Re Alejandro's 4286:
>His arguments are essentially *historical* and thus derived from
>*observation*. Marx is not a Platonic thinker (as Walras, and contemporary
>economists are) but rather a kind of Aristotelian, concerned with the
>understanding of the "laws of motion" of real things.
Colletti argues for a comparison of Marx's critique of Hegel with
Aristotle's of Plato. An aside: Marx refers to the value substance
as pupating in exchange which as I suggested to Andrew has been
interpreted by many Marxists simply as the medium in which the value
substance is conserved. So the question I have tried to raise is
Marx's interest in the metaphors of developmental biology and natural
metamorphoses of which Aristotle's conceptualisations dominated late
into the modern period. The inspiration from biology should not only
be in terms of population genetic models like Lotka Volterra which
after all is a part of biology which resembles physics.
>
>Hence, the issue is that, given the features of this society ("private
>exchange"), the socially prevailing form of book-keeping is not worked out
>in terms of the real, observable expenditures of human labor power but in,
>at first sight, strange, weird, categories such as "prices" and "values",
>measured in something which everybody name as "money". In this society,
>individuals really think and *talk* about the things as if they have a
>seemingly *natural* and intrisic feature called, in general terms, "value",
>and they actually use "money" to measure this. Here, things are "valuable",
>individuals say. This is by no means a transhistorical feature, but
>something that appears in this specific human productive organism. In
>addition to this, it's easily verifiable that these "value/money" figures
>are the socially accepted and general way for accounting the things society
>produces and/or consumes in order to survive. There are no other figures
>socially available for this.
An excellent reading of Marx as, to draw again from Mattick Jr, the
author of perhaps the best thick description ever written of
bourgeois society.
> Marx gives us a theory about what is behind this socially
>spread category, about what is the meaning of this *measuring practice* in
>which, regarding the material reproduction, everybody is in fact involved.
Yes. Marx's analysis of the 3 peculiarities of the value form is just
this: an acute, brilliantly ironic analysis of the bizareness of the
way we go about measuring and allocating our social labor time. It
has to be understood as you suggest in the context of anthropological
comparison. Not all societies have had such wierd practices.
>So, Marx "as an economist" is not pair of people such Walras and the like,
>who are model builders, concerned with ideal, *imaginary* theoretical
>entities whose properties have to be tested only logically or
>mathematically. Problems concerning such people are e.g.: The theoretical
>entity which, in my notation, I call "market", is it in equilibrium? Is
>this equilibrium stable? Or: Can I produce a model of capitalism with one
>premise less than other models presented by morally depreciated
>researchers? Or: The theoretical self-reproducing entity which in my
>notation I call "capitalism" (but, changing notation, can be a beehive), is
>it viable if its physical surplus product = 0? etc.
But of course this wierd discourse is also part and parcel of the
critical anthropologist's investigation of the workings of this
strange society.
Comradely, Rakesh
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