Karl Marx Das Kapital
KARL MARX
Das Kapital
and
The Science of Everything
by
Frank W. Andres
© Copyright, Frank W. Andres, 2021.
All Rights Reserved.
This book is dedicated to Kinsley.
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Introduction
I just wrote a minibook about Karl Marx….but what I learned was so surprising…We have learned things about George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Marx, and abut the German people, in general, that history has missed….We can see the revolutions of 1847-48 in a new light…We can see the frustrations of the German people…and how Marx worked tirelessly to help his own people…not as a mob organizer who was calling for people to rise up kill everyone…But as a philosopher, an economist…trying to show them how other countries were rising economically… Yes, there was some bad in all this capitalist stuff…but so much was good…As it was in the mid-1800s…the German people were reaping all the bad from the times…and were rewarded…with none of the good…It was time for a change…and Marx built an entirely new economic theory…to encourage them…to exhort them… to greatness…So much of this has been buried in the history books…It seems that history…sort of makes up its own theories about events…about people….Let us see what more we can learn…about those times…and about this great man….In this minibook we are going to examine his efforts…given the perspective of a new tool…a new science…The Science…of Everything..
Karl Marx…I guess we have heard of the man…He is the Devil….he also seems to be counted as one of the most important people who has lived during the past 3,000 years! There is a temptation to sit back in the year 2021 and judge his works in the context of events that are occurring today. The fact is…as we have learned in my last minibook…he was a German…He was Jewish by birth…however, he considered himself to be fully, and foremost…German…His works were very Germanic in origin… everything he did was aimed at elevating the German people…who for various reasons had slipped behind the rest of Europe…As I have said…his every thought…his every action was directed toward the elevation of his people…to what he felt was their proper station….He felt that they should be… leaders in and of the middle 19th century world.
First of all, Marx faced the intransigence of a Prussian autocratism that with force was keeping the German people in the lock of the Dark Ages…This intransigence was a continuation of the point of view fostered by that great Prussian leader, Frederiok II…King of Prussia, 1740-1780…who supposedly was an enlightened despot, who loved music and new ideas…but actually was a sort of tyrant keeping the German people in Darkness…in Backwardness….Marx hoped that if he wrote essays that were reasonable yet persuasive, he might encourage his people to rise and institute a parliamentary sort of society similar to those that the leading nations of Europe had recently installed. Well, the Prussian government crushed every and all opposition with force…and the German people seemed to be pliant and lethargic anyway….Marx felt that if his polemics were to be persuasive, embodying enough power to move an indifferent population…then he would need theory that could stand tall and and be irrefutable….Like a Wagnerian opera it would call forth a primal Germanic river of emotion and wrath that could sweep all history before it….As a last resort…if his German people just could not move by themselves…he had an auxiliary strategy…Maybe if his ideas were Powerful and cogent enough… people in other countries might be moved to action…which in turn might move others…who were in slumber….
The theoretical work which Marx created came to an apex in his great work…Das Kapital...which was in three volumes…only the first volume of which was published during his lifetime.
I have developed a new Science, a new Scientific Mmethod, and a new way of conducting experiments…My new Science and Scientific Method….I shall explain in detail later…What do I mean by…a new way of conducting experiments?…Well, for years people have said that some of my ideas are very interesting…but they were not certain they can be of benefit to society. Well, this and the previous minibook of mine on Marx…are part of an experiment…an unorthodox one to be sure…Experiments are supposed to be conducted at the laboratory bench….No, from here on out…some experiments just simply…will be different…Here, for example… I am attempting to the show the Power of a new Science of Everything….I am attempting to show that it can elucidate and illuminate…important events… and the lives of great personages… in history. So let us see how this new Science can do….Let us see how Karl Marx…and his Das Kapital stand…in the Light…of this new…Science of Everything.
