MEGA-Studien 2000/1Herausgegeben von der Internationalen Marx-Engels-Stiftung AmsterdamURL: www.iisg.nl /IMES/MEGA-Studien

Rezension

Pradip Baksi

Karl Marx / Friedrich Engels, Gesantausgabe (MEGA), hrsg. von der Internationalen Marx-Engels-Stiftung, IV. Abteilung: Exzerpte. Notizen. Marginalien, Band 3: Karl Marx, Exzerpte und Notizen Sommer 1844 bis Anfang 1847, bearb. von Georgii Bagaturija, Lev Čurbanov, Ol’ga Koroleva und Ljudmila Vasina, unter Mitwirkung von Jürgen Rojahn (Berlin: akademie Verlag, 1998), IX, 866 S., 18 Abb. DM 298, – . ISBN 3-05-003398-3.

This is the first volume of the MEGA2, edited under the auspices of the Internationale Marx-Engels-Stiftung (IMES) and, published by the Akademie Verlag. The texts of this volume are: I. Marx’s personal notebook of the years 1844–1847 (pp. 5–30); II. two of his exercise books of the years 1844–45, containing excerpts made in Paris (pp. 35–110); and III. six exercise books containing excerpts made in Brussels in 1845 (pp. 115–433). All the texts of this volume have been published here for the first time in their original contexts, extensively documented and substantiated in the Apparat (pp. 449–866). The general introduction (pp. 449–482) contains extensive references to the contemporary studies on the authors excerpted by Marx.

Marx’s personal notebook of the years 1844–47 contains, inter alia, lists of authors/books, reflecting his possible plans for many-sided studies in philosophy, logic, history, political economy, population dynamics, law, belles-lettres, socialist thought etc., in the years to come; a short note on “Hegel’s construction of Phenomenology”; the draft plan for a work on the modern state; a plan for producing a “Library of the best foreign socialist writers”; and, the famous theses “ad Feuerbach”.

The editors of MEGA2 I/28 and IV/30 may take note of the fact that a book on philosophy of mathematics1 figures in the aforementioned lists (p. 7.29). The editors of the earlier editions of Marx’s Mathematical Manuscripts did not have this information. Similarly, the editors of MEGA2 IV/23 may take note of a treatise on physiology as an empirical science2 figuring therein (p. 12.26). The book on philosophy of mathematics figured in Daniels’ list; but neither it, nor the title on physiology figures in the Vorauspublikation zu MEGA2 IV/32. No excerpts from these texts have been located so far.3

It is well known that the Engels edited version of Marx’s theses “ad Feuerbach” gained currency at first. This editing has been contested. The introduction to the present volume contains an account of the background in which these were penned (pp. 473–78), as well as of the discussion around them during the last four decades of the 20th century (pp. 478– 80). The controversies around their interpretation happen to continue. 4

The two Paris exercise books of the years 1844/1845 contain excerpts on political economy from some of the works of Pierre de Boisguillebert, John Law and, James Maitland – the Earl of Lauderdale; and, from a history of Rome.

Boisguillebert, and subsequently the Physiocrats, considered the laissez-faire doctrine to be something humane and significant. In Marx’s own words: “Humane in its opposition to the economy of the old

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which sought to increase its revenue by unnatural means of control and, significant as the first attempt at emancipating the bourgeois/civil life, which had to be emancipated for showing what it is” (p. 53.30–33). It is customary to characterize the laissez-faire doctrine as western and bourgeois,5 however, some investigators have traced its roots back to the ancient Chinese, Taoist concept of wu-wei, as applied to statecraft.6 Further investigations into the journey of this concept, across (and back and forth between) civilizations and modes of production, through texts of various persuasions, seem to be pregnant with rich possibilities, both for the study of the history of theories of government and, for that of political economy.

The six Brussels exercise books contain excerpts from general treatises on political economy (Henri Storch, Pellegrino Rossi), history of political economy (Joseph Pecchio, John Ramsay McCulloch, Adolphe Blanqui), writings on the conditions of the working people (Jean Charles Léonard Simonde de Sismondi, Eugène Buret, Ramon de la Sagra), tracts dealing with the use of machinery (Charles Babbage, Andrew Ure, Auguste de Gasparin), history of social ideas (François Villegardelle) etc. At the center of Marx’s interest in this period were the questions of private and public wealth, social differentiation and conflicts, property, money, value and capital. Yet another exercise book of that period is missing. It contained excerpts from some of the works of sismondi, Joseph Droz and Antoine Cherbuliez – on political economy (p. 770).

While reading these texts and the accompanying editorial apparatus, one is forced to register, that the editors of this volume have broken new grounds, by bringing to light new data on, and highlighting, Marx’s continental connections in the domain of political economy. Way back in 1957 Maximilien Rubel had indicated that the exercise books edited in the present volume are of considerable significance,7 yet, owing to a variety of reasons, many prominent scholars from very different linguistic, intellectual, and cultural backgrounds have remained largely unaware – or only marginally aware – of these historic connections.8 By utilizing Adolphe Blanqui’s study of political economy,9 the editors have endeavoured to show, how the previous analysis and critique of capitalism (including that of its crises) in continental political economy, entered into Marx’s own study of the same. In consequence, the discourses on Smith and Ricardo in Marx, may now be supplemented with the same on Boisguillebert, Sismondi, Cherbuliez et al. in Marx.

