[OPE-L:4705] Re: SV and the F of D

From: Andrew Brown (Andrew@lubs.leeds.ac.uk)
Date: Fri Dec 15 2000 - 04:57:00 EST


Gil writes:

> >  But the sense of the argument above is
> >plain:  dare to suggest that even a portion of Marx's argument is logically
> >suspect, and you are engaged in the sort of thinking that leads to the
> >Holocaust.
> >Gil Skillman

Then I'm very much afraid that Rakesh simply seems to confirm 
what Gil has said (see below). Note especially Rakesh's reference 
to 'manifestly spurious'. I wish it was manifest, I really do. But it 
certainly isn't to me at least. If it was I wouldn't have been wasting 
my time trying to work out what Marx was on about for so many 
years (and, presumably, Marx wouldn't have wasted so much of his 
time and energy writing Capital)

The basic congruity of Marx's 'vision' of Capital with my experience 
of the same does not entail the 'manifest spuriousness' of critical 
commentary on Marx's arguments. Nor does Rakesh's (at heart 
interesting and important) point re anti-semitism and 'derivitive 
forms' of capital. To the contrary, it is this congruity and 
significance that demands that critical commentary is taken 
seriously, and *rationally argued* against on a list such as this.

Andy


> 
> Gil, I just don't get what you are saying. Have you never met anyone 
> who finds  Marx's value theoretic critique of political economy, as a 
> systematization of the everyday ideas of agents caught in bourgeois 
> economy, the most powerful weapon ever created to do battle with the 
> representatives of a decaying bourgeois order? You obviously think 
> the whole of Marx's value theory is suspect. I react because you are 
> trying to take away on manifestly spurious grounds the conceptual 
> arsenal needed to rebel against and understand critically bourgeois 
> society--e.g., that since merchants' profit and banking interest are 
> primarily derived out of the surplus value produced in the circuit of 
> industrial capital in which the working class is directly exploited, 
> it is impossible to follow the Nazi claim that there is fundamental 
> distinction between predatory (Jewish) and productive (Aryan) 
> capital.  I consider you, Ajit and Steve class enemies just as you 
> all openly and proudly think of yourselves as freeing socialism from 
> its ridiculous charlatans and fundamentalist Marxist popes.
> 
> Rakesh
> 



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