‘Big Story.’..’Little Story’
First of all, Marx was most interested in raising the German people to the level of Industrial Revolution… such had occurred in Great Britain during the 18th century…and was now spreading into the Untied States during the middle of the 19th century….Therefore, from the beginning, his concern was aimed at society…not with individual people or firms….as the economic theories of Adam Smith were focused upon…
What has George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel to do with any of this?…He was a philosopher… not an early economist…nicht whar? Well, Hegel was always concerned with the great Synthesis that existed in his mind …as he was right hemispheric dominant in his brain….I have seen where he scored a 160 I.Q. on the only test that measures right hemispheric ability..the Wechsler-Belevue Block Test…He felt that his job as a philosopher was to take the ideas of the major philosophers who wrote before him…and to integrate them into one great synthesis…Immanual Kant had attempted to do this previously…. in his Critique of Pure Reason...however, Kant attempted to create a synthesis deductively….and so in the end he was left with only empty categories…and the two empty boxes…space and time…That is, he was left with a lot of form…and no content….All content for thought comes from the right side of the brain…and it does not matter how intelligent one is…in every person, one side of the brain is dominant…and that side dictates how one thinks….Kant was left hemispheric dominant in his brain…his thought was mathematical, analytical….generating no new content…only magnificent forms…..He had no idea how the right side of the brain works… consequently, its Power was left out…of his great work.
Hegel had the opposite problem….In his Phenomenology of Spirit….he presents all the content of thought from several philosophers…but the analytical contribution from others of these people is pretty much left out…Nevertheless, Hegel saw that if the synthesis of the thought of these major philosophers could be placed together in the correct order…then a picture of how the mind creates ideas could be made…Actually, what he was advocating…was that a philosopher become a biologist…and examine the human brain from the inside out…One would then know how the brain does its work…how it creates ideas…which are tools…the human brain then would be like an economic firm, making tools…but really not just like one firm…for it should have been apparent in this Synthesis that more than one brain would be needed…at least one collecting ideas by means of an inductive, synthetic method…and another one separating ideas utilizing deductive, analytical thought…In the end..philosophy would be examining how several minds working together are able to create ideas…which are tools…Tools made in this way…are often very Powerful and can be used…to transform the world…Marx understood all of this on some level…and merely transferred Hegel’s ideas to outside the brain…to German society as a whole….Very quickly Marx’s economic theory moved from Adam Smith and the demand-supply considerations of the firm…to a broader perspective…to include all of society itself….In modern-day words…he was the first to develop economic theory on the ‘macro’ level as opposed to the ‘micro’ level developed by Adam Smith… Many people have stolen his ideas since…without giving him credit…just as was the case of Hegel…from whom Marx himself had stolen without proper attribution… From the beginning…Marx constantly stressed… that he was like Hegel… he was concerned always with the ‘Big Story’ first… The ‘Little Story’ was always secondary…in importance…..
Economic Development
So one story Hegel gave Marx was the ‘Big Story’…the story of an economics that involved society as a whole…not just the firm…However, Hegel also gave Marx another story…he also asserted what the purpose of a society should be …A society should always be striving…to be better than it is now…its major objective should be to generate Progress…such that its people will be better off over time…This idea came from the German inductive physiological structure experienced within his mind…within the right hemispheric dominant brain…the experience of Synthesis…a conglomeration of ideas united conceptually by analogy and cause and effect…into one great Absolute…one great Whole…which gets always better, bigger…acquiring more Power to impact the world without it…over time…From this physiological fact within each right hemispheric person comes the idea of Progress….of Development, over time….Marx certainly carried this away from his studies of philosophy in school….He saw parts of the world getting better as was to be expected of a society entering a modern setting….but the tragedy as far as he was concerned…was that the bulk of the population captured in a capitalist dynamo of Progress….the laborers, working long hours in the midst of machines….the humanity who supposedly were entitled to the benefits of this Progress…these people, in general, were being left behind…were being cheated and exploited… and left…with nothing… Other things that are important for humanity… such as Culture and Nature…were also left in the debris ….
