Allin Cottrell wrote: > On Wed, 23 May 2001, Rakesh Narpat Bhandari wrote: > > > >If you believe that commodities can be resolved into labour and > > >labour alone, then you believe in magic. > > > > But Steve no one is saying that; of course there will remain some > > natural residue which is not objectified labor. Marx never said > > otherwise. In fact in both Capital 1 and the the Critique of the > > Gotha Programme he emphasized that wealth is the product of both > > labor and nature...as you surely know > > Agreed. The non-labour residue is composed of the materials supplied > gratis by nature, which are crucial to a commodity's use-value but > have no bearing on its value. > > Allin. ____________________________ Allin, the point here is not about "materials supplied gratis by nature". That is always a part of production process. The commodity residue is about the residue that will always remain of the *produced means of production*. It ultimately strikes at the *originary* method of reasoning, that is, the essence of something could be understood by reducing it to its origin. The commodity residue argument is showing that this is simply not true. If you want to understand *capitalist production* or the nature of production in capitalism, you simply cannot go back to the imaginary origin of production with the imaginary first man/woman who had to produce something without any aid of produced means of production. Once you begin with capitalist production, where the class of capitalist exists only on the basis of control over the produced means of production, then there is no logical way of reducing this state of affair to the imaginary state of affair where no produced means of production existed. I think this is a serious methodological issue, which the Hegelian Marxists are dealing with by simply closing their eyes to. Cheers, ajit sinha
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