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Engels struggles to edit the second volume of Capitalism, "Learning from the Life and Thought Background of Marx and Engels" (66)
In the above article, we have provided a brief chronological overview of the lives of Marx and Engels, but in this series, "Learning from the Life and Thought Background of Marx and Engels," we will look at the lives and thought of Marx and Engels in more detail.
I will now refer to the book by Tristram Hunt.Engels, The Man Marx Called General.This is a biography of Engels called.
What makes this book excellent is that it explains in an easy-to-understand manner which ideas influenced Engels and how his writings were produced from them.
It is very easy to understand the flow of history because you can learn along with the historical background of the time and the ideas that were popular at the time. It is easy to understand how the ideas of Engels and Marx were developed. The book also gives me a road map of what to read next to learn more about Marx and Engels. I appreciated this.
And this book made me realize how much Engels had influenced Marx's writings. It is quite amazing.
Although this book is a biography of Engels, it also goes into great detail about Marx. It was such a great biography that I thought I could learn more about Marx by reading this book than by reading a biography or commentary on Marx.
We may use other Marx biographies to supplement some of Marx's life and interesting episodes, but basically we will focus on this book and take a closer look at the lives of Marx and Engels.
For other reference books, see the following articles"List of 12 recommended Marx biographies--to learn more about the life and thought of Marx Engels."Please refer to this page for a summary.
So let's get started.
Engels struggles to edit the second volume of Capital
After Marx's death, Engels had to suspend his own scientific work and proceed with the very difficult task of organizing the estate of his friend's works.
The quotations from the documents are not in any order, they're just piles of them all clumped together and collected to be picked out later, and the handwriting is definitely indecipherable to anyone but me," he said. Moreover, the handwriting is definitely not decipherable by anyone but me, and that too after a great deal of effort," he wrote to August Böbel at a loss after wading through the records stored on Maitland Park Road.
Knowing that Engels had devoted his life to Marx and that he would have to be lonely without him, Böbel, Kautsky, and Liebknecht all urged Engels to leave London after Marx's funeral and join them on the continent.
Engels, who had grown accustomed to and preferred the low-pressure life in England, brusquely refused.
I have no intention of going to a country where I could be deported," he told the young disciples. But this is a security that I can only get in England and the United States," he told his young disciples, adding, "I am not going to go to a country where I can be deported.
If we are to continue to do our logical work, the peace and quiet necessary for it can only be found here." Primrose Hill had been transformed into an organized center of global communism, and Engels was determined not to undermine the "many streams of people who have come voluntarily from all over the world to Marx's study.
Chikuma Shobo, Tristram Hunt, translated by Erika Togo, Engels: The Man Called General by Marx, p. 389-390
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After Marx's death, Engels began work on compiling a half-finished edition of Capital.
As mentioned in the above article, Engels was already editing Marx's voluminous manuscript at the time of the first volume of Capital. Even when Marx was alive, Engels was struggling with this task.
What happened after Marx's death?
The work became an unimaginably arduous path.
Engels shudders at the sight of Marx's posthumous manuscript of the second volume of Capital
If I had known this was going to happen," Engels told Bebel.
'I would noisily pester him day and night to get it all written down and printed.' When Engels entered Marx's study and began sorting through the papers, he discovered, to his horror and anger, that the long-awaited second part of Capital had succumbed to Marx's usual evasions, the weakness of his immersion in a largely irrelevant subject, and his insatiable insistence on gathering more evidence It was that.
Intentionally or not, Marx had abandoned his masterpiece.
'Without the large amount of material from the U.S. and Russia (there are over two cubic meters of books on Russian statistics alone), the second part would have been published long ago.' These detailed studies held him back for years."
So, in addition to supervising the translation of Marx's works into English, Italian, Danish, and French ("Be more faithful to the original," Engels scolded Lafargue, who was struggling with "The Poverty of Philosophy. Marx is not the kind of man who would let his manuscripts be changed without his permission."), Engels also embarked on supervising the German versions of the second and third parts of Capital.