Marx’s challenge was to find a way for all mankind to benefit from this so-called Industrial Revolution… In the end, his question was…For whose benefit was this Revolution being undertaken… In the end…exactly who seemed to be the primary beneficiaries?….He felt that once People understood what was happening…they would become irate and take action…perhaps bring forth another Revolution…one that would result in a society…that would be more sharing and caring… a society that would correct these injustices….In this manner, all men and women…would be able to be beneficiaries of this tremendous Progress….
Das Kapital, Volume I
Well, anyone reading the first volume of Das Kapital …I mean really reading it…not just reading about it…well, he or she must be appalled by the
hundreds of pages devoted to trying to deduce that the price of a commodity produced by a firm is based exclusively on the contribution made by labor..and that in the end labor is being exploited…
As one might imagine… this must be a hopeless exercise…and it was..
In the end Marx was discouraged by the progress he had made in this pursuit … and of course, he had to have failed…for from today’s perspective what he was attempting to do…was take micro-economic theory…and deduce a ‘macro’ conclusion…, that is, he felt he had to show mathematically, using the theory of the firm….how labor was being exploited….If he could accomplish this feat…Q.E.D….the vital point would be proven…and laborers around the world would arise…and create a new world.
The problem is…and was…that in the theory of Adam Smith…labor is paid what it deserves along with all of the other contributors to the final presentation of a commodity in the market place…In the end the market, makes everything right…Also, in the end it is the consumer…not the producer who determines the price paid for a good…based on the aggregation of individuals’ marginal utility for the commodity in question….Yes, in the end…according to Adam Smith…perfect competition ensures that all contributors to production are paid what they fairly deserve… Yes, in the end, in Smith’s mind…it was…. Leibnitz’s The Best of All Possible Worlds!…The problem is…. that the world of Adam Smith never existed…Instead, from the first…the Devil….Monopoly….raised its ugly head…A monopoly has enough power to influence the creation of profit…it can do this by influence over the price of inputs…all inputs…yet if a monopolist is facing producers of inputs who also are monopolists… then the only input he can strictly control in collaboration with other monopolists…is labor which in a primitive state…possesses no power…Together monopolists can ensure that labor will receive a wage that will only meet minimum needs…. Monopoly is a classical concept…but the cure is a macro-political one… Adam Smith could tell you how monopoly works and the Evil that it would represent….if it existed….Fortunately for him…in his mind…it did not…Unfortunately for us…in our lives…it does…It takes a whole different level of economics to face the world of monopoly, production by a world of machines, and the need for countervailing power, labor unions and government…To produce equality and justice in the market place…a larger conception of society is required….This larger conception of society also would be considering an immense swirling flow of goods and money….nationwide…. The crazy thing is…all of this…is right there…in the philosophy…of Hegel!…. Somehow Marx understood all of this…and wrote Das Kapital…Volumes II and III…and was the first person…to enter the world….of macro-economic theory!
