Philosophy and Religion, Part 7a
“Capital”:
Not Doctrine, but Critique
In the year following the 150th anniversary of the 1848 “Communist
Manifesto”, Cyril Smith took on Marx’s premier work, “Capital” in his “Hegel, Economics, and Marx's
Capital” (attached, and linked below).
Smith showed how generations of Marxists have got it very wrong.
In particular, Smith shows us how “Capital” (the book) is not about
“economics” or about what even Great Lenin mistakenly called “Marx’s Economic
Doctrine”, but is really what it says it is: “A Critique of Political Economy”.
Equally mistaken, Smith shows, is the vulgar conception of the relation
between Hegel’s work and Marx’s, and here Smith could have drawn support from E. V. Ilyenkov [Image, above].
Ilyenkov’s “The Dialectics of
the Abstract and the Concrete in Marx’s Capital” was published in the
Soviet Union in 1960.
No doubt, Smith is not the first to rediscover the real Marx, and he
will not be the last.
Apart from giving us a very good reminder to pay proper attention to what
we are reading, Smith is also validating the CU policy of reading the original
work more than the commentators and the analysts (see, e.g., the CU Generic Course on
Capital, Volume 1).
The next post will deal decisively and comprehensively with Stalin and
Stalinism. It will lift the Stalinist load from off the back of Karl Marx, and
refresh Marx’s legacy.
The full Cyril Smith archive on MIA can be found here.
·
The above is to
introduce the original reading-text: Hegel, Economics, and
Marx's Capital, 1999, Cyril Smith.
