chapter 4 Marx’s Further Work on Capital after Publishing Volume i: On the Completion of Part ii of the mega² Carl-Erich Vollgraf When in 1908 the young Austromarxist Otto Bauer published an essay on Marx’s Capital in the journal Die Neue Zeit, he titled it ‘The History of a Book’. His idea was that each generation has its own Marx – and not just because each historical epoch poses different questions. After all, new texts by Marx continued to become available all the time. His own generation, he noted, had access to all three volumes of Capital. So, with Marx’s overall plan in view, it was obvious that one could now read Capital in a different way than the previous generation, which had to make do with Volume i only.1 Bauer could hardly predict what the situations of future generations would be, yet he anticipated them pretty well. Again and again there were new upheavals in society, but also new texts by Marx, new interpretations in different settings, and revisions – right up to the present day. In the years after 1989, with the collapse of state socialism, the literary mar- ket was for a while filled with obituaries in the style of ‘what remains of Marx now?’, but then it quickly turned out that he had never written any book about socialism. Subsequently Marx has joined the real classics. Everyone can now approach his work freely, and interpret its content in new and different ways. Even those who are well-read return to Marx, to confront the new dimen- sions of capitalist accumulation and the unbridled pursuit of profits. At least in passing, he is again acknowledged.2 The mega² is an aid in this process: extensive material relating to Books 2 and 3 of Capital is published for the first time, most prominently the complete drafts of 1864/65 and 1868/70. The complete manuscripts for both books as edited by Engels have also been pub- lished. Thus, for the first time, the relationship between author and editor can be discussed on the basis of documentary evidence. In terms of Bauer’s vis- 1 Bauer 1908, p. 33 and pp. 27–8. 2 For example, Herr and Rogall argue that Ricardo and Marx could not yet recognise problems such as global warming and reduction of biodiversity (Herr and Rogall 2013, p. 82). © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi: 10.1163/9789004367159_005 Carl-Erich Vollgraf - 9789004367159 Downloaded from Brill.com09/23/2021 03:28:53PM via free access marx’s further work on capital after publishing volume i 57 ion, we are the last generation to whom new drafts of Marx’s Capital become accessible; part ii of the mega², completed in 2012, represents the end of an era. The extensive primary publications in the mega² have received a remark- able response. Some authors declare that they are reprinting their own writings unchanged, since, in other respects, the current state of the scientific debates – especially given the Capital part of the mega² – would require them to write a completely new text.3 Others argue that the previously unknown manuscripts shed new light on Marx’s work, and that, for example, a new introductory course on Marx’s theory of the rate of profit would be appropriate.4 Authors who had already declared the 1870s as the decline phase of Capital are forced to reconsider their interpretation with the publication of volumes ii/11 and ii/4.3 in the mega² (2008 and 2012). Disagreements keep a discourse alive: there are also some authors who do not believe that anything they said for decades about the text of mew, Volumes 23–5 (mecw, Volumes 35–7) is now called into ques- tion. Finally, another group sees the manuscripts as one more confirmation that, although Marx wrote innumerable drafts, he never finished anything – a ‘patch-job’ overall. They believe that, contrary to its original intentions, the mega² demystifies and delionises Marx, the consolation being that it shares this shedding of illusions about an author with all other historical-critical edi- tions.5 In what follows, I present some theses on the texts first published in Part ii of the mega², especially from the era between 1867 and 1881. I am concerned here mainly with essentials, and less with specific theoretical advances. 1 To the Very End Marx Upholds His Vision and Conviction that Capitalism Must be Abolished. This is the Common Thread, the Fundamental Coherence and the Constant in His Multifaceted Work across Four Decades. Even so, Marx’s views on the vitality of capitalism, its economic potencies, its social possibilities and its developmental ranges do change over time. His 3 Arndt 2012, p. 257. 4 Heinz D. Kurz, ‘Die Verwohlfeilerung der toten Arbeit. Das “Kapital” ist historisch-kritisch ediert: Zeit für einen Grundkurs zum Fall der Profitrate’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 3 July 2013. 