The industry of interpreting Marx seems to be limited only by the amount of "productive consumption" that Marx's own texts can bear before they dissove under the wear and tear of countless re-readings. In recent years, the range of exegetical art expended in uncovering the "true" Marx has been matched only by the industry and perseverence of its practitioners. We now have Marx as a materialist-functionalist (Cohen, 1978), as an arch-deconstructionist (White, 1978), as the founder of a science (Althusser and Balibar, 1970), and as a precursor to rational decision theory (Elster, 1985). Strangely enough, especially in light of the recent interest in textual analysis, none of these readings has taken serious account of the narrative structure of Capital, making use of Marx's own metacomments (such as his postface to the second edition of Capital) as guides to critical reinterpretation.

The first part of the paper discusses the structure of the Grundrisse and pays particular attention to those passages which Marx notes will have to be rearranged and reordered in the final version. In the next section, we analyze the structure of volume I of Capital, contrasting it with the Grundrisse. We focus on Marx's discussion of the development of the money-form and argue that Marx's order of presentation of the various forms of the expression of exchange value is the inverse of his order of discovery, as his own postface to the second edition of Capital suggests. A major part of our evidence is the intermediate status of the A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, written between the Grundrisse and Capital. We then briefly discuss some of the implications of our analysis for understanding "fetishism" and "objectification."

Click here to order a copy from the author.