From: Ian Wright (ian_paul_wright@HOTMAIL.COM)
Date: Thu May 22 2003 - 03:35:42 EDT
Hello Andy, >However, I would be delighted if, in fact, the problem is purely >expositional and if therefore Paul (or indeed yourself) could phrase >his argument in such a way as I could make sense of. Well let me try and say some things that make sense to me, which I think may help bridge the gap. Some of this is `thinking aloud', so these are by no means finished thoughts, and brevity requires missing out lots of important detail. Humans make abstractions all the time: we are always identifying common properties of things and classifying them into abstract and useful kinds. For example, bananas, apples and pears are all types of fruit. I'd like to keep this assertion purely at the commonsense level, because not only is it obvious, but a philosophical analysis of this fact would only divert us. The difficulty with the concept of "abstract labour" derives from the fact that it isn't us that makes the abstraction from particular instances of concrete labour, but the economic system itself. But the idea of a social system supporting and using an abstract representation is initially a strange one. It becomes much less strange if you adopt the point of view of philosophical naturalism with regard to mind and matter. By this I mean that kinds of minds are kinds of matter, and in consequence there isn't a sharp distinction between things able to support abstractions and those that cannot. This does not imply that human minds do not have unique capabilities, as of course they do. An example of a simple form of matter able to support a representation is the thermostat. The position of its bi-metallic strip represents, in an impoverished sense, the temperature of the room. In fact, all kinds of control systems (in the sense of engineering control theory) have this property that components refer to aspects of the subsystem they control. The economic system is a control system, in all senses of the word, which just so happens to function through our actions. It is much more complex than the lowly thermostat, but much less complex than the human mind. It represents our concrete labours as abstract labour in the form of money. Abstract labour is its concept, money is its representation, and concrete labour is what it controls. To fully understand how the economic system controls human labour requires theory, which is of course political economy, and I take Paul's discussion of conservative systems in that context. You use the term "substance" in a technical Spinozian sense, but unfortunately the term has commonsense interpretations that are counter-intuitive. It is confusing that something "abstract" has a "substance". I think this is why Paul dismissed the notion. However, I think you are onto something important when you emphasise that "abstract labour" isn't a pure abstraction, as perhaps some value-form theorists may claim, but in fact has "substance", i.e. has a material, not just abstract, ontological status. I agree, but would put the matter slightly differently: "abstract labour" is a representation within capitalism that refers to the common properties of "concrete labour", and there are systematic causal relationships between the two. Other authors use the term "measurement" in this context, and I think that is adequate, except that it neglects the control side. For you, the expression "purely quantitative" set alarm bells ringing because this phrase fails to mention what the quantity counts. Are we getting anywhere? -Ian. _________________________________________________________________ MSN 8 helps eliminate e-mail viruses. Get 2 months FREE*. http://join.msn.com/?page=features/virus
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