Re: reform and rev

[Rakesh Bhandari <rakeshb@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> CB: The difference between Marx and others is the Russian, Chinese
> and other  socialist revolutions.  We are studying Marx because of
> the Bolsheviks and the Russian Rev.

Please Charles speak for yourself.

For one thing, I do not think Marx developed a theory of the transfer
of value in and through the world market that gives expression to
revolutionary aspirations of national revolts in which peasants,
petty bourgeoisie and the proletariat have been engaged. The Cuban
revolution was not waged against a pure advanced capitalism by a pure
proletariat of the sorts imagined by Marx in his theoretical work.
This has erroneously led some Marxists to dismiss outright such
revolutions (say the Cuban and Sandinista revolutions) as nationalist
reaction and to ridicule first world supporters of them as "third
worldists", but to combat this view one has to in fact go beyond
Marx's theory of a pure capitalism (no trade, only two classes, etc)
to show that without protection in the real world market weaker
national capitals are as a result of the tranfer of value in
circulation subject to devaluation and endemic crisis, which in turn
lead to financial/debt crises. Some orthodox Marxists would dismiss
this kind of theory of dependency because it is "circulationist", but
it is in fact a development of Marx's theory of production price in
the third volume of Capital.

The reason why so many Marxists have difficulty in understanding the
progressive thrust of many third world revolutions has been that they
only study Marx, and do not beyond him. Two people who have tried to
go beyond Marx here are Guglielmo Carchedi and  Enrique Dussel from
whose latest book (edited by the way by Fred Moseley) I draw in the
above.

Second, it is patently absurd to say that Marx was not studied before
the revolutions that you mention and imply that people would have
ceased studying Marx if not for those revolutions.

Rakesh

Towards An Unknown Marx: A Commentary on the Manuscripts of 1861-63
(Routledge Studies in the History of Economics, Volume 34) by Fred
Moseley, Yolanda Angulo (Translator), Enrique D. Dussel