5 Helmut König, ‘Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe. Lauter Prolegomena’, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 20 July 2013. Carl-Erich Vollgraf - 9789004367159 Downloaded from Brill.com09/23/2021 03:28:53PM via free access 58 vollgraf view of capitalism broadens, to the extent that he develops his theory of the reproduction of capital, and progresses from what is only a theory of exploitation to a theory of the movement of capitalist production as a whole. When Marx sets out reproduction schemas at the end of Manuscript viii for Book 2 (1877/81), they are worth the effort: these schemas are not intended to recapitulate what came before, but serve as an analytical tool for future elaboration. They are meant to show that equilibrium conditions reached in motion are constantly also destroyed again. It would have been the least surprising to Marx himself, as a materialist, that his views changed. After all, in the 40 years that he was grappling with the subject, capitalism changed considerably. Capitalism is, as Marx soberly acknowledges and accepts in the preface of Volume i in 1867, ‘no solidified crystal’ [fester Krystall], but an ‘organism understood as capable of change, and constantly in the process of transformation’.6 In his last years, Marx no longer talks about an impending collapse of capitalism; the contrary is more true. At the end of 1878, queried by a correspondent of the Chicago Tribune about the chances of his theories being put into practice, Marx is reported to have answered: ‘if not in this century, at least in the next’.7 Astounded by the pace at which socio-economic upheavals were occurring in the United States – processes that in England had taken centuries – Marx felt that his theory of accumulation was confirmed. But he also sensed the new political dimension: ‘The people will try in vain to get rid of the monopolising power and the (as far as the immediate happiness of the masses is concerned) baneful influence of the great compagnies swaying industry, commerce, property in land, railroads, finance – at an always accelerated rate since the outbreak of the Civil War’.8 Although in the drafts of his well-known letter to Vera Zasulič (1881) Marx talks about the ‘suicidal tendencies’ of bourgeois society, he deletes an important statement in the last version: that capitalism is withering in the West.9 Yet, in the same breath, he writes to Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis that bourgeois society is inevitably and steadily disintegrating before our eyes.10 A contradic- 6 mecw, vol. 35, p. 11; mega² ii/5, 1983, p. 14. 7 Account of Karl Marx’s interview with a correspondent of the Chicago Tribune, mecw, vol. 24, p. 569; mew, vol. 34, p. 509. 8 Marx to Nikolai Danielson, 15 November 1878; mecw, vol. 45, p. 344; mew, vol. 34, p. 359. 9 This correction is first revealed to the reader in mega² i/25, in the lists of variants for the drafts of the letter to Zasulič (see Karl Marx: ‘Deuxième projet de la lettre à Vera Ivanovna Zassoulitch and Troisième projet de la lettre …’, mega² i/25, 1985, p. 238 and p. 885, variant 233.15 (1)). 10 See Marx to Ferdinand D. Nieuwenhuis, 22 February 1881 (mecw, vol. 46, p. 67; mew, vol. 35, p. 161). Carl-Erich Vollgraf - 9789004367159 Downloaded from Brill.com09/23/2021 03:28:53PM via free access marx’s further work on capital after publishing volume i 59 tion? I think, rather, that there are two dashes of colour in Marx’s role-play: toward workers’ functionaries like Domela Nieuwenhuis he acts politically resolute. To accepted scientific colleagues like Nikolai M. Kovalevskij or Nikolai F. Daniel’son he appears pensive, open-minded, and sometimes at a loss. ‘A nice pickle it is altogether’, he sighs in a letter to the latter. He refers to the present English crisis: flat, without monetary panic, bullion drains compensated from outside. In addition, there is an agricultural crisis in which the farmers can no longer cover their costs,11 while at the same time American wheat is flooding Europe. With Marx’s insight into longer-term development potentials of capitalism, hitherto unalterable political positions are recalibrated – something which is hardly ever discussed by Marxist interpreters: the relationship of trade union and political struggles, the relationship of reform and revolution. Thus Marx writes in a letter to Nieuwenhuis in February 1881 that the right conjuncture for a new International has not yet arrived, that such activity is harmful, and that labour and socialist congresses should focus on national tasks. He declares sagaciously, with an air of newfound mathematical self-confidence, that ‘We cannot solve an equation that does not comprise within its terms the elements of its solution’.12 Of course, the events of the Paris Commune and the results of the Franco-Prussian War had not escaped him, and the Anti-Socialist Law has him worried.