Continuing with the preface
Volume 1 was published in 1867, and is a continuation of work last visited in 1859 (Zur Kritik der Politischen Oekonomie). The substance of which is, according to Marx, summarized in chapter 1 of Capital.
Delimitation is one order of business:
“The sections on the history of the theories of value and of money are now…left out all together” (89).
The theories of value were left to volume 4 (Theories of Surplus Value), and is essentially Marx’s survey of the literature referenced and cited throughout Capital. Also left out of the analysis in any volume are adequate discussions of international trade, the role of the state and civil society; and of course the production of culture and the culture of production. Also left out is the role specific types of ‘fixed capital’ (machines, infrastructure, things not consumed in entirety when applied to the production of a good) may play in the development of capitalism. Means of communication, for example.
In other words, Capital is not a theory of everything. It offers plenty of pieces with which to model, but never a ‘total’ understanding. While some interpretations might seek to endow marxism as a total explanation, this totalization is imposed on the text. I’ll pull this bit out of Distinction by Pierre Bourdieu to make this more clear:
“The primary differences, those which distinguish the major classes of conditions of existence, derive from the overall volume of capital, understood as the set of actually usable resources and powers -economic capital, cultural capital and also social capital” (Bourdieu 1979: 114).
Marx offers an excellent (though still incomplete) analysis of the functioning of economic capital (a phenomenal achievement), but other forms of ‘capital’ are not as thoroughly analyzed in Marx.
Marx’s study of political economy disavows any notion that one can study society, even its economic forms, in ’pure’ positivist faith.
“…in the analysis of economic forms (note the delimitation) neither microscopes nor chemical reagents are of assistance. The power of abstraction must replace both. But for bourgeois society, the commodity-form of the product of labor, or the value-form of the commodity, is the economic cell-form. To the superficial observer, the analysis of these forms seems to turn upon minutiae. It does in fact deal with minutiae, but so similarly does microscopic anatomy” (90).
Microscopic anatomy was still a frontier of biology, mysterious in a way quantum physics is to us today. We can never see small enough, but there are patterns to be found at varying scopes and levels of analysis.
It is helpful to point out that Marx’s doctoral thesis had to do with the Epicurian view of the atom in that whole ancient age philosophy dialogue over whether the trajectory of each atom is determined once and for all at inception or if it can change trajectory.
Someone who knows a lot more about this please feel free to step in here.
Anyway, Marx more or less sought to rescue this Epicurean notion of indeterminacy within overdetermination. Throughout Marx there is always this notion of emancipation, of the atom trying to break free, even in the pre-communist work.
In other words, we are not after a deterministic model. We are learning to analyze what we construct.
Time!!
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