Re: Giancarlo de Vivo's query about the problems in Kautsky's edition of Marx's Theories of Surplus Value, see the editorial intro to the said volumes in the IMEL edition, transcribed below
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1863/theories-surplus-value/preface.htm.

Giancarlo may also find of interest the editorial notes by Giorgio Giorgetti of the Italian Editori Riuniti edition, pp. 93 ff., as compared to the Kautsky edition published by Einaudi under the title Storia delle Teorie Economiche.

Daniele Besomi


___________

Theories of Surplus-Value was first published by Kautsky in 1905-10, and since then has been more than once republished in this Kautsky edition both in German and in other languages; it has been published several times in Russian.

The Kautsky edition has many radical defects. Setting out from the totally false assumption that the manuscript Theories of Surplus-Value was devoid of any harmonious plan and was something of a “chaos”, Kautsky subjected it to an arbitrary “adaptation”, revising the most important principles of revolutionary Marxism.

First of all Kautsky crudely violated the arrangement of the material set forth by Marx in the table of contents which he compiled and in fact adhered to in his work. Kautsky completely ignored this table of contents in preparing his edition, and did not even include it in the book.

The material in Marx’s manuscript is arranged consistently and in definite logical sequence. Analysing the attempts of bourgeois economists to resolve the basic problems of political economy, Marx reveals the class limitations that characterised even classical bourgeois political economy, the inability of the bourgeois economists to provide any internally consistent and scientifically grounded solution of the questions they dealt with, and above all of the central problem-the problem of surplus-value. Marx’s manuscript reveals that the development of bourgeois political economy was a process full of contradictions; thus in examining the theories of Smith and Ricardo, Marx shows that in certain respects they brought science forward in comparison with the Physiocrats, but in other respects they repeated the mistakes of the Physiocrats and even took a step backwards. Kautsky distorted this deeply dialectical survey of Marx; he tried to subordinate the whole material of the manuscript to an external, purely chronological sequence, and to present the course of development of bourgeois political economy as a smooth evolutionary process.

Following his chronological plan, Kautsky placed at the very beginning of his edition not the characterisation of the views of James Steuart, which in Marx’s manuscript forms the introduction to the chapter on the Physiocrats, but four short fragments (on Petty, D’Avenant, North and Locke, Hume and Massie), taken for the most part from notebooks XX and XXII. Kautsky mechanically transferred these fragments (as also certain others) to the first chapter of the first volume, and by so doing jumbled together the connected exposition of notebooks VI-XVIII (from James Steuart to Richard Jones) with the supplementary essays in notebooks XX-XXIII.

In Marx’s manuscript the analysis of Quesnay’s theory on the reproduction and circulation of the total capital came after the analysis of Smith’s theories; in the Kautsky edition this part of the manuscript precedes the chapter on Smith, and is given in a form rehashed by Kautsky, who arbitrarily removed nine tenths of this section from the main text and put it into an appendix printed in small type and wedged into the main text.

Kautsky also put the theoretical digressions in which Marx sets out his own view of the reproduction of the social capital into a separate appendix printed in small type and inserted in the text of the book. Kautsky tore them out from various places in the manuscript, grossly violating the inner connection between the historico-critical and the theoretical studies of Marx.

Kautsky was also responsible for obvious departures from the arrangement of the material given in Marx’s manuscript, in the second volume of his edition. Marx began this part of the manuscript with a critique of Rodbertus’s theory of rent; the Kautsky edition starts with the chapter “Surplus-Value and Profit”, dealing with Ricardo, and the critique of Rodbertus’s theory comes only after this chapter. In Marx’s manuscript the analysis of Ricardo’s views on surplus-value and on the process of the changing rate of profit is placed after the critique of the Ricardian theory of rent; in the Kautsky edition it is in the chapter “Surplus-Value and Profit” which begins the volume. Here also Kautsky, by departing from the sequence of the material in the manuscript, obscures important points of principle in Marx’s work, in particular, Marx’s idea that Ricardo’s errors in the theory of rent had left their stamp on the Ricardian doctrine of profit.

As a result of all these arbitrary rearrangements which he made in the manuscript, problems that are organically connected are torn apart in the Kautsky edition. For example, the chapter “Ricardo’s Theory of Profit” in Marx’s manuscript contains a critique of Ricardo’s views on the process of the formation of the average rate of profit and of his views on the causes of its fall. In the Kautsky edition these two parts of one and the same chapter of Marx’s manuscript are separated from each other by 350 pages of the text.

All the material in the manuscript is given by Kautsky in a form which obscures the questions of the class struggle, and the deep connection between economic theories and the social and political environment in which they are developed. Thus for example, in the second volume of the Kautsky edition there is a section headed by Kautsky “Anderson and Malthus. Roscher”. In the corresponding passage of the manuscript Marx shows that Anderson’s views on rent were distorted by Malthus in the interest of the most reactionary elements of the ruling classes, while Ricardo’s conclusions were directed against the landowning aristocracy. After this, Marx dwells on the vulgar economist Roscher, who crudely distorted the whole history of the question. The clear, politically sharp content of this section of the manuscript, which is a model of profound class analysis of the history of political economy, has been unsystematically lumped together by Kautsky under one general and quite colourless title which is a mere enumeration of names.

