Dear Jerry, It seems you are inviting me to relight some well known arguments. Well at the moment I can say only this: The two articles in the BCSE on Productive Labour, to which I referred, arose from concern that articles (like that of I Gough's in the New Left Review to which it was a response) didn't deal with the question of 'services' , focusing on production and apparently tying this to 'material' production, and omitting the issues of Health care and education of the working class by the 'welfare state'. The articles were published, more to my surprise than anything else since I was expecting some edit.com. response with the first at least. The result was, that my uneducated enquiries caused a discussion in 1973 involving Gough and Harrison .Then I. Gough in 1975 ( with J. Harrison) suggested abandoning the distinction between productive and unproductive labour! In the event an article was finally written by Peter Howell , in 'Revolutionary Communist No3/4 in 1975 that TO THIS DAY, I take to be a fundamental statement and brilliant explanation, from a Marxist standpoint, of the issue. (4000 copies + 1000 reprints of the journal were sold, mostly in Britain. It is a shame that it is unknown to so many younger Marxists.) As you know, in the same copy of that journal David Yaffe and I tackled the question of the Post War Boom and Inflation, in which the financial issues in particular were tackled in a way which, I would say, has not been bettered. This does not mean that we could not have expanded greatly on the ideas developed, but one has to consider the reader, the vehicle and the purpose at the time. SO no regrets at all! It is I think necessary to update the whole thing, 25 years of experience, and expand it to tackle concrete reality even more thoroughly. I remain a 'fundamentalist' or 'orthodox' Marxist, viewing Mattick, Grossman, Rosdolsky as key -- although I must stress that I had read NONE of them until after RC3/4, and Grossman only when available in the truncated form in English quite recently! (Could someone please translate the whole book!) I judge them by what Marx and Engels wrote. Maybe this is not quite the response you wanted/ expected, but it is all I can say for the moment . All the best Paul Blk -----Original Message----- From: Jerry Levy <jerry_levy@usa.net> To: ope-l@galaxy.csuchico.edu <ope-l@galaxy.csuchico.edu> Date: 29 November 2000 15:23 Subject: [OPE-L:4581] reflections on prior publications >Part of Paul Bullock's included the following: > >> When I was very young, in the 70's, I contributed 2 articles to the >> then newish Bulletin of the Conference of Socialist Economists. ... >> (later Capital and Class). I then wrote for ' Revolutionary >> Communist ', the then Theoretical Journal of the Revolutionary >> Communist Group here in Britain... instead of submitting my PhD...... >> also eg an article for a Japanese left journal on Racism in Britain. > >None of us are very young anymore -- in fact, some listmembers probably >weren't even born when you wrote those _BCSE_ et. al. articles. With age >often comes new perspective (in some instances quite literally, as in the >case of my reading glasses). I wonder therefore: what do you think of those >articles now? If you were going to write again on those subjects now, what >(if any) significant revisions would there be? > >While we're on this thread, does anyone else want to take this opportunity to >reflect on her/his prior publications? Has the passage of time changed any of >your perspectives on the content of prior publications? > >I would like to think that none of us are so old that we can't re-think and >challenge our prior conceptions .... > >In solidarity, Jerry > > > >____________________________________________________________________ >Get free email and a permanent address at http://www.netaddress.com/?N=1 > >
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