re 4717 >At 12:44 18-12-00 +0000, Paul Cockshott wrote: >>Why should we be worried about Marx following on from Ricardo? >>The differences between them are relatively minor when compared to >>the differences between the two of them and most other economists. > >Of course this depends on what you consider most important in Marx. If that >would be the awareness of value-form and its impact, the differences >between Ricardo and Marx are much greater than that between Marx and e.g. >Keynes. >>From that same perspective of value-form there is reason to be worried >precisely because Marx *also* to considerable extent indeed followed >Ricardo. His break from Classical Political Economy was incomplete (which >inevitably is the fate of all "breakers"). >Rounding this, even if Keynes, in contradistinction to Ricardo, was aware >of the value-form of capitalism, Ricardo and Keynes shared a committment to >capitalism. Because Keynes was aware of the VF his is a more subtle. > >Geert Reuten > >˙WPC Because Ricardo's categories of value are the expression--if one sided--of concrete reality, namely the valorization process, they are taken over by Marx in their basic principles and developed further. However, at the same time he modifies them by complementing their exclusively abstract value character with the material aspect, and elaborates their dual character. Marx's critique of Ricardo's categories of value, and the changes he made, closely resemble Marx's critique and transformation of Hegel's dialectic. Both exhibit the same basic feature, being directed agains tthe abstract and final character shared by Ricardo's categories of value and Hegel's dialectic, because each of these abstracts from 'real characteristic form.' In his critique of Hegel's dialectic Marx compares, in characteristic fashion, the logic with which Hegel begins the Encylopaedia, with money and value: it is the logic of 'money of the spirit' and the 'conceptual value' of people and of nature, because it is 'utterly indifferent to all real forms' and has become 'abstract thought, abstracting from nature and real people.' This is similar to the way in money represents the 'least real' form of capital, and how capital has reached the pure fetishistic form in interest bearing capital, in which all the different forms are obliterated, and it exists as indepedent exchange value. This crucial philosophical position is also brought into play by Marx within political economy: the abstract study of value obscures the 'real forms', the qualitative content of the concrete labor process, which expresses the specific differentiating features of the capitalist mode of production... [For example] what then characterises manufacture and machino facture, large scale industry as two different phases of capitalist production? Both have a capitalist character, both are are based on wage labour, both are governed by the search for profit. However since the technical labor process is completely different in each, manufacture represents a productive mechanism whose organs are human beings, in contrast to which is modern large scale industry is based 0n machines. this differences serves to distinguish the different phases of capitalism. The example example of the derivation of these objective tendencies of capital from the analysis of the concrete labour process and its instruments--machinery--is intended to illustrate the key distinction between Marx and other theoretical tendencies in the study of economic processes; additional consequences for the problem of crises and dynamics arise from this method of study. HG
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