Das Kapital….Volumes II and III
Volumes II and III of Das Kapital are very different from Volume I….As we have said…Volume I, which most people have heard of…is concerned with the surplus value of labor….the amount of exploitation… that Marx felt was embedded in the price of every commodity sold in the market place….As we have said…the Truth, of course, is that the price of a commodity is not determined by the cost of its production at all…instead the price is determined by the indifference curves of customers buying the products…that is, the price is determined by how much people desire a certain good….It is thought that the ideas in the second and third volumes were actually written before the first… As a consequence, they were closer to the ideas Marx had at the first which were obtained from his reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology.…yer these old ideas were actually newer…They were very different, in fact…. from any economics that had come before…Well, in the past…a king knew how much money was in his Treasury…but no ideas about what was happening economically in the society around him…The Physiocrats knew about imports and exports and the government budget…but again there was no theory involving the productive elements within the confines of the nation…..Marx has never been given the credit he deserves for the importance of the ideas found in these volumes…For they are operating on a different level than the first volume…they deal with what is now known as National Income, Consumption of Goods, Saving and Investment, Government Outlays, and Business Cycles…..in short, way back in the 1840s and ’50s, Marx was developing a theory of macro-economics! His achievement may have been overlooked or dismissed in the past as it would seem impossible from today’s perspective for anyone that far back in history to have any complete notions such as these…Surely his mind was intently set upon the possibility of revolution of the population and somehow he ended up talking about the things he did without ever really thinking what he was expounding was any type of new economic theory….Historians have been wrong…there was a reason Marx came up with such a theory….because, as we have seen…it had already been developed rather completely by someone else before…who was not an economist at all…
In Volume II, the reader is taken to the main ideas behind the market place…Marx shows how value and surplus value are realized outside of the providence of the firm…and the market supply and demand of Adan Smith… Now Marx is seen moving to other actors in the movement and production of goods that are located in further reaches of time and space reaching out to the length and breadth of an entire economic society….There is the money owner and money lender… there is the wholesaler and retailer… the entrepreneur!… the true functioning capitalist….who is bringing to the table new ideas for machinery and the wherewithal to obtain new enterprises rolling…Workers are viewed in this volume as mostly consumers…and what a modern day economist would say comprises aggregate demand and the consumption functions….Laborers here are essentially the sellers of labor power…that is, any money they might bring to a transaction essentially represents energy credits…which can be used to purchase goods produced by other labors who in turn have received energy credits for the work they have done…The ideas of value and surplus value recede to the background here…although somehow Marx was intent on returning to these concepts later…as he felt that the theories of Adam Smith and David Ricardo were the ones that must in the end…win the day…for they are the ideas that everyone obviously respected…Here too in this volume are the innocent origin of ideas concerning the trade cycle…with its downturns, on which…he secretly placed his bets…to bring forth the revolution he so intensely sought….
Volume III ironically focuses upon what modern economics would ultimate discern to be the most energizing actors in the course of the Business Cycle…these were machines…’innovation!…the rise and accumulation of Captial!…after all, is this not the title of his Masterwork!…Does he not see the contradiction in his assertion of the importance of labor…when industrial revolution was so obviously the result of the rise…. of an ocean of machinery?
Here in these two volumes of Das Kapital…..is the impressive sketching of an elaborate and thoroughgoing macro-economic theory…for which he has been given no credit at all…`
The Science of Everything
Let us view the work of Karl Marx from the perspective of our new Science of Everything…for there are many lessons that can be learned from this…
First, let us review what our new Science of Everything entails….In my book, Man and the Cosmos…The Science of Everything…the social sciences are placed on a biological base…now that we know for certain that man and woman are animals…Well, the delineation of human and ape DNA has confirmed that we are 99.3 percent the same…as a chimpanzee! Sorry…but it is True! The science of man and woman then…can no longer be a Mickey Mouse sort of enterprise…The social sciences now must become legitimate sciences equipped with methodologies and language consistent with the biological and physical sciences….When this is done…we then have an immense Science of Everything… all the parts of which can communicate and work with each other…And work together they must…in a new Scientific Method…for we are attempting to build the 21st Century…and our instruments are simply not able to measure things that move too fast…or are too small…For example, one hypothesis we have…is that every atom in the Cosmos…possesses consciousness…which seems improbable until one realizes that using our new Science of Everything we can use eight disciplines to derive a probability that such a hypothesis… has a 99.9 percent chance of being True…Also quantum mechanics is no longer a crazy science…now we realize that the speed of light just cannot be measured accurately with the instruments we now possess …individual photons cannot be followed with precision…which leads to conclusions in quantum mechanics and relativity…which are bizarre….With our new Science we can approach a problem from several angles at once…and thus utilize a new Scientific Method in which many disciplines can be utilized to increase the probability of a hypothesis being correct…Ultimately, we hope that when a hypothesis nears a 100 percent probability of being True…we can devise an experiment…which may not be like experiments in the past…to clench the fact that the hypothesis is 100 percent True…perhaps using circumstantial evidence….perhaps looking at the works of James Joyce, for instance…as I did in my minibooks concerning alchemy….Our interest becomes wide-ranging…proof of things…;may come from anywhere…if we are clever enough! As I have said…this minibook itself…is this kind of experiment….
