Capital not a Doctrine, but a Critique

Philosophy and Religion, Part 7a

“Capital”: Not a Doctrine, but a 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” (linked below).

Smith showed how generations of Marxists have got it very wrong.

In particular, Smith shows us how “Capital” 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’s [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 have been 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), currently being run on the CU Africa blog and forum.

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. There is excellent stuff there.

Please download the main text below and read.

Download:

Hegel, Economics, and Marx's Capital, 1999, Cyril Smith (7803 words)

Further reading:

How The Marxists Buried Marx, 1998, Smith (13629 words)

Karl Marx and the Origins of ‘Marxism’, 1998, Smith (4670 words)

The Communist Manifesto after 150 years, 1998, Smith (8285 words)

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Previous main Communist University posts:
Channel [members]	Course Archive	Weeks	Last Posted
SADTU Pol Ed [436]	Development, Rural and Urban	3/10	5 August 2010
CU Africa [230]	Marx’s Capital, Volumes 1, 2 & 3	8/33	3 August 2010
CU [2837]	Philosophy and Religion	7/10	5 August 2010
Courses completed in 2010 to date:
SADTU Pol Ed	Lenin’s The State & Revolution	6	June - July
	National Democratic Revolution	12	March - June
	Basics	10	January - March
SADTU Pol Schools	3-Day School	3 days	2-4 June
CU	No Woman, No Revolution	10	March - June
	Basics	10	January – March
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