dismissed suggestions that his writing was in general difficult to understand (e.g., ibid., 75) and entertained the idea of writing an account of Hegelian philosophy which would be understandable by the “ordinary” person. Correspondence, 102.

153 “… suppose that every piece of linen in the market contains no more labour-time than is socially necessary. In spite of this, all these pieces taken as a whole, may have had superfluous labour-time spent upon them.” Capital, I, 120 Google Scholar; “… it is a condition for the sale of commodities at their value that only the socially necessary labour time is contained in them … only the labour time which is required for the satisfaction of the social need (the demand).” Theories of Surplus Value, 398–9. See also Engels', “Preface” to The Poverty of Philosophy, 15.Google Scholar

154 Capital, I, 54, 58, 67 Google Scholar; this contrasted with “abstract” labour, the labour of society. Ibid., 67; Critique of Political Economy, 23, 29, 33, 102.

155 This phrasing was used in Critique of Political Economy, 27, 29, 43, 45.

156 Capital, I, 84 Google Scholar; Critique of Political Economy, 47, 63–4.

157 Capital, I, 84.Google Scholar “… overproduction and many other features of industrial anarchy have their explanation in this mode of evaluation.” The Poverty of Philosophy, 66.

158 Capital, III, 221.Google Scholar

159 In criticizing Ricardo's adherence to Say's Law, Marx said that Ricardo “forgets” that “the individual labour, through its alienation, must present itself as abstract, general, social labour.” Theories of Surplus Value, 381. Similarly Engels observed: “The fact that value is the expression of the social labour contained in the individual products itself creates the possibility of a difference arising between this social labour and the individual labour contained in these products.” This led to, among other things, “crises.” Anti-Dühring, 338.

160 “Only through the undervaluation or overvaluation of products is it forcibly brought home to the individual commodity producers what things and what quantity of them society requires or does not require. But it is just this sole regulator that the Utopia in which Rodbertus also shares would abolish. … we then ask what guarantee we have that the necessary quantity and not more of each product will be produced, that we shall not go hungry in regard to corn and meat while we are choked in beet sugar and drowned in potato spirit, that we shall not lack trousers to cover our nakedness while trouser buttons flood us in millions …” Engels', “Preface” to The Poverty of Philosophy, 19.Google Scholar See also Critique of Political Economy, 103–6; The Poverty of Philosophy, chap. 1. Contrast this with the typical interpretation of Joan Robinson: “…. Marx believed that, under socialism, the labour theory of value would come into its own.” An Essay on Marxian Economics, 23.

161 Correspondence, 246.

162 Ibid., 172; The Poverty of Philosophy, 49. “… in no conceivable state of society can the worker receive for consumption the entire value of his product.” Engels' “Preface” to ibid., 21. “… deductions from the ‘undiminished proceeds of labour’ are an economic necessity and their magnitude is … in no way calculable by equity.” Marx, Karl, Critique of the Gotha Programme, in Marx, and Engels, , Selected Works, II, 22.Google Scholar

163 “Preface” to The Poverty of Philosophy, 11.Google Scholar

164 The Poverty of Philosophy, 60–1.

165 Capital, I, 637–8Google Scholar; Theories of Surplus Value, 360; Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, 23–4.

166 Capital, III, 230 Google Scholar; Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, 23–4. “The alienation of the worker in his product means not only that his labour becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside him, independently, as something alien to him, and that it becomes a power on its own confronting him; it means that the life which he has conferred on the object confronts him as something hostile and alien.” Ibid., 70. Alienation is not merely an objective situation but also a subjective state of mind induced by it in which the “human mind stands bewildered in the presence of its own creation,” which it does not recognize as such. Engels, , The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, reprinted in Marx, and Engels, , Selected Works, II, 325.Google Scholar This concept recurred throughout Marx's writings, though the specific Hegelian term “alienation” was no longer used after the 1840's in most cases: ibid., 323; The German Ideology, pp. 22–3; Theories of Surplus Value, 317; Anti-Dühring, 300, 345. See also Marcuse, , Reason and Revolution, 273–87.Google Scholar