And the rewards may be amazing! For example, if atoms do indeed possess consciousness…then new ways of fighting cancer can be developed…and computer chips can be made…even smaller….
Now back to Marx….Well, utilizing our new Science…we can see that one of the social sciences…well, it is at least a Humanity, it would seem…..we are talking about philosophy, here…When philosophy is placed on a biological base…it can be seen…that this discipline is actually an exercise…in ‘looking’ at the brain…from the ‘inside out’….When we understand what philosophy really is…then we can understand…in a thorough-going manner….exactly how a miraculous macro-economic theory such as Das Kapial possesses… might have arisen… seventy years before the writings of John Maynard Keynes!…..Using the perspective of our new Science…we can see that George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel…was not just another philosopher…indeed, in a sense, he was the first macro-economic theorist… Well, first of all, Marx did not stand Hegel on his head…we can see from my Science of Everything… that Hegel was really talking about his brain…he was not an idealist…talking about ethereal things…he was describing in the best way he could…in a metaphorical way…how his brain operated…So in the end…he was a materialist after all…not an idealist…And when he said that the mind…that Spirit moved through history….until it became the Absolute over all things…he was not talking about some idealistic spooky essence moving through the pages of history…he was talking about a German people…who were right hemispheric dominant in their brains…who were down for the moment..but through the process of the dialectic… which actually describes how the Syntheses in their brains is built up…these people with their brains…not some ethereal ghost-like Spirit… would rise to take command of the world…in the end!
So there.!.. As I say…like all philosophers, without their realization, Hegel ultimately was looking at the human brain…his own brain…from the ‘inside out’…and what he found was how ideas…that is, tools…are created…in the brain…How did he do this?…As I have recounted above… he brought together the ideas of several philosophers, all of whom were geniuses…thus their ideas were a reflection of faculties that were most highly developed in their minds…Hegel realized that if he placed the ideas of these people in a proper sequence…one would have a picture of how ideas…that is, tools… are developed by the human mind…how they are created by the human brain… This is like having several firms working in the mind to produce things that are most important in the economic process…that is, not commodities… but tools…that is….Kapital!…
There is a second aspect here that is a bit hidden…the Synthesis that Hegel possessed was in one person’s mind…namely, his own…but the entire process of creating tools must by necessity involve more than one person…
there are two sides of the human brain… and every person is dominant in one side of the brain…He or she views the world…from the perspective of one side of the brain…never both…so Hegel was actually announcing the fact that the creation of ideas…that is, tools, must by biological necessity involve a society of thinkers…a collection of firms…an economic society of sorts…New ideas require several brains working together to produce new ideas…that can impact the world..and somehow Marx in an intuitive manner…could see all of this…for it is all right there…in Hegel’s works….
So right here we have a social science…Well, philosophy has been termed a ‘humanity’ in the past…because it is a subject in which we are plsying around with ideas…not really doing serious work…supposedly…not serious like in a social science…From now on..I term the discipline not a ‘humanity’, not a ‘social science’…but a full-fledged ‘biological science’…which will be working hand in hand with neural science…in accomplishing some of the most important work in the world!…Now where was I?…So right here we have a ‘science’… focusing on the biological workings of the human brain and then on the interaction of several brains…also we have two disciplines involved in the birth of this important subcategory of economics…both philosophy and economics were involved…as unlikely as that might seem…We also have two sides of the brain…working together, resulting in an explosion of completely new and revolutionary ideas….that is, we have a Beatle-like duo, a Watson-Crick-like dual effort of right and left hemispheric Powers colliding and creating a super breakthrough in thought…that duso was Hegel…and Marx….not as many might conjecture…The crucial connection intellectually was not the duo…of Marx and Engels….All of these things are part of my Science of Everything.
