MARX BOOK PRELUJDE

 

KARL MARX’S CAPITAL

 

An integrated philosophical, political, historical, mathematical, and literary interpretation

 

by

 

Robert Paul Wolff

 

Prelude

 

I come from a family with long roots in the socialist tradition. My grandfather, Barnett Wolff, arrived in New York City as a one-year-old baby in 1880 and grew up in lower Manhattan. Early in his life, he committed himself to the socialist cause and spent his entire life working for it. He and a colleague founded the Brooklyn branch of the Socialist Party and he ran for office on the Socialist ticket a number of times, winning election to the New York Board of Aldermen in 1917. On the occasion of the Russian Revolution, my grandfather sided with the Mensheviks rather than with the Bolsheviks, and as a consequence I grew up in a pro-socialist but anti-Communist family.

 

My parents, whose families knew one another, courted as teenagers at meetings of the Young People’s Socialist League in Brooklyn, but by the time I was born in 1933, they were loyal supporters of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal.

 

Despite this background, I had no familiarity with the writings of Karl Marx during my undergraduate or even my graduate years. It was not until the summer of 1960, when I was preparing to teach a sophomore tutorial at Harvard in a newly established undergraduate interdisciplinary program called Social Studies, that I first read Volume One of Capital. I read it quickly and, I am embarrassed to admit, was not particularly impressed by it. Over the next decade and a half, I taught the thought of Karl Marx in various courses at Harvard, the University of Chicago, Columbia, and the University of Massachusetts but it was always the early writings – The Communist Manifesto, The Economic Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, The German Ideology, and so forth.

 

Then in 1977, I decided to teach a graduate seminar in the philosophy department at the University of Massachusetts devoted to Classics of Critical Social Theory. One of the books I chose for the course was Capital.  When I reread Volume One in preparation for teaching, I was stunned by it. I thought I had never read so brilliant, complex, challenging a work. I had almost immediately a revelation about the book, what the French call an éclairecissement.  I believed that I saw deeply into the reasons why Marx had chosen to expound his theories in so strange and puzzling a fashion. Pretty much on the spot, I decided to devote as much time and effort as it took to come to a full understanding of what Marx was doing and to find a way of expounding it that would capture its extraordinary and multidimensional complexity.

 

As I saw it, to do justice to what Marx was trying to accomplish in that great book, I would need to draw on the materials of at least five academic disciplines - philosophy, history, sociology, literary theory, and economics – and then to find a way of integrating them into a single unified vision of his thought.  Philosophy did not present a problem. That was, as Eliza Doolittle says in My Fair Lady, mother’s milk to me. History and Sociology were also disciplines that I felt I could handle successfully.  My first job after getting my doctorate was teaching the history of Western Europe at Harvard, and at the University of Chicago I had taught some of the great works of sociology. I had never studied literary theory, but at that time I had been married for 15 years to a distinguished literary scholar, and by pillow talk, as it were, I had picked up a fair amount of the discipline.

 

Economics posed a more serious problem and to explain what was required of me, I need to say something about the development of the study of the works of Marx and his predecessors in the period of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Karl Marx, and the other important classical political economists set forth their theories in plain text, not using even those mathematical techniques that were available to them in the 18^th and early 19^th centuries. But beginning in 1960 and continuing on for several decades, a number of extremely gifted mathematical economists around the world brought modern techniques of analysis to bear on the classical tradition of political economy, with exciting and interesting results. Piero Sraffa in England, Michio Morishima in Japan, Andràs Brody in Hungary, Luigi Pasinetti in Italy, Gilbert Abraham-Frois and Edmond Berrebi in France, and many others completely revolutionized our understanding of the great early figures of modern economics. For reasons that I will explain later in this book, the branch of mathematics that they used in their analysis was not the calculus one finds so often in neoclassical economic texts but rather linear algebra.  Although I had studied a fair amount of calculus in college, I had never mastered linear algebra. Fortunately, I had a sabbatical leave in the spring semester of 1978.  As soon as my grades were submitted at the end of December 1977, I bought myself a linear algebra textbook and spent January teaching myself the subject. Then I set to work.

 

My original plan was to write an intellectual biography of Marx, laying out the philosophical, historical, sociological, literary, economic, and mathematical interpretation of Capital in relation to Marx’s life, but then I read a marvelous biography of Marx by the Princeton scholar Jerrold Siegel, and I decided that I did not like Marx very much as a human being and would not want to spend that much time with him. When I floated the idea of my integrated interpretation to my good friend and colleague Robert Ackermann, he pointed out that there was not much of a market for a book that would be half literary criticism and half mathematics, so in the end I decided to write a trilogy: mathematics first, literary criticism second, and the integrated vision of what Marx was doing in the third and final volume.

 

I began the economic and mathematical part of my story in a volume called Understanding Marx, and published it with Princeton University Press in 1985.  Elements of the literary philosophical part of my analysis appeared three years later as the Romanell/Phi Beta Kappa lectures under the title Moneybags Must Be so Lucky, published by the University of Massachusetts Press.  Along the way, I published a number of journal articles in various places, including in 1981 what I considered to be a very important and quite mathematically technical essay, “A Critique and Reinterpretation of Marx's Labor Theory of Value,” of which more anon.

But by the time all of this had happened, we were deep in the Reagan years and the exciting re-examination of Marx had given way to the dreary fight to preserve such elements of the 60s and early 70s as had not totally evaporated from the American consciousness. Eventually, I moved on to the Afro-American Studies Department at the University of Massachusetts and spent a good deal of my time raising money for poor black students in South Africa. The final volume was never written.

 

Now, as I fast approach the end of the first nine-tenths of a century of my life, the time has finally come one last time to try to set forth as clearly, completely, and precisely as I am able the vision I had forty-five years ago of what Marx is doing in his great work. Over the years I have become more convinced than ever that Marx has something of the greatest importance to say to us not merely about the nineteenth century but about the world in which we live today. 

 

A word of warning. As I proceed, I shall incorporate into this manuscript substantial portions of books and articles I have already published. I make no apology for this. My goal is to pull together half a lifetime of work into a single coherent narrative. I have no idea how long this will take me or how extensive the final manuscript will be but I hope that I shall at long last complete the task that I set out to perform 45 years ago.