I The Commodity Chapter One, Volume One of the first edition of Capital
I. Introduction Das Kapital is the central philosophical text of scientific socialism. That should be a resounding platitude, but appears to have been the least obvious quality of what is Marx’s life work even to what counts as the ‘orthodox’ tradition. In 1887, Kautsky called it*‘an essentially historical work,’ one which is a ‘new historical and economic system’. This is in a work called (ominously) Marx’s Economic Teachings. Two years earlier he had greeted the publication of Volume II of Capital with the patronizing qualification that it would be of more interest to the capitalists than to the workers. It is not surprising then that one finds Kautsky twenty years later trying to ‘complete’ these ‘economic teachings’ with a philosophy — that of* Mach. Such was the philosophical terrain from which Bernstein’s Neo-Kantianism was opposed. In sum, revisionists have never proceeded from an immanent criti que of Chapter I, as if they knew that they would only lose their fingers in any attempt to tinker with this — the dynamo of Marxist methodology. But any effort to ‘complete’ Marxism (with whatever: Kant, Mach, Dewey, Set-theory) poses it as something other than and hence much less than a philosophical method of knowing the truth, and ineluctably ends up in the empirical embrace of the latest ‘new world reality’. Never was Lenin’s demand that Marxism be developed more important than today, but everything depends on making sure