Treating Capital as a complete theory contradicts Marx’s own premise of continuous development.

Evidence

There is a view that everything that Marxism needs is already there in Capital : and that, if you stare hard enough at it, it will—like the hidden books of the Bible—yield up all its secrets, a theory of everything. I don’t subscribe to this thesis in its literal form. Apart from anything else, it denies one of the central premises of Capital— that the capitalist mode of production is constantly developing, and this in turn requires a continuous labor of theoretical development and clarification. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 475

Categorization

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

• SEED: An essay angle: ‘There is no royal road to science’ — how the insistence that a founding text contains everything is itself anti-Marxist, applicable to economics orthodoxy generally.

Related

• Marx’s theory must be continuously developed because capitalism constantly changes. (similarity 0.88)
• Capital is neither a pure theory nor a national history but something else. (similarity 0.85)
• Marx concluded capitalism was the only mode of production he could adequately theorize. (similarity 0.82)
• Capital cannot yield all of Marxism without further theoretical development because capitalism constantly develops (similarity 0.80)
• Ideology-focused readings of Marx long obscured his theory of the state (similarity 0.80)
• Reading Capital catalyzed the theoretical revolution in Marxist social science. (similarity 0.79)
• Capitalism depends on a noncapitalist world whose possession is imperialism’s core project (similarity 0.79)
• Capitalism is a symptom of something deeper and unnameable in Western civilization (similarity 0.79)
• Marx’s study of capital itself dissolved the identity theory of correspondence (similarity 0.78)
• Marx explains capital better than class and class contradiction is not master key (similarity 0.78)