1/30/50
Dear J:
The "interlude" I spoke of in my last letter1 is becoming an independent stage and, moreover, has me so enthusiastic that I believe I'll run to NY a day or so ahead of Fri. and keep away even from you. The dialectics of Marx's plans for CAPITAL must be worked out in great detail and I cannot do it here as I do not have Marx's Collected Works to the extent that they were published in Russian. Here are just a few elements that have me excited.
One. Those 4 periods2 of Marx's work on Capital. He puts his first plan of the Critique in the middle '40s away because he wishes to premise it with a critique of German philosophy and science as it exists; he is working out his dialectics materialistically and doing away with the German socialists and utopians all at once.
The second stage of his economic studies results in the Critique as we know it (that too had tremendous changes in it as originally he was to have started with the abstraction Value, but as we know the concrete Commodity, came to stay); it does away with Proudhonism3 or people who think they wish to reorganize exchange, have commodities, but not money, do not see the necessity of the latter arising from the contradictions of the former; he has ended Ricardian Socialism.4
The remarkable third and central and pivotal stage occurs when, on the one hand, he is developing the section on machinery and taking "a little practical course for workers", on the other hand is seeing the Civil War and never wavers for a second that the North, with its industrial predominance will win, and organizes 1st Int.5 How little we have paid attention to his "phrase". "As in the 18th c..., so in the 19th century the American civil war sounded it for the European working-class",6 but, Jimmie, when that gets worked in with his actual elaboration of the plan for Marx, I hope to be able to make a connection that will not sever again. Where in 1859 Marx of the Critique7 argues with Proudhon and has even to justify himself, so to speak, in the context of all other theories, the Marx of 1867 of Capital8 is the Marx of the First International who not merely proclaims to the whole world the historical tendency of capitalist accumulation, but in proclaiming it he has so developed the accumulation of capital: accumulation of misery that we see the precise "mechanism" of the how of the overthrow of capitalist conditions: the workers revolt; the "mechanism" then is the subject. It is all quite terrific, the decade 1858 (when he first overthrew the whole doctrine of profit and directly "adapted" the Logic) to 1867 (when he changed the whole structure because the historic development of the proletarian struggles disclosed the true essence and notion of capitalist accumulation and relegated landed property to a footnote about the transformation of surplus value into one of its fragments).
So, with your permission I shall get quietly to NY next Tues. or Weds. and if you can would love to see you Thurs. eve. should there be any things to be taken up for the pow wow on Fri.
1 The previous letter in this collection. The one dated Jan. 24, 1950.
2 On the four periods see the previous letter in this collection. The one dated Jan. 24, 1950.
3 Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865), is considered by many to be 'the father of anarchism'. Marx met, and became friends with, Proudhon while in exile in Paris in the mid-1840s. But Marx later became critical of him, and wrote The Poverty of Philosophy (1847) as a critique of Proudhon's System of Economical Contradictions: or, Philosophy of Poverty (1847). Supporters of Proudhon, like Marx, helped to found the International Workingmen's Association (The First International). Disputes between the 'Proudhonists' and the 'Marxists' led to the break-up of the First International.
4 Ricardian socialism was a strand of socialism that drew on Ricardo's labour theory of value to argue that labour is the source of all wealth and, therefore, workers were entitled to all the products of their labour. They argued that private ownership of the means of production should be supplanted by cooperatives owned by associations of workers. Marx argued against Ricardian socialism in The Poverty of Philosophy (1847).
5 '1st Int.' is a reference to the International Workingmen's Association (The First International).
6 The quote is from the Preface to the first edition of Marx's Capital: Volume One, (1867).
7 Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, (1859).
8 Karl Marx, Capital: Volume One, (1867).