This type of editorial titling is extremely characteristic of the Kautsky edition. Almost all the titles which Kautsky furnished for the chapters and paragraphs of his edition bear an objectivist, neutral character. This applies, for example, to titles such as: “Adam Smith and the Concept of Productive Labour”, “Ricardo’s Conception of Value”, “Ricardo’s Idea of Surplus-Value”, “The Rate of Profit”, “Value and Surplus-Value”, “Variable Capital and Accumulation”, and so on. Kautsky’s titles have nowhere set off Smith’s two different definitions of value, the twofold nature of Smith’s views on the relations between value and revenue, Ricardo’s inability to connect the law of the average rate of profit with the law of value, etc., which Marx had brought to light. In his titling Kautsky also glosses over the vulgar element in the views of Smith and Ricardo: and he supplies the chapters on Ramsay, Cherbuliez and Richard Jones with titles calculated to give the reader the entirely false impression that some elements of Marxist political economy were to be found already in the works of these bourgeois economists.

Kautsky’s distortions and revisions of Marx’s text are shown in their crudest and most overt form in the numerous cuts that he made. Kautsky omitted, in his edition, not only individual words and sentences, but also whole passages, some of which fill three, four or more pages of the manuscript, in Marx’s compact writing. Among the parts of the manuscript Kautsky omitted there is even a whole chapter, which appears in Marx’s table of contents under the title: “Bray as Adversary of the Economists”. Kautsky also omitted, among many others, the passage in the manuscript in which Marx speaks of the economic preconditions of the absolute impoverishment of the working class under capitalism. Having started on the path of falsification, the revisionist Kautsky, who denied the absolute impoverishment of the working class, did not hesitate to conceal from the reader Marx’s arguments on this important question, of principle.

In “editing” Marx’s manuscript, Kautsky tried to tone down the annihilating criticism to which Marx subjected the views of the bourgeois economists, and to substitute “decorous” sleek expressions for the angry, passionate, caustic language used by Marx in his merciless criticism of the apologists of the bourgeoisie. Thus Kautsky in all passages removed from Marx’s characterisation of bourgeois economists such epithets as “asses”, “dogs”, “canaille”.

Finally, characteristic of the entire Kautsky edition are the numerous and sometimes extremely crude mistakes in deciphering the text of the manuscript, inaccurate and in a number of cases obviously incorrect translations of English and French expressions occurring in the text, arbitrary editorial interpolations inconsistent with the movement of Marx’s thought, the absolutely impermissible substitution of some of Marx’s terms by others, and so on.

The complete disregard of Marx’s table of contents, the arbitrary and incorrect arrangement of the manuscript material, the objectivist titles which avoid the class essence of the conceptions criticised by Marx, the obscuring of the fundamental antithesis between Marx’s economic teaching and the whole bourgeois political economy, the removal of a number of passages containing important theses of revolutionary Marxism, from which Kautsky more and more departed — all this suggests that what we have here is not only gross violations of the elementary requirements of a scientific edition, but also the direct falsification of Marxism.







Il giorno 25-mar-2014, alle ore 11.41, Giancarlo de Vivo ha scritto:

> Yes Professor Womack is right, of course. I would however like to ask him and also other colleagues what example of bad or corrupt editorial work by Kautsky they have found. I must confess I am not aware of any major problem.
> 
> Giancarlo de Vivo
>  
> Il giorno 24/mar/2014, alle ore 23.39, Womack, John ha scritto:
> 
>> Many thanks to Professor de Vivo, who is quite right about the unabridged English translation of The Theories.
>> Only I would note the first version I know in English, the “selections” translated by Bonner and Burns (Lawrence & Wishart 1951), was from Kautsky. Most any scholar now seriously studying The Theories would use the unabridged version. But an innocent student looking in the library might fall for the abridgement.
>>  
>> From: Societies for the History of Economics [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Giancarlo de Vivo
>> Sent: Monday, March 24, 2014 6:08 PM
>> To: [log in to unmask]
>> Subject: Re: [SHOE] FW: [SHOE] Circular flow
>>  
>> May I point out that the English translation of Theories of Surplus Value (at least the unabridged one) is NOT made from the Kautsky edition. 
>> Giancarlo de Vivo
>>  
>> Il giorno 24/mar/2014, alle ore 22.52, Womack, John ha scritto:
>> 
>> 
>> I forgot to mention Marx's analysis of Smith and Quesnay on circulation in his Theories of Surplus Value (where you should be very careful of Kautsky's bad editing and English translations based on it). 
>> 
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Womack, John 
>> Sent: Monday, March 24, 2014 5:29 PM
>> To: 'Societies for the History of Economics'
>> Subject: FW: [SHOE] Circular flow
>> 
>> And don't forget "circulation" and "circuits" in KM's Das Kapital.
>> 
>>  
>> ******************************
>> 
>> Giancarlo de Vivo
>> 
>> Dipartimento di Economia, Management, Istituzioni
>> Università di Napoli "Federico II"
>> via Cinthia - Monte S. Angelo
>> 80126 Napoli
>> 
>> tel. +39.081.675049
>> 
>> 
>>  
> 
> ******************************
> 
> Giancarlo de Vivo
> 
> Dipartimento di Economia, Management, Istituzioni
> Università di Napoli "Federico II"
> via Cinthia - Monte S. Angelo
> 80126 Napoli
> 
> tel. +39.081.675049
> 
> 
>