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I thought I had sent this earlier. I hope it makes it through as an
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attached mail follows:
Dear Andrew,
Somewhere in your paper you criticized Lucio Colletti's abandoning of
Marxism as a science upon belated recognition that Marx indeed accepted
that dialectical contradictions were at work in bourgeois reality. You seem
to argue that a postivist philosophy of science undergirded this
abandonment.
1. What do you mean by positivism? In Peter Halfpenny's book, more than six
definitions are offered, and Colletti, quite keen about the historical
specificity of abstract labor, does not seem to demonstrate that putatively
condemnable positivistic obsession with eternal laws of nature.
2. What do you mean by dialectical contradiction? Examples of which would
be? That capital is the product of workers but variable capital is part of
total capital. Is that really contradictory? Or are the dialectical
contradictions the three peculiarities of the value form? As I have been
suggesting, category mistake may be more helpful here than dialectical
contradiction. I look forward to looking at the beginning of Ryle's the
Concept of the Mind when I get back.
3. If I remember correctly the last few chapters of Colletti's Marx and
Hegel book are quite brilliant. He shows that the sensuous, surpra sensuous
nature of commodities, the centaurs, the metaphysics and theology ( all
those things taken even by Marxist economists as mere rhetorical flourish)
are precisely Marx's most important point--the phantasmorgia of commodity
fetishism, as revealed by painstaking philosophical analysis, is at the
same Marx's critique of the money driven behavior understood as the apogee
of human rationality implicity and/or explicitly by the political
economists (the last few chapters of Maurice Godelier's Perspectives in
Marxist Anthropology are also quite fine in my opinion).
But I don't have my books with me, so again this is how I understand Marx's
argument
--value seems to those caught up in everday life to be a unatary predicate
of commodities though it is at least a second order predicate (I did not
get through logic as an undergrad)
--there is constant conflict between everyday understanding and
philosophical analysis about whether value is an intrinsic or relational
property, subject independent or relational or whether value is a property
or predicate (I am out of my philosophical depth here, and I think is
precisely Marx's critique of the political economists that they did not
understand the nonsense and contradictions of the commodity world, though
this critique seems to me to apply to most Marxist economists who simply
gloss over what Marx is trying to do as mere literary flourish, as Colletti
so brilliantly pointed out).
--money is simply metaphysically ill-formed. That is gold stands for or
represents (incarnates) human labor. But human labor seems to be a
construct, i.e., an abstraction, an idealization, a conceptual object which
is not really subject to change like actual things. Money is thus
metaphysically ill formed in that there is an attribution of conceptual
properties to a concrete thing and substantial properties (the properties
of gold) are attributed to a construct. In being both thing and construct,
money is metaphysically ill formed.
I think Colletti opened up questions like this. I don't remember Martin Jay
expressing much real appreciation in that breezy survey for the issues
which Colletti raised.
Riccardo and Chris A will doubtless have much more to say.
Yours, Rakesh
attached mail follows:
Dear Andrew,
Somewhere in your paper you criticized Lucio Colletti's abandoning of
Marxism as a science upon belated recognition that Marx indeed accepted
that dialectical contradictions were at work in bourgeois reality. You seem
to argue that a postivist philosophy of science undergirded this
abandonment.
1. What do you mean by positivism? In Peter Halfpenny's book, more than six
definitions are offered, and Colletti, quite keen about the historical
specificity of abstract labor, does not seem to demonstrate that putatively
condemnable positivistic obsession with eternal laws of nature.
2. What do you mean by dialectical contradiction? Examples of which would
be...That capital is the product of workers but variable capital is part of
total capital. Is that contradictory? Or are the dialectical contradictions
the three peculiarities of the value form? As I have been suggesting,
category mistake may be more helpful here than dialectical contradiction.
3. If I remember correctly the last few chapters of Colletti's Marx and
Hegel book are quite brilliant. He shows that the sensuous, surpra sensuous
nature of commodities, the centaurs, the metaphysics and theology ( all
those things taken even by Marxist economists as mere rhetorical flourish)
is precisely Marx's most important point--the phantasmorgia of commodity
fetishism, as revealed by painstaking philosophical analysis is at the same
Marx's critique of the money driven behavior understood as the apogee of
human rationality implicity and/or explicitly by the political economists.
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