阅读“不可读”的马克思

很好很强大+1

Footnotes

1. Gustave Flaubert, Bouvard and Pecuchet, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1976, pp. 289ff.

2. A recent biographer, Francis Wheen, deplored “the mad circular argument one hears from people who haven’t ventured even as far as page two. ‘Capital is all hooey’. ‘And how do you know it’s hooey?’ ‘Because it’s not worth reading’.” Francis Wheen, Karl Marx, Fourth Estate, London, 1999, p. 299.

3. Karl Marx Frederick Engels Collected Works (MECW), volume 6, Lawrence & Wishart, London, MECW, 1976, p. 487.

The propulsion through the opening section of the Manifesto is so convincing that it can sweep the reader past the warning that Marx had placed above the portal: class struggle can end with “the common ruin of the contending classes.” Marx drew on his knowledge of the Ancient world to deny inevitable progress from any purpose-driven view of history.

Karl Popper’s obsession with his version of historicism blinded him to this contra-teleological strand in Marx, whom he otherwise admired for his humanity and his contributions to social and historical knowledge, The Open Society and Its Enemies, RKP, London, 1966; for Popper’s praise of Marx’s “lasting merit,” see p. 88.

4. MECW, 6, p. 485.

5. Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, Part I, Foreign Languages Publishing House (FLPH), Moscow, pp. 89 and 94.

6. Letter from Helmut Hirsch to Encounter, November 1980, p. 92.

7. Marshall Berman, All that is Solid Melts Into Air, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1982, pp. 102 and 121.

8. Steven Marcus, Engels, Manchester and the Working Class, Norton, New York, 1974, pp. 139, 137 and 108.

9. MECW, 6, p. 174.

10. Georg Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness, Merlin, London, 1971, p. 224.

11. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1954, p. 6.

12. Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” MECW, 11, 1979, pp. 103-4.

13. MECW, 11, p. 112.

14. Margaret Rose, Reading the young Marx and Engels, Croom Helm, London, 1978, pp. 84 & 131.

15. In their correspondence, Engels wrote to Marx of the “Gold*****” in the Australian colonies, 23 September 1851, Henry Mayer (ed.), Marx, Engels and Australia, Sydney Studies in Politics 5, Cheshire, Melbourne, 1964, p. 104.

16. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, NLB, London, 1974, pp. 85-86.

17. Bertell Ollman, Dance of the Dialectic, Steps in Marx’s Method, University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 2003.

18. Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1970, p. 203.

19. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1976, p. 70.

20. MECW, 6, pp, 130-1.

21. This interplay of thinking with doing explains how those children of the bourgeoisie, Marx and Engels, could become proletarian intellectuals. Their case was less remarkable than that of Honore de Balzac (1799-1850), whose sequence of novels, The Human Comedy, Engels described as “a constant elegy to the irretrievable decay of good society; his sympathies are all with the class doomed to extinction.” Yet, as Engels went on to explain, he and Marx admired Balzac above all other contemporary novelists:

his satire is never keener, his irony never more bitter, than when he sets in motion the very men and women with whom he sympathises most deeply – the nobles ... That Balzac thus was compelled to go against his own class sympathies and political prejudices, that he saw the necessity of the downfall of his favourite nobles, and described them as people deserving no better fate ... that I consider one of the greatest triumphs of Realism. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels Selected Correspondence, FLPH, Moscow, 1953, pp. 479-80.

22. MECW, 11. 1979, pp. 187-88.

23. Karl Marx, Capital, I, FLPH, Moscow, 1958, p. 109; Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1976, p. 204.

In 1867, Marx alleged that “The English Established Church, e.g., will more readily pardon an attack on 38 of its 39 articles than on 1/39 of its income.” Capital, I, p. 10; Penguin, p. 92. The stand-alone witticisms in Marx and Engels have a Shavian ring, which leaves one wondering how much George Bernard Shaw learned from them about punch lines.

24. MECW, 6, 1976, p. 178.

25. Capital, I, p. 113; Penguin, p. 208.

26. Capital, I, p. 763; Penguin, p. 929.

27. MECW, 5, 1976, p. 5.

28. MECW, 3, 1975, pp. 175-76. Our appreciation of the complexity of Marx’s comment on religion will be deepened by adding knowledge of medical practices from around 1840 when opiates were not taken merely to put their users to sleep, but to deaden the pain, physical and psychological. Opiates allowed workers to continue their battles for existence, offering comfort, not oblivion, sustenance not slumber. It was in this ambivalent sense that Marx referred to religion as an opiate. An appreciation of the history of pharmacy is but one example of the care that must be exercised when interpreting any text.

