I liked Howard's post (it's nice - but can it replace capitalism ...?) Conscious that it may well start hares in the pursuit of which I may well not find time to join, I just make a quick response to his final query: >... And what is the > ontological status of a pure form anyway?, e.g. from Nicola's post: > > >Suppose that money is not a commodity but > >> pure form > IMO, it means what it says: Money qua Money (i.e. that which is denoted by Money in the value-form reconstruction in thought of capitalism) has no necessary (to the reproduction of that theoretical object totality) content. Of course, a pure form in itself can have no ontological coherence. But it is not the existential absence of content, but the existential contingency of content that is denoted by the proposition that Money is pure form. I hope it is clear that I do not mean by this that there is nothing interesting to say, less abstractly, about whether accounting entries, cattle, coffee trees, bullion or electronic information are the better bearers of Money. or other such issues. btw, I do think that it is appropriate to feel existentially uneasy about living in an epoch driven by pure form, but that is an entirely appropriate reaction to living within capitalism. In response to Paul C.'s comments about the value-form approach: prediction is technologically important; but, I would submit, the insights generated and clarified by the value-form and a systematic dialectical interpretation/reconstruction of Marx(ism) are also important to the extent that they capture something about the nature of the bourgeois epoch. As to the barber-shop debate: I guess it is probably at least as fruitful to examine the nature of the abstract entities that theory cannot do without - particularly the real abstractions central to the value-form type approaches as compared to the abstract abstractions that are abstract statisitcal entities - as it is to enumerate undifferentiated abstract entities as any kind of guide to theory choice. But then, imo, political economy is not physics. comradely, Michael ____________________ Dr Michael Williams Business & Management Studies De Montfort University Block A (Business Studies Centre) (0.04) Polhill Campus Polhill Avenue Bedford MK41 9EA UK tel: +1234 793036 [Home: +23 80768641] fax: 0870 133 1147 mailto: michael@williamsmj.worldonline.co.uk http://www.mk.dmu.ac.uk/~mwilliam [This message may be in html, and any attachments may be in MSWord 2000. If you have difficulty reading either, please let me know.]
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Sat Jun 02 2001 - 00:00:06 EDT