ABSTRACT
Every serious student of Marxism is aware of the distinction Karl Marx makes in the Preface to Capital, Volume 1 between Inquiry and Presentation, but on at least two other occasions he also mentions the important role that self-clarification plays in his work. One of the more regrettable side-effects of the new Preface can be seen in G. A. Cohen’s influential book, Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence, which relies heavily on this Preface, and the school of ‘Analytical Marxism’ that rose out of it. This chapter analyses the continuing importance of Marx’s dialectical method in how he understood capitalism, an importance that goes well beyond what one might take out of his explicit use of dialectics in Capital. Capitalism came up with a clever way of disguising the separation of wealth from the workers who produce it by paying them a ‘wage’ to do the same amount of work that their forbearers had been forced to do.