A similar point can be made about Nietzsche’s “God is Dead.” The messenger is a madman who at once adds that he has arrived too soon. Anyway, the shocking aspect of his annunciation is not that God is dead, because the death and rebirth of gods are integral to religious thinking, including Christianity. The horror was the subsequent claim that “God remains dead,” leaving humanity without the promise of resurrection, see The Gay Science, New York, Vintage, 1974, p. 181.

29. Bertell Ollman, Alienation, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1976, p. 3.

30. M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, Four Essays, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1981, p. 75.

31. MECW, 3, 1975, p. 291; Karl Marx, Frühe Schriften, I, Cotta-Verlag, Stuggart, 1960, p. 586.

32. H. W. Fowler, A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, Omega, Ware, Herts., 1984, p. 474.

33. MECW, 3, p. 299; Frühe Schriften, I, p. 598.

34. MECW, 3, p. 187.

35. Rose, Reading the young Marx and Engels, p. 141.

36. Capital, II, pp. 105-6; Penguin, II, p. 185.

37. Anitra Nelson, Marx’s concept of money: the God of commodities, Routledge, New York, 1999. Because Nelson is deaf to dialectics, she complains that Marx does not have a concept of money but rather a “theory of the money commodity.” She divides her time between nit-picking and thinking up Marx’s motives. (pp. 92-93). The intentionalist fallacy encouraged her to suppose that she can see into Marx’s thinking, which is the more risible given that she neither gets his jokes, nor is aware that he is being ironical. Her literalism is of a piece with her insensitivity to process. For an astute reading of Marx on money see Suzanne de Brunhoff, Urizen Books, New York, 1976.

38. MECW, 5, p. 24.

39. Notwithstanding this restraint, Marx was not afraid to be robust, as in this sardonic onslaught:

Switzerland is the center of attraction for hysterical virgins over thirty, for the pale buds of the finishing school who are keen on the chaste by so effective love-making of the fleet hunters of the Chamois. In the original agricultural cantons the people live like animals, and are as bovine as their oxen. It is necessary, very necessary, that this last refuge of brutal primitive Germanism, of barbarians of bigotry, of patriarchal naiveté and purity of morals, of agricultural stability and of loyalty to death – available to the highest bidder – should at last be destroyed.

This “birthplace of freedom” is nothing else but the center of barbarism, of brutality, bigotry, hypocritical “purity” ... Internal affairs are exhausted in making cheese, chastity, and yodeling ... abroad, the only claim of the Swiss is that of being hired mercenaries.

Here, the rolling thunder comes with its flashes of ridicule. To strike at his target of hypocrisy, Marx reaches for the directness and rhythms of Luther’s bible. This barrage could be Luther’s excoriating the Papacy.

40. The French Marxist Louis Althusser was but one in a line of commentators to warn those opening Capital to skip those 100 pages, that is, Part I on “Commodities and Money,” until after they had read the next 600. He further advised them to delay reading the 30 pages of Part V, see Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy, NLB, London, 1971, pp. 79-86.

Engels had offered parallel advice on how to approach volumes II and III, Selected Correspondence, pp. 566-68.

41. Capital, I, p. 21; Penguin, p. 104.

42. Capital, I, p. 21; Penguin, p. 104.

43. Capital, I, p. 766; Penguin, p. 933.

44. Capital, I, p. 774; Penguin, p. 940.

45. Karl Marx, Capital, II, FLPH, Moscow, 1957, pp. 284-5; Penguin, II, pp. 359-60.

Many of us have been comforted to learn from Engels that Marx, although adept at algebra, including differential calculus “did not get the knack of handling figures, particularly commercial arithmetic.” Marx kept notebooks on differential calculus. The notion of approaching a result by ever smaller increments without ever reaching that end, that is, asymptotically, appealed to Marx as a means to express the dialectic, the process of change, see Mathematics Manuscripts of Karl Marx, New Park, London, 1983.

