Today's Education Guardian contains an article contrasting two new university library developments, Aberdeen, whose £55m "library for our sixth century". due to open in 2010, and the University of Central Lancashire, who have no new building to boast of, but an e-brary, as they call it, of a rather modest 30,000 e-texts at a cost of £25,000. They quote a UCLan criminology lecturer, Nick Currie, who believes there should be more books. Currie does not help his argument by saying, "if you think Marx shouldn't have wasted his time writing 20 volumes of Capital when he only had two or three ideas that could be summarised in a paragraph, then the internet is fine". Unfortunately for Currie, as every schoolboy, at least of my generation, knows, Marx only wrote three volumes of Capital, or four if you count Theories of Surplus Value, to wit, volume 1, the Process of Production of Capital, volume 2, the Process of Circulation of Capital and volume 3, the Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole. Neither can his error be excused by supposing that he was meant the complete works, for they, in the Lawrence and Wishart English edition, run to 50 volumes.
Technorati Tags: marx
