Once Again on the Alleged Differences between Engels and Marx

ABSTRACT

Engels is the co-founder of Marxism. However, he sometimes came under attack as a distorter of Marx’s thought. The first wave of attacks (1970s and 1980s) focused on philosophical and methodological issues. The second wave of attacks emerged since the 1990s and centred more on political economy, pioneered by the Neue Lekture and the Sraffians. It maintains that Engels distorted Capital by making unwarranted interventions during his editing of the book. More specifically, it is argued that he misrepresented Capital as a complete book whereas it is supposed to be a solely incomplete research project. Among others, Engels is accused that he inscribed to Marx a theory of economic crisis based on the law of the falling rate of profit (LFRP), whereas the latter was supposedly agnostic. This paper concentrates on this second wave of attacks. It argues that their accusations are unfounded and do injustice to the great contribution of Engels in the Marxist tradition.

KEYWORDS:

• Engels
• Marxism
• Capital
• MEGA

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on Contributor

Stavros D. Mavroudeas is Professor in Political Economy at the Department of Social Policy of Panteion University, Greece. His publications include The Limits of Regulation (Edward Elgar, 2012), Greek Capitalism in Crisis—Marxist Analyses (Routledge, 2014), “Duration, Intensity and Productivity of Labour and the Distinction between Absolute and Relative Surplus-Value” (Review of Political Economy), “Regulation Theory: The Road from Creative Marxism to Post-Modern Disintegration” (Science & Society), “Periodising Capitalism: Problems and Method—The Case of the Regulation Approach” (Research in Political Economy), “Overworked Greeks? Working Time Trends in Greece” (Asian-African Journal of Economics and Econometrics), “A History of Contemporary Political Economy and Post-Modernism” (Review of Radical Political Economics), “Henryk Grossmann’s Falling Rate of Profit Theory of Crisis: A Presentation and a Reply to Old and New Critics” (Indian Development Review), “Work More or Work Harder? The Length and the Intensity of Work in Marx’s Capital” (Science & Society), and “A History of Contemporary Political Economy and Post-Modernism” (Review of Radical Political Economics).

Notes

1 The NL is proposing a new reading of Marx against the supposedly rigid schemes of classical Marxist theory. It draws its roots from Horkheimer and Adorno. It has been inaugurated by H-G. Backhaus and H. Reichelt and continued by M. Heinrich. Three are its main features. First, it argues that Marx has a monetary theory of value, implying that abstract labour is directly associated and incarnated in money. This is a well-known fallacy that Marx appositely and explicitly rejected in his critique of Franklin. Second, the NL abhors considering the state as an instrument of the bourgeoisie and argues that although it supports the capitalist system it has also considerable degrees of freedom. This attempt to break from mechanistic conceptions of the capitalist state had led the NL to relativism and to embracing reformist politics of transforming the capitalist state. Third, it questions the revolutionary character of the proletariat.

2 As Roth (2010, 1231) gently puts it: “Marx was a master of revision.”

3 Marx argues explicitly that it is not money that renders commodities commensurable. Quite the contrary, they are commensurable because all commodities are objective human social labour expended. This socially necessary labour-time constitutes their value and it is their immanent measure of value. This is expressed through a series of mediation in their external measure of value, that is, money. The external measures derive from the immanent measure and, thus, it can neither stand on its own nor substitute the former.

4 Disputing the Marxian monetary theory is necessary because only in this way the NL can be substitute (labour) value with money. The NL does this by considering money as the product of state power. In this it has close affinities—with or without knowing it—with post-Keynesianism and the old Credit School. For this reason, debunking the Marxian theory of credit money that is built upon LTV is necessary for the NL.

5 There are many examples of Vollgraf and Jungnickel’s (2002) interpretational sophistry. They accuse Engels for making more organized chapter 3 on LFRP and, thus, giving the semblance of a more finished and coherent passage. In order to prove it they quote H. Grossmann (who is the main revivalist of the theory of LFRP) for complaining that chapter 3 does not live up to the expectations generated by Capital I and that there are “fatal flaws in the arguments of Capital III” (Vollgraf and Jungnickel 2002, 47–48). But Grossmann was saying so because he required much more clarity and an even stronger presentation of LFRP than that offered via Engels’s modifications. Hence, his criticism is not against Engel’s modifications, quite the contrary. Another truly appalling example of sophistry and ignorance of economic analysis is given in Vollgraf and Jungnickel (2002, 49). They criticize Engels for removing the brackets and inserting an insignificant (as to the essence of the text) word. Thus, they argue that Engels presented Marx’s analysis of interest-bearing capital as a complete one whereas Marx had only ambivalent thoughts about it. Their textual comments are a truly hair-splitting experiment. But what is more appalling is their lack of knowledge of the issue at hand (that is Marx’s distinction of money-as-money and money-as-capital and why he considers loan with or without security as an ancient form compared to money-as-capital).

6 Bronfenbrenner and Wolfson (1984) and Mavroudeas and Ioannides (2006) have proven this within the framework of a Bauer-Grossmann model.

7 Foster (2017) very accurately pinpoints to Carver’s (2016) review of G. Steadman-Jones’s “Karl Marx” where we are told that Marx’s political project was simply “to contribute to a broadly-based, popular movement for democratic institutions.”