Abstract
Marx once famously mocked himself to his daughter Laura as ‘a machine condemned to devour books and then throw them, in a changed form, on the dunghill of history’. In her new book, Lucia Pradella follows Marx’s gluttonous book reading adventures in the realm of political economy. Her aim is to dispel what she claims is the myth – repeated by none other than David Harvey – that Marx’s methodological starting point in Capital was the national economy, in particular the English national economy, after which he expanded (or at least intended to expand) his approach to incorporate international relations.
The problem with such a method, according to many of Marx’s critics, is that by positing the international as a secondary add-on to his system, Marx was unable adequately to comprehend political economy as a truly global phenomenon. Pradella challenges this claim through the medium of a tour through Marx’s excerpt notebooks of the 1840s and 1850s. These notebooks are interesting in and of themselves. One would have thought that 130 years after his death there would be little new to say about Marx, but clearly this is not the case.
In part, this is because so much of his work remains to be published. The German edition of Marx and Engels’ complete works, the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA), is intended, when complete, to run to 110 volumes. A total of 50 of these volumes have been (unevenly) translated into English as Marx/Engels Collected Works (MECW), while 40 of the volumes are still in preparation. Marx and Engels’ excerpt notebooks with marginal notes will eventually cover 32 volumes of the MEGA. It is unfortunate that there is no plan to translate the majority of these materials into English, as the excerpt notebooks reveal Marx’s enormously industrious first steps in dealing with intellectual and political problems.
It has been by following one aspect of this process that Pradella has cast new light on an old problem. By focusing on materials not available in English (and in some cases not yet published in German either, since she has had access to several as yet unpublished volumes from the MEGA), Pradella is able to tell a new story about how Marx came to write Capital. More importantly, her book is also a largely successful argument (I do have minor quibbles but this is not the place to air them) that Marx’s methodological starting point was – as indeed was that of much of the literature which he devoured – framed internationally from the outset.
Taken together, these features make it highly likely that Pradella’s book will become an important point of reference for anyone wanting a serious account of Marx’s method in Capital.