46. To dispel the lopsidedness of that judgement, let Hegel also speak in his own defence. Just before the end of his life in 1831, he responded to the debates leading up to the First Reform Bill in the British parliament: “Nowhere more than in England is the prejudice so fixed and so naïve that if birth and wealth give a man office they also give him brains.” “The English Reform Bill,” T. M. Knox and Z. A. Pelczynski, Hegel’s Political Writings, OUP, Oxford, 1964, p. 311.

47. Capital, I, p. 83, Penguin, p. 177.

48. S. S. Prawer, Karl Marx and World Literature, OUP, Oxford, 1978.

The Soviet editions did not provide translations, though the Penguin series does. Working one’s way through the explanatory footnotes is a short course in cultural literacy. Marx advised one militant to learn Spanish, as he had done, by reading Don Quixote. The Moscow editions provided much of the necessary detail, culminating in the Marx-Engels Collected Works from 1975. Dirk Struik’s editing of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts and The Communist Manifesto was exemplary for his commentaries and scholarly apparatuses. The Penguin-New Left Editions from the 1970s also deserve to be consulted, both for their translations and their explanatory notes, which supply translations for Marx’s quotations.

The Penguin editor, Ben Fowkes, missed this jibe at Richard Wagner’s 1849 manifesto, “The Art-Work of the Future”: “Nobody – not even a practitioner of Zukunftsmusik* – can live on the products of the future ....” The asterisked footnote misinterprets Zukunftsmusik as “castles in the air, or dreams which may or may not be realized,” p. 272; The Moscow edition, Capital, p. 169, made no attempt to explain this rare reference to music in Marx, which he repeated in Volume II, Moscow, p. 493.

49. MECW, 5, p. 47.

50. Marx. Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, p. 188.

51. James Buchan, Frozen Desire, Picador, London, 1997, p. 202.

52. Capital, I, p. 83n; Penguin, p. 176n.

53. Capital, I, p. 259n; Penguin, p. 370n.

54. Capital, I, p. 264n; Penguin, p. 375n.

55. Bakhtin, p. 41n.

56. Honore Balzac, Lost Illusions, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1971, p. 641.

57. Capital, I, p. 774; Penguin, p. 940.

58. Capital, I, p. 153; Penguin, p. 254.

59. MECW, 3, p. 324.

60. MECW, 3, p. 307.

61. MECW, 6, 1976, pp. 176, 186-8.

62. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1953, p. 481.

63. Capital, I, pp. 105, 112-13; Penguin, pp. 200 and 205-8.

64. Capital, I, p. 162, Penguin, p. 265; Capital, II, pp. 105-6; Penguin, II, p. 185; Capital, III, pp. 289-91; Penguin, pp. 403-5.

65. Capital, I, p. 76-77; Penguin, pp. 169-71.

66. Karl Marx, Capital, II, FLPH, Moscow, 1957, pp. 105-6; Penguin, II, pp. 185-86.

67. Capital, I, p. 594; Penguin, p. 741.

68. Bakhtin, p, 50.

69. Capital, I, pp. 191-93; Penguin, pp. 298-300.

70. Bakhtin, pp. 48-49.

A disciple of Auerbach’s Mimesis could explicate the structure and texture of Capital to reveal Need to make a comparison with the tropes of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1770). The inclusion of Capital would disturb Auerbach’s categories.

In The House of All Nations (1938), Christina Stead gave a fictional representation of money capital.

71. Capital, I, pp. 596-7n; Penguin, p. 744n.

72. Capital, I, pp. 597-98; Penguin, p. 745.

73. Maurice Dobb, Political Economy and Capitalism, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1944, pp. 137-47

74. Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1970, p. 193.

75. Capital, I, p. 110; Penguin, p. 205.

76. MECW, 5, p. 3.

77. MECW, 3, p. 300.

78. Capital, I, p. 110; Penguin, p. 204.

79. Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, p. 87; Capital, II, p. 103; Penguin, p. 183.

80. Capital, I, p. 110; Penguin, p. 205.

81. MECW, 9, 1977, p. 216.

82. Capital, I, p. 52n; Penguin, p. 144n.

83. Capital, I, pp. 72-73; Penguin, pp. 163-64.

郑重道歉

我发帖的时候全部为英文，没想到完毕后全部自动翻译为中文。各位，对不住了！将就一下！再次致歉！

看原文有助于正确理解作者的思想。