2017년 5월 26일 금요일

[발췌: Heilbronner's] Worldly Philosphers


출처: R. L. Heilbroner, ^Worldly Philosophers: ...^


Chapter 6, "The Inexorable System of Karl Marx"

※ 발췌 (excerpt):

( ... ... ) "The history of capitalism," we read in the Program of the Communist International adopted in 1929─a kind of latter-day restatement of ^The Communist Manifesto^─"has completely confirmed the Marxist theory of the laws of development of capitalist societ and of its contradictions, leading to the destruction of the entire capitalist system." What were those laws? What was Marx's prognosis for the system that he knew?

The answer lies in that enormous work ^Das Kapital^. With Marx's agonizing meticulousness, it is remarkable that the work was ever finished─in a sense it never was. It was 18 years in process; in 1851 it was to be done "in five weeks"; in 1859 "in six weeks"; in 1865 it was "done"─a huge bundle of virtually illegible manuscripts which took two years to edit into Volume I. When Marx died in 1883 three volumes remained: Engels put out Volume II in 1885 and the third in 1894. The final (fourth) volume did not emerge until 1910.

There are 25 hundred pages to read for anyone intrepid enough to make the effort. And what pages! Some deal with the tiniest of technical matters and labor them to a point of mathematical exhaustion; others swirl with passion and anger. This is an economist who has read ^every^ economist, a German pedant with a passion for dotting i's and crossing t's, and an emotional critics who can write that capital has a "vampire thirst for the living blood of labour," and who tells us that capital came into the world "dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt." ( ... ... )

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