Chikuma Shobo, Tristram Hunt, translated by Erika Togo, Engels: The Man Called General by Marx, P390-391
*Lines have been changed as appropriate.
As you can see here, Marx was completely stuck in completing his own Theory of Capital.
That was one aspect of Marx's life that he was immersed in Russian studies in order to escape from it. (Even this is still a dead end...)
The second and third volumes of "Capitalism" are considered to be Marx's works, but I am not sure if they can even be considered to be Marx's works.
Engels, with a sore eye, deciphers and edits the text.
In his study on Regent's Park Road, from the summer of 1883 to the spring of 1885, he worked diligently to collate and decipher countless rewritings and statistical charts, disconnected lines of thought and incomprehensible notes, which became the second part of the German edition of Capital, "The Distribution Process of Capital.
It was a painstaking and frustrating process, but Engels thoroughly enjoyed the excitement of "being able to say that while I was working on this book, I was really communicating with him [Marx] and living with him.
Although the dialogue with his old comrades was enjoyable, the task of editing Marx's incomprehensibly bad writing line by line was threatening Engels' health.
And according to Edward Aveling, the manuscript was in terrible shape. 'There are abbreviations that one can only guess at, and one has to decipher the crossed-out lines and countless corrections. It is as difficult to read as reading a Greek palimpsest [i.e., a piece of reused parchment with the previous text incompletely erased] tied up in string.
By the mid-1880s, Engels' eyes were overworked and weak, and he began to show signs of conjunctivitis and progressive myopia.
To lighten the load, he was forced to indoctrinate the younger generation with the hieroglyphic mysteries of Marx's handwriting - "two able gentlemen, Karl Kautsky and Eduard Bernstein - but eventually a German socialist typesetter, Oskar Eisengarten was hired to dictate to them.
However, Engels still had to review Marx's manuscripts, and in 1887 he began to suffer from chronic eye inflammation. This made it extremely difficult to read except under natural light.
Thankfully, after much trial and error, the science-minded Engels found a cure. From last year until this past August, I used cocaine, but the effect wore off (due to habituation), so I switched to ZnCl2 [zinc chloride], which works very well," he told his friend, physician Ludwig Kugelmann.
But what really worried him about his aging body was a warning from one of his doctors: "I'm never going to be able to ride a horse again - that means I'm not fit for battlefield service. I'm never going to be able to ride a horse again - which means I'm not fit for battlefield duty, for God's sake!"
Chikuma Shobo, Tristram Hunt, translated by Erika Togo, Engels: The Man Called General by Marx, P391-392
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The tearful struggle of the Engels seems to appear before our eyes.
It is a horrifying story that the deciphering process was so difficult that it caused him to suffer from eye diseases. I feel the terrible persistence of Engels, who went to such lengths to bring Marx's second volume of "Capitalism" to the world.
Completion of the second volume of Capitalism and the weaknesses of this work
True to his industrious nature, Engels published the second part of Capital in May 1885. This was only two years after Marx's death.
With its publication, Engels was able to continue his struggle against a familiar series of bourgeois critics, among them the German economist Johann Karl Rodebertus, whom Marx had accused of plagiarism, and once again position Marxism and the theory of surplus value as part of a paradigm shift in nineteenth-century science.
Engels' preface declares that "Marx is in the same relation to the pioneers in the theory of surplus as Lavoisier was to Priestley and Scheele," using his favorite parable of the scientific disciplines.
The existence of that part of the value of output that we now call surplus value was identified long before Marx. ...... But they [economists of the past] never explored it further. ...... Marx thought it was not 'deflagrated air' or 'fire air,' but oxygen.
What Part II did not address, however, was what Engels had first noticed in 1867 and Marx had promised to answer later: the question of whether invariable capital (machinery and equipment) can generate profits through surplus value, and given that the proportion of variable and invariable capital (labor and machinery Given that every factory has different ratios of variable and invariant capital (labor to machinery and equipment), the question is how profit margins can be determined with different types of capital.
