Re: [OPE-L] theoretical tasks

[Michael Schauerte <mikeschauerte@xxxxxxxxx>]

With respect to your last sentence, I think this approach (looking at
each section or chapter and trying to identify the particular issues
that Marx is addressing) may run the risk of missing the logical
connections between different parts of Marx's theory, including the
strict logical connection between Sections 1 and 2 of Chapter 1, and
Sections 3 and 4, Chapter 2, etc., as I discussed in my last message.

Comradely,
Fred


I overstated Kuruma's position a bit in that last post, because he does consider how the parts fit together. For example, the main topic of his book is the relation between Sec. 3 and Ch. 2. The point I wanted to emphasize is that he was opposed to those who focused so exclusively on the aspect of development, whether historical or logical, that they ended up failing to grasp the questions Marx was posing at a given point. When he wrote the book, there was a strong tendency to read Capital with the goal of identifying which part corresponded to this or that part of Hegel's Logic, and the discussion of the value-form was seen as a pure unfolding of categories without much awareness of how Marx traced his way back from the money-form to the simple form of value in order to unravel its riddle. In criticizing the approach of some of the time of applying a ready-made schema from Hegel to interpret Capital, Kuruma quoted a passage from Marx criticizing a similar approach by Lasalle (below). It was that sort of emphasis on development at the expense of grasping theoretical problems that Kuruma was opposed to, but I should have emphasized that he still sought the connections between problems and understood Marx's system of thought:

 

"It is plain to me from this one note that, in his second grand opus, the fellow intends to expound political economy in the manner of Hegel. He will discover to his cost that it is one thing for a critique to take a science to the point at which it admits of a dialectical presentation, and quite another to apply an abstract, ready-made system of logic to vague presentiments of just such a system." (Marx, 1983a, pp. 260-1)