From: Fred B. Moseley (fmoseley@mtholyoke.edu)
Date: Sun Sep 29 2002 - 23:40:41 EDT
On Sat, 28 Sep 2002 gskillman@wesleyan.edu wrote: > Hi Fred, As usual, a related point came to me on my drive home. You will soon need a tape recorder to record your thoughts on your drives home. > You wrote > > > I think this interpretation is in keeping with Marx's general > > philosophical method of what Ilyenkov calls "materialist dialectics" , > > according to which Marx's theory is based on "real" or > > "concrete" abstractions, rather than purely logical or mental > > abstractions. The concepts in Marx's theory, including the key concepts > > of capital and the circulation of capital, are abstracted from the real > > capitalist economy, and therefore refer to actual phenomena in the real > > capitalist economy. They are not purely theoretical concepts that have > > been invented out of our heads. > > Let's grant that one's theory of capitalism should be grounded as > concretely as possible in "actual phenomena in the real capitalist economy." > As Marx recognizes in K.I Ch. I, that would mean starting with the > "immense collection of commodities" that constitutes capitalist wealth, > along with their respective prices. > > The *aggregate" concepts denoted by M, C, and V, on the other hand, are > "purely...mental abstractions" that therefore "have been invented out of our > heads"--you can't see them or touch them, and they don't immediately bear on > the details of any commodity transaction, Gil, I argue that M, C, and V (and I would add most importantly S) are defined in terms of quantities of money-capital in circulation in the real capitalist economy as a whole, and therefore are in principle observable. In a very rough way, these monetary variables refer to the quantities of money-capital on the accounting books of capitalist enterprises (a point which Duncan Foley has emphasized in his work). In a theoretically more rigorous way, these moneatary variables can be estimated by judicial use of the monetary quantities in the US NIPAs (as I and Shaikh and others have attempted to do). It seems to me that you, like so many others, are defining these variables in terms of labor-values (even M?). I would agree that quantities of socially-necessary labor-time are not in principle observable. But M, C, V, and S refer to quantities of money-capital, which are observable. > but if you think you have a good > theoretical reason for doing so, you could perform the purely mental > operation of calculating these aggregates by constructing them from their > concrete foundations in capitalist reality--that is, from sums of money > given by purchases of commodities at their respective prices. Indeed, if > we are to uphold Ilyenkov's methodological precepts, we must *necessarily* > proceed in this way. So rather than merely positing C and V as pure > abstractions, it would seem more in keeping with materialist dialectics > to construct them explicitly from prices and quantities--since this must be > done in practice in any case if one is to actually calculate these magnitudes > for a real capitalist economy. By "calculate" and "construct" here, do you mean estimate or theoretically determine? Comradely, Fred
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