In other words, as Meghnad Desai expressed it, "Is (non-labor) capital associated with profitability or not?" It is.
Instead of solving this conundrum, Engels weakly threw the problem back at Marx's critics. If they can show how it is possible to bring about an equal average rate of profit, and how it must be so, not only will it not violate the law of value, but on that very basis we shall be willing to discuss the matter further with them."
Chikuma Shobo, Tristram Hunt, translated by Erika Togo, Engels: The Man Called General by Marx, P391-392
Some line breaks have been made.
' In other words, as Meghnad Desai expressed it, "Is (non-labor) capital associated with profitability or not?" In.
Instead of solving this conundrum, Engels weakly threw the problem back at Marx's critics. If they can show how it is possible to bring about an equal average rate of profit, and how it must be so, not only will it not violate the law of value, but on that very foundation we would like to discuss the matter further with them."
As is clear here, the second volume of "Capitalism" did not resolve the fundamental problem of the first volume, and Engels was forced to reopen the book as he had never expected. And this problem was not resolved in the third volume.
The fact of the matter was that Marx's theory was not actually established.
But that is also true. To begin with, the second and third volumes of "Capitalism" were written before the first. For more information about this, please refer to our previous articleA Brief Overview of the Writing Process of Marx's Capitalism! Learning from the Lives and Thought Backgrounds of Marx and Engels" (50)We told you the following in our article on
The following is a list of the most common problems with the
Marx wrote vigorously on economics in the early 1860s, producing an entire draft of his work in 1861-62 that was more tightly structured than before.
The section on the history of economic thought contained therein, which cannot be found in later manuscripts, was eventually published separately as the History of the Doctrine of Surplus Value.
The third and most well-developed and most lucid work was written in 1864-65.
It was too large a volume to publish at once, so Marx extracted the first 40% of it and revised it extensively for publication. This became the first volume of Capital, which was published in Hamburg in 1867.
In the 1870s, Marx made numerous changes and corrections to the work for the second German edition in 1873 and the French edition two years later [the second German edition was published between 1872-73 and the French edition between 1872-75]. Despite his efforts to obtain a translator and publisher, the English version was not published until after his death in 1887.
Despite these publications, most of Marx's planned works remained unpublished.
Marx had hoped to complete the work shortly after the first volume was published, and he was to continue this work until the year he passed away. After 1867, however, the results remained scattered.
After Marx's death, Engels, who collected, organized and cleaned up his writings, had to refer to multiple drafts since the 1860s.
Volumes II and III of Capital, edited by Engels, were published in 1885 and 1894, respectively, although most of Volume I was actually written after Volumes II and III [were written in manuscript], and it contains Marx's final thoughts and formulations on many important issues.
Hakusuisha, Jonathan Sperber, translated by Jun Obara, Marx: The Life of a Nineteenth Century Man, vol. 2, p. 165-166.
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It is surprising that the second and third volumes of Capitalism were already written before the first volume was published.
The first 40% of the first half of the large volume of "Capitalism" had already been completed, and the first volume of "Capitalism" was the first volume that was cleaned up and published....
One often hears that, "Because of the many points of contradiction and problems pointed out in the first volume of Capital, Marx struggled to write the second and third volumes in order to answer them, but his life ended.
It is true that this is one aspect of the book, but in reality, the second and later volumes had already been written. Marx thought it was too incomplete to be published, so he kept trying to find a way to make it work, but he was never able to produce anything satisfactory, and it was probably closest to being put away as it was.
I read the above passage and thought, "Marx left many manuscripts, in which he had clear ideas and answers, which are still valid today."
As we will see later in Engels' biography, Marx was completely stuck ideologically after the publication of the first volume of Capital. That is why Marx, as usual, went to the library to read books of various genres, and left behind a large number of notes on them. It may be the position of the Marxist side today that they are trying to revive the recorded notes of that dutiful reading as "Marx's true thought.
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