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freed wrote
>
> I agree with Jerry in 2697 we need to distinguish between different levels
> of understanding Marx. As I have said before, I think it is possible to
> understand a lot about Marx's theory without reading Hegel. But I also
> nonetheless think that Marx's theory is based in part on Hegel's logic
> (such aspects as totality, necessary connections, essence-appearance,
> inversion, mediation, subject, posit the presuppositions,
> etc.).
I want to ask you whether you seriously believe in the positing of
presuppositions?
What on earth does this mean for a logical system?
Logics are now understood to be formal systems characterised by an alphabet
and a set of rewrite rules. These rewrite rules can be alternatively called
axioms or presuppositions. For instance in arithmetic we have the law
of double negation -(-x)=x and in Boolean logic the equivalent not(not x)
=x,
but what does it mean to posit the presuppositions. At most it can involve
applying other rewrite rules in a circle to return to the first one, but
this
is hardly a very interesting application.
In terms not of logic but of the study of the economy what you seem to be
referring to is the means by which we think of self reproducing systems -
how
the capitalist mode of production reproduces itself as an economic form.
But this is a common problem to other sciences relating to questions like
homeostasis in cells or the propagation of solitons, or at a simpler level
the
analysis of harmonic motion. None of these problems have depended on
Hegel for an understanding, so why should Hegel be regarded as necessary
for a study of self reproducing systems?
Metaphors from his Hegelian education may have influenced Marx, but Newton
was influenced by alchemy and a study of the latter is no longer taken as
crucial
to an understanding of mechanics.
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