MEGA2 IV/3 has also brought to light new information on Marx’s debt to earlier egalitarian and socialist thought in Europe. Already before 1842, Eugène Buret had raised the questions: “should property and pauperism exist? Should marriage and prostitution, family and familylessness exist?” (p. 142). Such questions gave rise to the ideas: “Without sublation [Aufhebung] of private property no removal of pauperism. Without the sublation of bourgeois family no removal of prostitution” (Editors’ Introduction, p. 471). These are related to Marx’s idea: “Suffrage, the struggle for the sublation of the state and of bourgeois society” (p. 11.35). The consequences of the attempts at one-dimensionally interpreting/translating/actualizing sublation as barren or formal abolition cancellation, disregarding the dimensions of preservation and elevation,10 in the aforementioned domains of private property, family, state and civil society, are writ large in the annals of the 20th century. Whither the 21st?

In Marx’s excerpts from Thèodore Fix (p. 231), one reads about an advocacy for using permanent constraint and force, with the aim of changing the conditions of the have-nots in the projected empire of liberty and, for offsetting the dominant laws of demand and supply. Perhaps here began the germinal of Marx’s conception of the “dictatorship of the proletariat”? (Editors’ Introduction, p. 472.)

Marx also excerpted from a survey of the pre-1789 social ideas by François Villegardelle; it contains selected texts by other authors. One of these is a text by a leader of the French revolution, Brissot de Warville. In Marx’s excerpts from it we bump into the ideas that: being propertyless the overwhelming majority of the people have no fatherland; it is impossible for them to belong to the bourgeois/civil society, indeed they stand in hostile opposition to it; hence, if one wishes to restore to the people their rights, then one must break the entire machine of existing administration (p. 427). One will readily agree with the editors of the present volume, when they point out (p. 472), that these ideas subsequently entered

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into The Manifesto of the Communist Party11 and, grew into the thesis about the need to break up the bourgeois state machine in the course of the proletarian revolution – formulated in the 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte12 and, in The civil War in France”.13

Like the other volumes of MEGA2 IV, this one too is going to be of great help for the interested students. So far, owing to the privileging of the finished writings of Marx, among other things, Marx-studies remained largely oriented upon the question of the specificity of Marx’s intellectual and practical break from the earlier contributions to science and socialism. Now, with the publication of the volumes of MEGA2 IV, we are getting materials that represent the continuity which links him with the earlier thinkers and activists. Thus, grounds are being created, for appreciating both the lines of continuity and the points of departure in Marx. Time for yet another round of multiple course correction in our understanding of Marx’s interventions in political economy and strategic political thought.

NOTES

1. Constantin Frantz, Die Philosophie der Mathematik. Zugleich ein Beitrag zur Logik und Naturphilosophie (Leipzig, 1842). On this see also: Jòsef Szigeti, “The Principle of Identity of Identity and Non-Identity”, Nature, Society, and Thought (Minneapolis), 12 (1999), No. 3, pp. 342f.

2. Friedrich Burdach, Die Physiologie als Erfahrungswissenschaft, Bd. 1–6 (Leipzig, 1826–40).3. Personal communication from Jürgen Rojahn dated 31 May and 5 June 2001.4. On this see, for instance: Gerald Hubmann, Herfried Münkler, Manfred Neuhaus, “‘… es kömmt drauf an sie zu

verändern’: Zur Wiederaufnahme der Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA)”, Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie, 2/2001, p. 307, n. 2.

5. See, for instance: H. Scott Gordon, “Laissez-faire”, in: International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, ed. By David L. Sills (New York and London, 1968), vol. 8, pp. 546–49.

6. See: Basil Guy, The French image of China before and after Voltaire (Geneva, 1963), pp. 341–59; John James Clarke, Oriental enlightenment: the encounter between Asian and Western thought (London and New York, 1997), p. 50, n. 18.

7. See: Maximilien Rubel, “Les cahiers de lecture de Karl Marx”, International Review of Social History, 2 (1957), p. 399; quoted in the Introduction to MEGA2 IV/3, p. 473.

8. See, for instance: Louis Althusser, Étienne Balibar, Lire le Capital (Paris, 1968); Teodor Ilyich Oizerman, Formirovanie flosofii marksizma (Moskva, 1977); Meghand Desai, “Political Economy”, in: A Dictionary of Marsist Thought, ed. By Tom Bottomore [et al.] (Oxford, 1983; repr. 1987), pp. 375–78; Ernesto Screpanti, “Towards a general theory of capitalism: suggestions from chapters 23 and 27”, in: Marxian economics: a reappraisal. Essays on Volume III of Capital, Vol. 1, ed. by Riccardo Bellofiore (London and New York, 1998), pp. 109–23.

9. [Adolphe] Blanqui, Histoire de l’économie politique en Europe, depuis les anciens jusqu’à nos jours, suivie d’une bibliographie raisonnée des principaus ouvrages d’économie politique, 2 éd., t. 1.2. (Paris, 1842).

10. On this see: Georgij Bagaturija, “Engels o kommunistčeskom obščestve, in: Engels – teoretik [Red.: G.A. Bagaturija, A.I. Malyš] (Moskva, 1970), p. 369; and, Michael George, “Marx’s Hegelianism: an exposition”, in: Hegel and Modern Philosophy, ed. by David Lamb (London, New York, Sydney, 1987), pp. 120–29.

11. “The working men have no country”, MECW, Vol. 6, p. 502.12. MECW, Vol. 11, pp. 185, 193, 337.13. MECW, Vol. 22, pp. 328, 333f, 486–88, 493, 533, 536, 549.

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MEGA – Studien, 2000/1, S. 129 – 132.

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