Modern Imperialism, Monopoly Finance Capital, and Marx's Law of Value by Samir Amin

Author:Samir Amin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New York University Press
Published: 2017-03-10T16:00:00+00:00

Afterword

In the introduction to this work, I recalled that my reading of Das Kapital had aroused my enthusiasm yet had given me no greater understanding about the origin of Asian and African “underdevelopment.” And I noted that all my subsequent analytical work—during a half-century—has gone into an effort to fill that lacuna.

In my view, Marx’s opus remained unfinished. I am certainly not alone in recognizing this. Marx himself, in a letter to Lassalle, wrote: “the whole is divided into six books: 1) Capital, 2) Landed Property, 3) Wage Labor, 4) The State, 5) International Trade, 6) The World Market.”1

As is well known, Marx published only the first volume of Das Kapital in his lifetime. Engels published the (nearly completed) manuscripts of Volumes II and III (parts of which deal with landed property and wage labor) posthumously; and Kautsky later published Marx’s notes for Volume IV, which covers the history of theories of surplus value. The contemplated volumes dealing with the state and the system of globalized capitalism were never written.

I am interpreting the “silences” of that unfinished work, Das Kapital. I am indebted to Michael Lebowitz, author of Following Marx, for this expression.2 Das Kapital—and here Lebowitz and perhaps several others, like the Englishman E. P. Thompson, share my view—dissects (or “deconstructs”) the logic of capital and adduces a critique of political economy (the subtitle of Das Kapital). The term “critique” must be understood not as the substitution of a “good” for a “bad” (or, at best, imperfect) economics but as specifying the status of political economy (in the loftiest sense of the term) as the foundation of bourgeois ideology.

This dissection allows Marx to make visible what is concealed in political economy: value and surplus-value, which show up in political economy only in the forms of price and profit. This operation is basic. Without it capitalism cannot be grasped in its reality and so would appear as a “rational” system of organizing production.

Marx thus envisaged completing this side of the analysis of capital with a book on wage-labor (the third book mentioned in the letter to Lassalle). Here Marx envisaged introducing the new class struggle (that of the wage-earning proletariat against the capitalist bourgeoisie) into the construction not of a “political economy” but of a “historical materialism” or “materialist history” (and I do mean materialist, plainly not “economic-determinist”). After all, wage labor is not a “fact of nature,” and human beings try to escape from it whenever possible. As Marx points out in discussing the “new colonization” (the settler colonization of North America): the “natural” reproduction of the wage-labor force clashes with the handicap formed by its flight and establishment as independent farmers on conquered territory. Emancipation of those who, under capitalism, are wage laborers subordinate to capital (and exploited by it) comes through the abolition of wage labor (communism), not through its “humane management.” The fragments of an analysis of wage labor published in the volumes of Das Kapital (supplemented with writings by Marx and Engels from newspaper articles and from their correspondence) clearly point to that intention.

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