Roman Rosdolsky 1897-1967: An Introduction

Abstract

Roman Rosdolsky's Comments on the Method of Marx's Capital and its Importance for Contemporary Marxist Scholarship was delivered in September 1967 as the opening paper of the Frankfurt Colloquium commemorating the 100th anniversay of Marx's Capital.1 At this colloquium, held only one month before his death in Detroit, Rosdolsky foreshadowed the posthumous publication of his major work, Zur Entstehungsgeschichte des Marxschen Kapital (The Origins of Marx's Capital). The two volumes of this publication are the result of twenty years of work during emigration in the United States, and are recognized as the major commentary of Marx's Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Oekonomie.2 Rosdolsky's deceptively short, but highly compressed analysis of the dialectical method in Capital, is important not only as a prelude to his larger theoretical work on which it is based, but also for its relation to the political and theoretical development of Marxism in the late 1960s. In this context Rosdolsky challenged not only the old Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy, but those new orthodoxies that have recently challenged the already petrified Soviet Marxism. Rosdolsky pointed to the inadequacy of the purely economistic interpretations, which neglect the dialectical and historical social theory in his work, often ignoring the importance of value-producing labor as the subjective side of capital, as well as the historical transformation of use value in its commodity form. Perhaps more important, Rosdolsky emphasized the Hegelian roots of the conceptual and historical dialectic in both the Grundrisse and Capital. This came at a time when the French structuralist interpretation of Marx's epistemological break with humanism, anthropology and Hegel was gaining acceptance outside of Paris. (It was not coincidental that the first to debate Rosdolsky's thesis at the colloquium was Nicos Poulantzas.) At the same time, this emphasis coincided with the rediscovery of Marx by the West German New Left, who were themselves eager to dispense with the dialectical Marxism of Lukacs, Korsch and the Frankfurt School which was characteristic of the now superseded anti-authoritarian phase of the