From: Andrew Brown (Andrew@LUBS.LEEDS.AC.UK)
Date: Mon May 12 2003 - 06:47:18 EDT
Hello all, I argue (in my phd) that value is misconstrued by both critical realists and by that branch of value-form theory which might be termed 'Hegel-inspired systematic dialectics'. The main points are: - essentially missing from both Hegel-inspired systematic dialectics and from critical realism is an adequate grasp of labour in either its transhistorical or historical aspects. (I argue that Ilyenkov's materialist dialectics to provides such a grasp) - transhistorically, labour articulates the key aspects of nature and humanity. Labour is the prime moment of production and the form of labour actvity corresponds to the result of that activity, the product, such that the product is the passive resultant form, the embodiment indeed, of the former. Michael W's recent post exemplifies the sort of Hegel-inspired miscomprehension of labour that I argue against. Michael Eldred's contributions to OPEL, where labour has no centrality, seem to be a connected if extreme development of such a position. - turning to the historical form of labour in value, then this is where abstract labour becomes a 'substance'. The peculiarities of commodity relations and capital entail that labour stripped of all sensuousness takes independent effect as value. The key to grapsing this is: (i) to grasp that there *must* be a 'third thing', a material thing, constituting commodities as values, a necessity which stems from basic materialist premises in the context of the specific historical form of the commodity; (ii) to see that this thing can only be abstract labour, since labour time is the only material property of commodities not abstracted from in exchange (this cannot be grasped without recognition of products as embodiments of labour). Value is, precisely, congealed abstract socially necessary labour. Why 'congealed'? Why is abstract labour a 'substance'? Because abstract labour is labour stripped of all sensuousness. There is no natural materiality left in abstract labour. Hence the embodied abstract labour constituting value has no body in which it can be embodied! Instead, we have to say that this abstract labour itself has become a substance, a highly peculiar social substance, congealed abstract labour, pure and simple. This is peculiar enough to a materialist dialectician. It is no doubt unfathomable to anyone who does not recognise the crucial transhistorical features of labour, and hence cannot distinguish between what is transhistorical (embodied labour) and what is historical (abstract labour becoming a social substance). Whilst I can hardly defend much of this here, I do think it should be clear that neither critical realism nor Hegel-inspired systematic dialectics fully grasp Marx's own arguments such that the sort of approach indicated above is pretty much absent from the literature even though it follows Marx's own words pretty closely. On the one hand we have Hegel-inspired systematic dialecticians trying to construe a large part of Marx's essential position as metaphorical, and another large part as failing to break from clasical political economy sufficiently. On the other, we have critical realists who must try to interpret Marx's labour theory of value as a more or less plausible 'hypotheses', for 'testing', thereby strip away the claims to *necessity* that permeate Marx's own account of the move from exchange value to labor and value. None of this is to deny the many great advances made by both critical realism and Hegel-inspired systematic dialectics. Andy
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