An international conference of great historical importance will begin today at Amsterdam under the aegis of International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam and Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. The theme is Marx’s Capital, An Unfinished and Unfinishable Project? .The keynote speech at the inaugural session will be delivered by David Harvey. I was informed of this three-day meet by Pradip Baksi, a polymath and of course, an internationally recognized Marx scholar two months ago. I approached several dailies requesting the editors concerned to carry a newsy piece but in vain. Pradip is well-known to the top scholars of IISH and editors of Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA) , the international project for publishing complete works, letters, manuscripts of Marx and Engels in original, had several papers published in the MEGA journal ,Mega Studien. Herewith is my unpublished piece which interested readers may find useful. Das Kapital is under-researched and incomplete by Sankar Ray The International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, a centre under the University of Amsterdam, in collaboration with the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities are in the final phase of an international conference on a novel and relevant concept, Marx’s Capital, An Unfinished and Unfinishable Project? . The three-day meet will begin on 9 October and the keynote address will be delivered by David Harvey, author of The Enigma of Capital and Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism . But Leninist parties the world over – the parties that grew up during the era of Communist International (119-45) era when those affiliates of Third International (Comintern) used to be called as ‘sections’ of Comintern.. An international; conference is scheduled to take place on Marx’s Capital, An Unfinished and Unfinishable Project? in Amsterdam between 9-11 October under the aegis of .the and but the ‘ideologues’ of CPI, CPI(M), variants of CPI (M-L) and CPI (Maoist) are either unaware or apathetic to the highly important meet at a time, when the global capitalist system is threatened by an entirely new type of crisis “Nearly every asset class is expensive by historical standards”, an uneasy confrontation for the defenders of capitalism. Top brass of these official communist parties have been deliberately –if not cowardly - keeping their rank and file uninformed about the gigantic project of publishing ( now being digitalized ) of complete works of Marx and Engels, Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA) their correspondences with their contemporaries, notes, manuscripts etc in original in 114 volumes . For instance, there are three manuscripts of Das Kapital (one in French). To date, 57 volumes have been published. Marxists –I mean those ‘official Marxists’ during the period between 1890 and 1973, thereafter too until the collapse of Soviet Union) – has quarantined Marx’s works in their bandicoot-like limitations. The Russian School, led basically by Georgi Plekhanov, and followed up by Lenin and his followers including the parties , commandeered by the Comintern. They practically treated Das Capital (three volumes) and Theory of Surplus Value as whole of Marx’s contribution in economics.. Loren Goldner, wrote 15 years ago. “It is too often forgotten that Capital was an unfinished book, and that in particular the chapter of Vol. II dealing with the total capital, which is at the center of our perspective, remained very embryonic (3). The key concepts of the following analysis: valorization and devalorization, the total capital, expanded social reproduction, the credit system and its role in the reproduction of the total capital, and relative surplus value, are foreign to the virtual totality of Marxists today. (Loren Goldner Preface to The Remaking of the American Working Class :The Restructuring of Global Capital and the Recomposition of Class Terrain,1999) The theme of the three-day deliberations reminds Marxologists (not to be confused with official Marxists or so-called Marxist-Leninists whose ideologues pooh-pooh Marx’s caution in German Ideology that ideology is ‘camera obscura’ and it “amounts either to a distorted conception of this history or to a complete abstraction from it”) of . Marx’s suggestion to keep up his works and conclusions continuously enriched through scientific research. Incredible as it may seem, the Ford Foundation came forward to offer grant without any conditionalities (a normal rule of the agency) and this helped the IISH implement the historic and ambitious research. This makes the conceptual basis of Das Kapital as an ‘unfinished and unfinishable project’ sagacious and timely Pitiably enough, , Marxists, Marxist academics and the like ignored Marx’s appeal to treat his works with a scientific temper and instead canonized Marx. Engels wrote to Bernstein in 1982 , “Now what is known as ‘Marxism’ in France is, indeed, an altogether peculiar product — so much so that Marx once said to Lafargue: ‘Ce quil y a de certain cest que moi, je ne suis pas Marxiste((All I know is that I am not a Marxist.).’ Marx said these words in 1881 to Paul Lafargue and Jules Guesde, two top French socialists in a rebuking tone when their opponents at the First International that they were ‘Marxist’. The rebuke was significant as Marx categorically stated , ‘The philosophers have interpreted the world. The point is to change it’ and he never anything on philosophy (critiques not being enunciation of new philosophical ideas). To accept ‘Marxism’ is to accept Marx as a philosopher. The IISH , conservator of most of Marx and Engels’s archive , jointly with the BBASH that edits the volumes of Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe or complete works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (MEGA) planned the three-day deliberations judiciously. will deliver the keynote speech and will speak on the new Marx-edition or, why a fundamental revision of the dominant Marx-interpretation is necessary . Regina Roth who authored Karl Marx’s Original Contributions in Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA): Another View of Capital, has picked an interesting topic ‘Edition from the legacy: Friedrich Engels and Marxs Capital ‘ . Fred Mosley, author of Marx’s Theory of Money-Modern Appraisals , is to deliberate on the tendential decline of the rate of profit. The conference reminds me of Roman Rosdolsky ‘s Entstehungsgeschichte des Marxschen Kapital (The Making of Marx’s Capital ) which opened a wider window on arguably -so-far the most outstanding critique of capitalism , Martin Nicolaus’s article, The Unknown Marx, (somewhat a preface to the first English translation of Grundrisse ) published in The New Left Review in 1968 and Enrique Duessed’s treatise ,Towards an Unknown Marx :A Commentary on the Manuscripts of 1861-63 (2001),originally written in Spanish. Ideologues of official CPs the world over , excepting the Communist Party of France - showed no interest in studying Rosdolsky or Dussed, let alone Nicolaus.. At least two Indians should have made it to the Amsterdam conference as crucial participants. One is Kolkata-based Marx -scholar of rare merit and erudition , Pradip Baksi,. associated with the MEGA , who drew our attention to the conference. In a personal note to this writer, he revealed Marx’s amazingly versatile knowledge and works beyond what is loosely defined as Marxism ( Marx profoundly disapproved of this in a rebuff to Paul Lafargue and Jules Guesde during the era of the First International in the early 1880s. He told in French to two top French socialist leaders in a rebuking tone, Ce qu’il y a de certain c’est que moi, je ne suis pas Marxiste, ” or If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist). Marx’s works include chemical manuscripts, history of geology, linguistics and several others. Pradip, translated Marx’s Mathematical Manuscripts into English and Bengali . The other scholar and world renowned Marx scholar and thinker, Paresh Chattopadhyay who wrote the most theoretically important chapter – Communism of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels - in the Oxford Handbook of The History of Communism, but he is too pre-occupied with preparation of manuscripts for two books to make him available for the conference. Marx remains a victim of vulgarization. Participants of Amsterdam programme are expected to be free from such aberrations, keeping alive the Cartesian motto .. De omnibus dubitandum (Doubt everything) .. The hoary-headed old fogies or the so-called ideologues of Marxism-Leninism fail to perceive the essence of Marx’s cautionary statement, but those who insulate themselves from the narrowed and faulty perception and look forward to unfathomed Marx , called Marxism, will look forward to the outcome of the Amsterdam conference. The real Marx is many times wider than what is practiced as Marxism. Pradip Baksi ,defying his physical infirmity and illness, is at work on the bibliographic aspect of Marx’ perception of history and completed the first part of it ,A Partial and Partially Cyberdiscursive Bibliography Reflecting Karl Marx’s Encyclopedic Approach to the Study of History (https://academia.edu/5512520/A_Partial_and_Partially_Cyberdiscursive_Bibliography_Reflecting_Karl_Marxs_Encyclopedic_Approach_to_the_Study_of_History) which gives an idea about the vast and unfathomed Marx. Marx scholars of future and present generations have to critically study Marx and come out with their results and they must insulate from hitherto under-studied and vulgarized Marx.
Posted on: Thu, 09 Oct 2014 04:59:33 +0000
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