[PEN-L:2395] Re: How not to quote Marx

[Gilbert Skillman <gskillman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I promised at the outset that I wasn't going to engage Jim Devine in
another long PEN-L debate, and I'm sticking to that promise, so I
won't address Jim's recent posts anent my ASSA paper point by point.
I'll just offer the following comments and refer those interested in
what the paper really says to the paper itself (available by snailmail or in
Science & Society toward the end of the year):

1)  Jim's various characterizations of the paper have no recognizable
connection to the arguments actually developed there.  This is
indicated, for example, by the following passage:

> It is quite iffy to reject an element of Marx's theory -- his
> theory that capitalist (or other) domination in production is
> needed if a surplus-product and surplus-value is to be produced,
> which Gil summarizes by referring to "Volume I, Ch. 5" --
> because it is allegedly contradicted by what Marx said in a
> manuscript written much earlier.

> Suppose that one wanted to go beyond Gil's purpose (which is to
> argue, if I read it correctly, that the labor/labor-power
> distinction is wrong in Marx's own terms but _can_ be justified
> in Gil's terms, i.e., strategic bargaining theory).

These comments demonstrate, better than anything I could write,
 that Jim either has not read or does not understand the argument
given in the paper.

2) With all due respect to Jim's lecture on "how not to quote Marx",
I note that in my paper I'm much more careful to support given quotes
from Marx with corroborative passages from other sources than are
other authors, including Jim, who have cited the Grundrisse or other
works not edited by Marx for publication.  For example, Marx's claim
that certain circuits of capital which operated prior to the era of
capitalist production represented "capital's mode of exploitation without
its mode of production" is echoed in mutually consistent passages
from Volume III, the Grundrisse, the Resultate, and Part III of
Theories of Surplus Value--passages, incidentally, which support my
reading of what Marx meant by "capital's mode of exploitation".

    Of course it it is possible that Marx would have altered these passages
had he lived to edit them.  But as I've argued, they support a
coherent and powerful account of the logic of capitalist exploitation
which anticipates modern theoretical developments by over 100 years,
so it is at best not obvious why one would prefer to dismiss such
passages in favor of the clearly logically flawed account in Volume
I, Part 2.

While we're on the subject, I might add that my critique of Marx's
value-theoretic account of the role of the labor/labor power
distinction in capitalist exploitation is based entirely on the work
Marx *did* edit for publication, and that my assessment of Marx's
alternative, historical-theoretic account of its role is entirely
consistent with his analysis in Volume I, Chapters 12-16, and indeed helps
clarify certain puzzles in that account.

Having said this, I grant that problems are likely to arise from
using English translations of German sources.  But I'm not alone in
facing this problem.  Jim, for example, does not cite Marx in the
original German.

3)  Jim's suggestion that my reading of Marx fails to grasp "what
Marx's method was and how various quotes from Marx fit into the
framework of Marx's different levels of abstraction"  begs the
central question at issue, since I'm arguing that the
historical-strategic account I attribute to Marx is logically
coherent in a way the value-theoretic account is not, and is
consistent with the broad structure of Marx's specifically historical analysis.

Enough.

Gil Skillman