Porque Marx não acabou o Capital?

Why Didn’t Marx Finish Capital?, por Ludo Cuyvers, no Marxist Sociology Blog:

Today, almost every problem that has remained unsolved in Capital, has been cited as a reason why the book remained unfinished. However, it is difficult to see how such issues could have led Marx to reconsider his earlier manuscript, or abandon further attempts to elaborate on their solution, if he found Engels able to “make something” of them? (...)

For instance, against Stedman Jones’s argument that, over the years, Marx was forced to reconsider his former deterministic historical materialism, which was evident from hisPreface of Zur Kritik, it can be argued that while drafting the Grundrisse – before Volume 1 of Capital was published – Marx indicated discomfort with such determinism. And about the so-called transformation problem of labor values or the law of the falling rate of profit, it can be said that although Marx continued to wrestle with both issues, the solutions he outlined, though imperfect, do not provide sufficient reason for these imperfections to be seen as at the basis of the unfinished nature of his manuscripts. As Volume 3 of Capital shows his rate of profit formula is based on labor values and he repeatedly attempted, but unsuccessfully, to find out the impact on the rate of profit of increasing labor productivity.

Among the substantive problems of Capital, a more serious candidate is Marx’s failure to reconcile, based on his schemes of reproduction, expanded reproduction with steady economic expansion. Marx’s mathematical manuscripts show a clear intention to apply and deepen the dialectic materialist method and the study of dialectic development processes using mathematics.

But apart from this intention, there is evidence that at least part of Marx’s notes on calculus and differential equations were related to the problem of how “to determine mathematically the principal laws governing crises”, as he wrote in 1873 in a letter to Engels. However, the algebra of non-negative matrices that he needed to solve it, did not exist yet. In fact, the prospects of an acceptable solution for Marx’s theoretical and mathematical problem of an expanding economy became only sufficiently promising with John von Neumann’s seminal work during the 1930s, and with that of Oskar Langein the 1950s.

Eu até acho que, quando se meteu na parte da transformação dos valores em preços, Marx andou por perto de abandonar a teoria do valor-trabalho sem perceber.