Abstract
This chapter aims to make reading the third volume of Capital a challenge and a productive resource for contemporary debates. To do so, it combines a careful consideration of the sources made available by the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA2) edition with an insistent interrogation of Marx’s reasons for not finishing Capital in the ‘aesthetic form’ he originally planned. From here, it goes on to look at the reception of Capital and its third and concluding volume, in particular, in Marxist politics (singling out the theoretical efforts of Lenin and Gramsci). The work ‘invested’ in order to make Capital in its entirety, as presented in a theoretically integrated way in Volume III, useful for a politics of overcoming the domination of capital is then discussed, while focusing on the relation of science and politics. This is then turned into an appeal to present debates making full use of the scientific and analytical resources Capital as a whole still has to offer. In this way, we hope to address an invitation—to readers, but also to our authors—to continue the debate on how to scientifically grasp the structures, mechanisms and tendencies of the domination of the capitalist mode of production, and how to make use of such insights to turn anti-capitalist struggles into a forceful reality again.
We cannot foresee the solutions of the problems facing the world in the twenty-first century, but if they are to have a chance of success they must ask Marx’s questions, even if they do not wish to accept his various disciples’ answers. (Hobsbawm 2011, p. 15)
[…] nothing is more urgent than to make a social history in the Marxist tradition, in order to resituate modes of thought or expression, which have been fixed and fetishized by the forgetting of history, in the historical context of their production and their successive uses. (Bourdieu 1993, p. 50)
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- 1.
‘But in 1883 there was little enough to show for his life’s work. He had written some brilliant pamphlets and the torso of an uncompleted major piece, Das Kapital, work on which hardly advanced in the last decade of his life. ‘“What works?” he asked bitterly when a visitor questioned him about his works’ (Hobsbawm 2011, p. 3).
- 2.
Who published a useful ‘Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital’ (Heinrich 2004), providing essential orientation on the third volume (with a balanced overview and discussion of ‘Profit, Average Profit, and the “Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall”’ (141–155); ‘Interest, Credit, and “Fictitious Capital”’ (155–168); ‘Crisis’ (169–178); and ‘The Fetishism of Social Relations in Bourgeois Society’ (179–198), the last with an ‘Excursus on Anti-Semitism’ (185–191).
- 3.
- 4.
‘For much of their lives both Marx and Engels regarded France rather than their own country as decisive for the revolution. Their attitude to Russia, long the chief target for their attack and contempt, changed as soon as a Russian revolution became possible’ (Hobsbawm 2011, p. 74).
- 5.
Both cases are of specific political interest to Marx (see Hobsbawm 2011, pp. 76, 80, 86–87), but also significant for Marx’s work on the third volume—for the development of ground-rent relations (especially Ireland), for the development of formal (trade and money capital) and real subordination of labour under capital, and for the development of joint-stock capital .
- 6.
‘Arguing against Kovalevsky’s view that three of the four main criteria of Germano-Roman feudalism were to be found in India, which ought therefore to be regarded as feudal, Marx points out that “Kovalevsky forgets among other things serfdom, which is not of substantial importance in India. (Moreover, as for the individual role of feudal lords as protectors not only of unfree but of free peasants . . . this is unimportant in India except for the wakuf (estates devoted to religious purposes). Nor do we find that “poetry of the soil” so characteristic of Romano-Germanic feudalism (cf. Maurer) in India, any more than in Rome. In India the land is nowhere noble in such a way as to be, e.g., inalienable to non-members of the noble class (roturiers). Engels , more interested in the possible combinations of lordship and the substratum of the primitive community , seems less categoric, though he specifically excludes the Orient from feudalism and, as we have seen, makes no attempt to extend his analysis of agrarian feudalism beyond Europe. There is nothing to suggest that Marx and Engels regarded the special combination of agrarian feudalism and the medieval city as anything except peculiar to Europe’ (Hobsbawm 2011, 169).
- 7.
- 8.
In this paragraph, the rich work of Wikipedia has been used—see https://en.wikipedia.org/.
- 9.
See an overview of his correspondence on political economy, particularly relating to his work on Capital, at https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/letters/subject/capital.htm.
- 10.
Which shows in his particular and sustained interest in the rent problematics in Russia, as well as in possible transitions towards a communist society, such as in his correspondence with Vera Sassulitch (see the useful collection of texts in Shanin 1983).
- 11.
- 12.
This ‘new economics’ has sometimes been explicitly assigned a distinctly counter-revolutionary mission, as in Pareto. Speaking more generally about the new social sciences as they were emerging since the middle of the nineteenth century, scholars such as Wolf Lepenies, who explicitly links these new social sciences to counter-revolutionary thinking as developed in response to the French Revolution (Lepenies 2006), never seem to ask what this has meant historically for the processes by which Marxist scholars have been excluded from academia. Nor, of course, enquired into the deformations and limitations this exclusion has provoked in Marxist lines of scientific enquiry as well.
- 13.
On this fascinating and influential figure who, after being one of the few to whom Engels conceded to understanding Marx’s Capital, wrote a kind of ‘Anti-Capital’ (Sombart 1928), see Backhaus 1996. On his later reactionary turn which drove him to support German ‘National Socialism’, see Harris 1942.
- 14.
As in Althusser’s heroic attempt to counsel workers on how to read Capital, in his didactic contributions to a pocket book edition (see Althusser 1969), he simply restricts himself to the first volume.
- 15.
Most probably, Marx did not totally abandon the idea of a self-verifying circle in the presentation of Capital—presenting the surface of the ‘trinity formula’ as a return to the sphere of circulation from the First Section—but this ceased to be an all-important ‘conclusion of the system’, as Böhm-Bawerk and his followers were keen to maintain. Instead, it served as a useful test for the overall consistency of Marx’s ‘system’, the truth and relevancy of which had to be brought out in other ways, like convincing explanations of capitalist crises or by identifying specific measures to limit (or overcome) the domination of the capitalist mode of production in modern bourgeois societies.
- 16.
See also: ‘Marxismus im Zeitalter der Hoffnungen und Katastrophen – Lenin’ (Brangsch 2017, pp. 79–101).
- 17.
We insist on the fact that these were plural and must be studied as such to draw out the lessons contained within. The experience of Soviet Russia must be distinguished from that of the ‘people’s democracies’ established after 1945, the relatively autonomous development of Yugoslavia, the ‘autochthonous’ successful revolutions in China or Cuba, and the ‘failed’ revolutions in countries such as Nicaragua and Portugal.
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- 19.
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Brie 2017.
- 21.
It is thus no surprise that the most acute criticism of ‘Marxism-Leninism’ came from Thomistic theologians like Bochénski 1950.
- 22.
With Trotskyism and Maoism as its major historical formations .
- 23.
As in Laclau and Mouffe 1985.
- 24.
This constituted a central point of Marx’s criticisms levelled against Proudhon (Mäder 2010).
- 25.
Gramsci also remarked that he had to review the materials anew, limited as he was to his own memory in prison.
- 26.
‘Das Kapital. Kritik der politischen Ökonomie’, of Julian Borchardt, Berlin, 1919.
- 27.
These six points summarise eight in total.
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Dellheim, J., Wolf, F.O. (2018). The Challenge of the Incompleteness of the Third Volume of Capital for Theoretical and Political Work Today. In: Dellheim, J., Wolf, F. (eds) The Unfinished System of Karl Marx. Luxemburg International Studies in Political Economy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70347-3_1
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