Apart from your recent article, which has been translated into Chinese, which books have you written?
My first book, my PhD thesis, was Die Wissenschaft vom Wert (The Science of Value). It was first published in 1991 and a considerably extended edition appeared in 1999. After all the discussions of the late 1960s and 1970s, it was an attempt to determine the peculiar scientific kernel of Marx’s project of a Critique of Political Economy. I was occupied with the difference, on the one hand between early and late Marx, on the other hand with the difference between Marx and classical political economy but also with the difference between Marx and modern neoclassical economics. I tried to describe Marx’s fundamentally new project of critique of political economy, a project, which was not only meant to add a new theory to the existing theories, but to practice a critique of a whole science, to articulate a scientific revolution. But in this project of Marx’s you can also find some ambivalences: on the one hand, Marx broke with the old field of economic science, on the other in some of his inquiries he remained in this field, without realizing it. The simultaneity of break with this field, leaving this field and remaining in this field, caused certain problems in Marx’s theory, for example the well known “transformation problem.” The transformation from values to prices of production I can understand as a problem which is caused by this incomplete break with the field of political economy. It is not really a problem of Marx’s new theory; it is a problem of a mixture between old elements (which Marx had already criticized) and new elements.
What other books have you written?
I wrote an introduction in all three volumes of Marx’s Capital (Kritik der politischen Ökonomie: Eine Einführung). It is aimed at readers who have no specific knowledge about Capital, but it presupposes that the readers are ready to work and it not only leads them through all three volumes, but also presents basic elements of a Marxian theory of state and Marx’s ideas on socialism. It is based on the material I presented in Die Wissenschaft vom Wert , so it accentuates issues (like for example fetishism) which are not so common in other introductions. The first edition of the book appeared in 2004, and every year since then a new edition has been necessary; in Germany it became the most widespread introduction in Capital. In 2008 a Spanish translation appeared and now an English translation is almost ready.
My third book (Wie das Marxsche Kapital lesen?) is in some respects a continuation of the second book, it is written for people who want to go deeper in Marx’s Capital. This third book is a very detailed commentary on the first two chapters of volume I of Capital: the chapter on commodity and the chapter on the exchange process. I give comments on nearly every sentence of these two chapters: these two chapters have enormous importance for the understanding of Marx’s Capital, but on the other hand they reveal themselves to be very complicated, when you really try to catch their whole content and when you don’t reduce this content to some easy propositions about value and labor. To this commentary on the first two chapters I added some appendices with other texts of Marx relevant to understand his analysis of the commodity. One text is taken from the so-called “Reworking manuscript” (a manuscript in which Marx reworked the first edition of Capital for the second edition) in which you can find methodological considerations about thanalysis of the commodity (a kind of self commentary of Marx) which Marx made in no other place so explicit than in this “Reworking manuscript,” which is until now only published in MEGA (and translated in no other language). In MEGA volume II/6, which includes this manuscript, you can see how intensively Marx worked on it, how often he changed formulations, added sentences, changed again and so on.
So these two books are based on MEGA?
Also my first book was based on MEGA and even for my Diploma thesis of 1981 I used MEGA. I have now worked for more than thirty years with MEGA. If you want a really scientific discussion about Marx, when you want to investigate his thinking deeply, you need all the material MEGA provides.
World Review of Political Economy 2.4
marxismocritico.com 