And my discoveries concerning Hegel and Marx…would not have been made without it….
As I say…when we place the social sciences on a biological base…we end up with an entire spectrum of disciplines…a rainbow of thought, all with the same methodologies…,with the same language…integrated completely with all of the physical, and biological sciences….All science is one!…And all disciplines can and must talk together, work together… to bring forth great Progress in thought!…And now…we have concrete evidence!….of all of this having worked in the past!…Please… Witness, the Miracle…of Das Kiapital!…
Also, if one considers man- and womankind in a biological manner… then metropolitan areas…no, entire nations..are biological entities… organisms… organisms of man and woman’s own making!…
Which brings us to an important point…our goal is to study human behavior as we would any other biological organism…but other organisms do not have money…and we are able to examine them quite admirably….But, say economists indignantly…money is so accurate…money is one of our signatures of being humans…and not animals…Exactly!…The use of monetary analysis is another way to avoid unpleasant realities…such as being animals…
As I have pointed out elsewhere…’money analysis’ is a duplicate of ‘goods analysis’…money flows are a similacrum for the goods flow…in a transaction money flows one way..goods the other…it would be best if we could remember that we could…perhaps should…examine a society without any money at all…money analysis is static and partial…you have to stop the economy periodically and count the money and then place that against the goods that changed hands during a certain period…this is Gross National Product…It is Gross Domestic Product if you desire to ignore international transactions…because you are embarrassed to face the 23 trillion dollars of debt you owe to other countries….especially to China…. Economic analysis today utilizing money flows is also partial because it ignores the fact that a good moves through time and space…which Marx was very much aware of…from raw materials, to production, to wholesale, retail…to the consumer…. There are the physical vectors of moving goods…That is, there is the movement of all entities in an economy in time and space that is lost in
money analysis…What one is really losing is…the biological organisms of metropolis…of nation…One is left with a similacrum…a virtual representation of reality…that leaves us several levels away from the real action…and hampers all analysis and development of policies to alleviate human pain…in a jungle ruled by machines….a jungle…of our own making….
Yes, as I have said…incredibly…and the only reason that Marx was involved in all of this… was not bloody revolution….The reason Marx did all did…was…that he saw from the start….that man and woman for the most part have seemed to have taken a back seat in this economic development process…What Marx saw was…that only a few humans seemed to be benefiting from all this grand progress…at least way back in the 1840s when revolution burst forth…Moe and more…humans seemed to be enmeshed, caught in a web of their own making..incredibly like tiny parasites in an immense mechanical world…of tools…It is true that eventually there was a river of commodities flowing to them as largess…as reward for their effort…but if a nation grew ill economically… when there was Depression… which was necessary for the mechanical organism to get well…. at moments such as these…the plight and man and woman seemed not to be considered at all…was not important…at all…
Later it would be seen that Depression is not actually an illness for this mechanized world…eventually in economic thought…a theory of the business cycle… a cycle of boom and bust… began to emerge….The Business Cycle would prove to be a part of the natural processes of economic development… like a heart pumping…like lungs breathing…again the plight of man and woman did not seem to be an object of consideration in this rush for riches….this splaying forth of glass and metal… across Nature’s landscape…
Conclusion
I have a 230 I.Q….the result of my taking the only test that measures the abilities of the right side of the brain…the Wechsler-Bellevue Block Test…How can one’s I.Q. be more than 200?…Well, there are many tests that measure the left side of the brain…and they have validity…That is, if you receive a certain score on one of these tests…then you will receive a similar score ..on the rest…unless you are like me…I scored differently on all of them…because they are not equipped to measure my strengths…The test that does measure my abilities is a performance test…if I could perform the required procedures in a couple of minutes I might receive a 400 I.Q…the fact is, the score sheet in the back only goes up to 170 I.Q….but higher scores can be extrapolated based on the time it took one to perform the test…
