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Ajit Sinha <ajitsinha@lbsnaa.ernet.in> said, on 05/13/00 at 03:20 PM,
replying to Fred:
>>... there are many more
>> passages that could be presented in which Marx clearly states that the
>> commodity he starts with is the product of capitalist production.
>> Here is one more from "Notes on Wagner":
>>
>> "What I start out from is the simplest social form in which the
>> labor-product is presented in CONTEMPORARY SOCIETY."
>>
>> Marx did not analyze the commodity in Chapter 1 "independent of any
>> specific historical mode of production."
>Fred, the "simplest social form in which the labor-product is presented
>in CONTEMPORARY SOCIETY" is the relation between the buyer and a seller
>on equal footing. This relationship could exist independent of
>capital-labor production relation. To a large extent I simply don't
>understand what is the import of your question. As I have suggested that
>Marx's logical point of beginning the argument with commodity relation
>was to use it for analyzing the capital-labor relation as a relation
>between the seller of a commodity 'labor-power' and the buyer of the
>commodity the capitalist. My point has been that this strategy creates
>problem for Marx's problematic of exploitation. ...
"Contemporary society" IS a society with the capital--wage labor relation,
not a society in which the buyer and seller "COULD exist independent of
capital-labor production relation". Marx's passage is supportive of Fred
rather than Ajit.
Paul Z.
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