From: Christopher Arthur (cjarthur@waitrose.com)
Date: Fri Jan 03 2003 - 12:33:26 EST
Michael in earlier mails foregrounded the term 'essence' but I think this is rather ambiguous and for Marxiam purposes needs setting in a post-hegelian context. Sometimes you use it as a synonym for 'what capitalism is'. This usage makes it a meta-category. It does not in itself imply the usual metaphysical category of explanation which would say capitalsim HAS an essence, say labor, distinct from its surface appearance. Hegel's Doctrine of essence is a sustained polemic against this sort of explanatory framework ending by reducing essence and appearance to interchangeable moments of Actuality, and arguing that 'what is' is known only in its Concept/Idea. >From this point of view your stuff about value being a groundless (measure?)-relation seems to imply it is a very 'thin' category, roughly on the level of Hegel's doctrine of Being. But in 8076 suddenly something like the metaphysical category appears when you praise marx who "digs deeper into the essence of social relations". And in 8229 a very unexplained notion appears, namely a 'structure of essence'. Is this the same notion as Tony Smith and Geert reuten? namely that the categories of essence are adequate to characterise capitalism because it lacks the self-determining harmony of the Concept? Or what do you mean? Chris A 17 Bristol Road, Brighton, BN2 1AP, England
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