I have theoretically proposed that great intellectual strides may be made if people with different hemispheric dominance in the brain work together…
and this has been supported by experiences in my life….The right side of the brain was really discovered by Roger Sperry of Cal Tech in the early 1950s in his work with people whose corpus collosi in their brains had been cut…which was part of what was then supposedly a procedure designed to alleviate the symptoms of epilepsy….With the connection between the two hemispheres in the brain cut…scientists and doctors were hoping that the ‘storming’ in an epileptics brain…might be alleviated…There were seven subjects that he studied closely…and he was able to identify strengths of the right side of the brain…Well, the left side sof the brain seemed to be no mystery…it was analytical, deductive…most professors in the universities seemed to operate in this way…The right was of more interest…the fact is…it was..and still seems to be…almost a complete mystery….Any expert concerning this side of the brain seems to know next to nothing about it…how its memory operates…how knowledge is created…They seem to know that has the ability to develop syntheses….hypotheses, music…The left side seems to create no new knowledge of its own…so it is left to the right side of brain to be the fount of all new knowledge…but no such people are being identified when they were young, such abilities are never intentionally developed, and such abilities are never intentionally utilized in the pursuit of knowledge…all of this…in spite of the fact that it seems that such abilities are absolutely essential, required for rapid progress in intellectual work…and thus in the work of the world…in general..
Because of these things…I was induced to look at the great Germans…
who have always been linked to the right side of the brain…Hegel, Goethe…and then Marx…who was actually Jewish, so evidently left hemispheric dominant…or was he?…He was working with Engels…was this a right-left coupling of some type?…or what?
And so I wrote my first minibook on Marx with my primary source being the Encyclopedia Brittanica….just from this one source I was able to assert with some confidence that I thought Marx seemed to be the original source for the development of macro-economic theory….because I had already studied Hegel thoroughly…and it was obvious that Marx was some sort of student of his….Now I have written a second minibook on him…to assert more firmly that what I hypothesized in the first minibook is True….to ascertain exactly how development of this theory occurred…exactly what breakthroughs were made..by whom….and when and how subsequent economists benefited from his writings…without giving him or Hegel proper credit.
As we can see from the investigation above…there was a right-left hemispheric collaboration in the development of Das Kapital...but it was at a distance in space and time…Hegel was indeed right hemispheric dominant and his philosophy was actually, as we have seen, an investigation of a right hemispheric dominant brain…from the ‘inside out’…From our perspective today we can see that in actuality the Synthesis in the brain of a right hemispheric dominant person…operates like a physical economic system…and Hegel’s philosophy delineates the faculties in his mind that are utilized to create ideas…which are tools the mind can use…to impact the world about it….How much of this Marx understood is not clear…but he understood quite a lot and it was his faith in Hegel’s conception of things to actually give him the Truth that he required to help his German people and society in general…that kept him going back to Hegel’s work long after Hegel was quite out of fashion…
The fact is…Marx died in 1883….Das Kapital, Volumes II and III, were finally completed by Friedrich Engles in 1895…and the first macro-economic works that have been officially recognized… were published soon thereafter….and they seemed to appear from nowhere…the work of Alvin H. Hansen along with a host of other contributors…has developed and extended Keynes’s work extensively…yet no one seems to give us a clue as to the exact origins of such macro-economic thought…well, there was the work of Knut Wicksell, a Dane…whose work Geldzins und Gueterpreise appeared in 1898…..which was translated into English right away…which led to a flurry of work on the subject thereafter…Nothing from Das Kapital was published in English until much later… Wicksell seems to have captured all of the ‘macro’ aspects of Marx’s work…without attribution…and so it was Wicksells’ work which remained the seminal work in this field for some time…..From him or any other important economist thereafter…there was scarcely ever.. a mention of Karl Marx…in connection with macro-economic theory.
