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oops I meant unary predicate...
Just to take one more shot.
social labor is regulated through movements in commodity value as reflected
in so many physical units of the ordinary use value (think of it as so many
boxes of chocolate!) that however itself, as a category mistake, comes to
incarnate human labor.
In this way any one *thingly* commodity or *member* commodity comes to
represent, in yet another logical error, some real quantity of what however
is merely a *construct* or *equivalence class*--abstract labor, which
perhaps unless conceived as an expenditure of energy, shouldn't be real or
thingly enough to be counted at all. All this seems terribly
metaphysically ill-formed (constructs having thingly properties, things
having conceptual properties) though strangely parallel with Christian
ideas about abstract man.
Wasn't it something like this that Colletti was probing?
I would of course appreciate any clarification of what Marx himself sees
to the be the contradictions here. I don't know if these are dialectical
contradictions, or what would be gained by calling them such. But I do
think Colletti was on to them, and appreciated that Marx, the logic
chopper, was demonstrating how out of their philosophical depth the
economists were.
Yours, Rakesh
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