Acceptance Speech for World Marxian Economics Award (III)

Abstract

June 17, 2016It is such an honor for me to receive the World Marxian Economics Award by highly valuing my contribution to the development of Marxist economics through my research activities and their results. I am sincerely grateful for that.Some days ago, my new book titled Marx's Theory of Interest-Bearing came out in Japanese. four-volume book consists of my various articles on Marx's theory of interest-bearing capital that I published over the last 30 years since 1982, though I improved and expanded them profiting from this opportunity.The book aims truly to reconstruct Marx's theory of interest-bearing capital through philological analyses of his own manuscripts and to convey it to readers because it is not able to see it when one reads the Engels's edition of volume III of Capital.After Marx's death, Engels found a number of manuscripts for Volume II and III of Capital, and he decided to edit the manuscript to publish them as Volume II and III, respectively. He was able to publish his own edition of Volume II shortly within a year and half. However, it took him 9 years to finish editing Volume III. main reason for consuming such a long period of time was the enormous difficulty in editing the fifth chapter of the manuscript that deals with interest-bearing capital. After a lot of hardships, Engels modified Marx's incomplete manuscript here and there and finally managed to publish his edition of Volume III that reasonably looks like a complete text. Without doubt, his skill of editing is astonishing. Nonetheless, Engels' own interpretation ended up creating Part V of his edition, which significantly differs from the characteristic and structure of the fifth chapter originally intended by Marx.In 1981/82 I conducted research on Marx's original manuscript for Volume III of in the International Institute for Social History in Amsterdam, and I was also able to read its deciphered text in the Institute for Marxism-Leninism in Moscow. I came to realize Engels's bias at the time. Since then over 30 years I have documented the difference between the fifth chapter of Marx's manuscript and the Part V of the Engels's edition in order to reveal what Marx analyzed in the fifth chapter of Volume III of Capital.In 1993, MEGA volume II/4.2 was published, and it became possible to read Marx's first manuscript of Volume III in a printed format. Before that I conducted my research based on my own notebooks that I made during my stay in Amsterdam and Moscow, but after the publication of the MEGA edition I can also use this edition while examining the content of Marx's manuscript.My new book marks the point where I reached after 30 years.In my book, I aimed at carefully examining how Engels edited the fifth chapter of Marx's own manuscript for Volume III, The Division of Profit into Interest and Profit of Enterprise. Interest-Bearing Capital and created Part V of the current Engels's edition, so that I can reveal Marx's original structure and content of the chapter, which has become invisible in the Engels's edition.The fifth chapter of Marx's manuscript consists of six sections divided by title numbers with or without head titles. Sections 1 to 5 deal with his theoretical analysis of interest-bearing capital under the capitalist mode of production, and Section 6 is a historical description of the process in which the capitalist mode of production subsumed usurer's capital in the precapitalist mode of production under itself, transforming it to the modern interest-bearing capital. With regard to the first five sections, sections 1 to 4 largely correspond to Chapters 21 to 24 in the Engels's edition, and they maintain their original figure. Section 6 also is almost identical with Chapter 36, the last chapter of the Engels's edition. Thus, the problem revolves around Section 5 titled by Marx Credit. Fictitious Capital. Engels edited this section and divided it into 11 chapters (Chapters 25 to 35). …