Karl Marx…the Devil’s Devil…actually a passionate man concerned with the betterment of his people…and of humanity, in general…Yes, he is routinely vilified…year after year…celebrated in Russia year after year…for propaganda purposes…but when it comes to macro-economic theory which is the most important practical part of economics, it would seem…he is never mentioned…in professional economic circles…Supposedly, Marx was just an obscure, unimportant disciple of Ricardian economics… whose major contributions were political…that is, Dangerous…. in nature….So supposedly his entire economics concern….was with an Adam Smith world that never existed….
Well,..it would seem that Citizen Marx has not been given the credit he deserves…for the truly spectacular things he did…things that truly impacted the world….the initial development of a theory concerning National Income accounting….and the economics of developing countries….
In one thing, Marx was truly wrong…and that was his belief that only humans produced work that was truly worth being compensated for…which is strange because he certainly was aware that there were machines involved in the production of a nation’s goods….And how important are machines?… Well, the truth is that one can easily envision a world in which machines take over all production…and man and woman are left dong what they alone can do…and that is, creativity…The fact is…the way things are evolving…cities will soon be fully automated with only a few people in command…the rest of humanity will then be able to return to the land to live in a setting more compatible with their physiology..and, as I say, doing the activities that they alone can do…which, by the way, are the only activities that can yield joy and happiness,,, physical creativity, which is having children… intellectual creativity… coming up with ideas;…and Cosmic creativity…taking ideas and making physical implements and systems…which can impact and change the world… If Marx could have correctly extrapolated the future from the world as it existed around him….then he would have seen that the agony in which man and woman were caught…would be just a temporary phase…and that the things most crucial to industrial development and to continued economic growth is not the exploitation of humans…but instead greater and greater reliance…..upon the machine….At the present time, humans are caught in the elaborate machinery created by their minds….But just for the moment!… Great, Great days….are ahead!…..
Bibliography
I have studied the works of George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and books about him all of my life…the books I have used are too numerous to list…I wrote a paper for my philosophy class at U.C. Davis in 1965…for a Professor Bossart…in which I took all the books I had read on various philosophers and all the books I had read related to Hegel…including the Phenomenology of Spirit….and demonstrated how if one could properly translate Hegel’s words…well, it is difficult enough to explicate what he meant when the original is in English….one would end up with a straight-forward step-by-step replication of how the mind creates ideas…from perception, to collection (induction), to separation (analysis)…I took my 7 page paper to Dr. Henry Wan who was a professor of economics at Davis…He read the paper…well, he was one of the best econometrics people in the world…he took his hands and touched his head…and said…’The human brain is a stupendous thing…I make econometric models…and a business executive can come up with answers in minutes…that would take my models nine months to calculate…’
It was at that moment…when Dr. Wan’s hands touched his head…that philosophy collapsed into physiology for me…and I realized that this meant that I had to put all the social sciences…on a biological base…Well, I mean…my God…if philosophy, the most ethereal, and idea-oriented discipline in the curriculum is becoming biology…well, any other social science or humanity must be able to be converted in this way also….no doubt more easily…. and given the evidence from DNA…biological solutions are the best…For man- and woman kind…to successfully combat world problems like global warming, population explosion, warfare, starvation, pandemics… Cancer…. on and on… such conversion should be ….must be made…as soon as possible…like Now!
Engels, Friedrich, Capital, Volumes II and III (New York: International Publishers Co, Inc., 1987).
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, Phenomenology of Spirit, Translated by A.V. Miller with analysis of the text and Foreword by J.N.Findlay (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977) 595pp.
Marx, Karl, Das Kapital (Volume I), with an introduction by Serge L.Levinsky (New York: Regnery Publishing Inc,, 1996) 356pp.
Sperber, Jonathan, Karl Marx, A Nineteenth-Century Life ( New York: Liveriight Publishing Company, 2019), 680pp.
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