167 “ … a definite social relation between men … assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy, we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men's hands. This I call the Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour, so soon as they are produced as commodities,” i.e., products for the market. Capital, I, 83.Google Scholar Value involves “a relationship between persons expressed as a relation between things.” (Ibid., 85n). The appearance of the value is the exchange-value or price. According to Engels, “economics deals not with things but with relations between persons, and, in the last resort, between classes; these relations are, however, always attached to things and appear as things.” Engels, Frederick, review of “Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy ,” Marx, and Engels, , Selected Works, vol. I, p. 374.Google Scholar See also Critique of Political Economy,” 30–1, 51–2; Engels on Capital, 45.

168 Capital, I, 14; III, 62.Google Scholar

169 Correspondence, 92, 213, 278–9, 289, 420–1, 461, 463–4.

170 Samuelson, , “Wages and Interest,” 911.Google Scholar

171 Schumpeter was one of the few historians of economic thought to note that the Ricardian value theory “forms no part of Marx's teaching” ( History of Economic Analysis [New York, 1954], 597 Google Scholar), and even he had believed otherwise earlier ( Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy [New York, 1950], 23 Google Scholar) Veblen has pointed out much earlier that despite the resemblance of the Marxian doctrine to “the labor-value theory of Ricardo,” in fact “the relationship between the two is that of a superficial coincidence in their main propositions rather than a substantial identity of theoretic contents.” Veblen, Thorstein, “The Socialist Economics of Karl Marx and His Followers,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 08 1906, 587.Google Scholar He also saw what Marx's correspondence later confirmed, that the opening chapter of Capital was not an attempt to prove the notion of value (Ibid., 585).

172 Jones, Richard, An Essay on the Distribution of Wealth and on the Sources of Taxation (London: John Murray, 1831), vii.Google Scholar Whewell, William, “Prefatory Notice,” Jones, Richard, Literary Remains (London: John Murray, 1859), xii–xiii.Google Scholar The term “Ricardian vice” was, of course, coined much later by Schumpeter, : History of Economic Analysis, 472–3Google Scholar; Essays of J. A. Schumpeter, ed. Clemence, R. V. (Cambridge, Mass., 1951), 150.Google Scholar

173 Theories of Surplus Value, 202, 282.

174 Ibid., 133.

175 He disavowed, for example, any interest in the “dull and tedious quarrel over the part played by Nature in the formation of exchange value.” Capital, I, 94.Google Scholar See also note 167 above.

176 For example, Schumpeter, Joseph A., Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, 39n.Google Scholar

177 The Condition of the Working Class in England, 82. It should be noted further that although the expansions and contractions of the “reserve army” have been considered by interpreters to determine wages in the Marxian system ( Samuelson, , “Wages and Interest,” 908 Google Scholar), in Capital they determine only the direction of cyclical fluctuations of wages, not the level around which the fluctuations take place, and certainly not secular changes in wages. “… the expansion and contraction of the industrial reserve army … correspond to the periodic changes of the industrial cycle.” Capital, I, 699.Google Scholar

178 Engels construed his role of editor of the posthumous volumes of Capital very narrowly—probably more narrowly than Marx had intended, in view of his extensive briefings of Engels and his message relayed through his daughter that Engels should “make something” of the manuscripts he left (Capital, II, 1, 11; III, 12, 14). It was out of the question for Engels to have actively collaborated in the writing of Capital during Marx's l'fetime, despite the latter's desire to make him a co-author (Correspondence, 209–10) since he was busy earning money as a businessman to subsidize Marx. The period between his collaboration with Marx on the Communist Manifesto in 1848 and his Anti-Dühring in the mid 1870's was largely barren for this reason. Another factor of uncertain weight was Engels' ideological vulnerability during this period because of his occupation. As Engels pointed out to Marx, their enemies among the socialists were certain to say: “The fellow is sitting in Manchester exploiting the workers, etc.” (ibid., 188).