From: Howard Engelskirchen (howarde@TWCNY.RR.COM)
Date: Wed Oct 01 2003 - 02:57:35 EDT
Kevin's assertion that Marx's theory of value lacked a mechanism or philosophical basis underscores how deeply readings of Marx have been obscured by the omnipresence of positivist philosophies of science. Happily those approaches are no longer tenable and one of the important contributions of scientific realism to the study of social life has been to open space for an appreciation of Marx's naturalism and of the foundation his achievement offers social theory. A good part of what is required to get a sense of how significantly Marx foreshadowed scientific realism is indeed metaphysics (in the philosopher's sense of ontology), but without any 'quasi' to qualify. Unfortunately I will be away from my computer for two weeks, so I will not be able to follow this up, but I will be delivering a paper in Amherst at Rethinking Marxism titled "The Real Definition of Value." My target is precisely the philosophical basis of value. For any interested I'd be happy to forward a draft for comment and critique -- in two weeks, that is. Briefly, Marx's "Notes on Wagner" makes explict the way in which his methodology prefigured scientific realism. In "Scientific Realism: How Science Tracks Truth," for example, Stathis Psillos recently wrote, "The determination of reference (and of meaning) of a term becomes, by and large, an issue which cannot be solved a priori by means of conceptual analysis, but is amenable to empirical investigation into the features of the world and of the natural kinds that populate it" (284). Today the materialist approaches that dominate science decisively reject axioms arrived at a priori and rely instead on empirical investigation and results determined a posteriori. This is exactly Marx's argument in "Notes on Wagner." He rejects the idea of value as an abstract concept that can be conceptually manipulated by splitting it up into, e.g., use value and exchange value. Wagner's method, he argues, "reminds one of the old chemists before the science of chemistry: as cooking butter, which is simply called butter in everyday life . . . has a soft consistency, they called chloride butter of zinc, butter of antimony, etc." The common name 'butter' comes to be applied to all manner of substances with a soft, malleable constistency. But to refer to the features compounds such as zinc chloride and antimony trichloride share with edible butter tells nothing about their nature or how they work. For that we need an understanding of their molecular structure and this knowledge is ultimately embedded in background chemical theories. Marx understood this and sought to reason about value in an analogous fashion. In effect he was looking to identify value as a natural (or, better, 'social') kind. For him this meant, as it means today, giving an account not of the manifest properties of a thing but of its kind constituting properties, the internal structure that makes it what it is. The concept of natural kinds has only recently begun to get the kind of attention it requires -- effectively people have assumed that natural kinds must be characterized by necessary and sufficient membership conditions, must be ahistorical, unchanging, independent of their environment, etc., and were to be understood in the context of scientific laws that were exceptionless and independent of location or historical circumstance so that they applied to all times and all places (all possible worlds). If that is what natural kinds must be, then obviously they have no applicability to social science. (And if science depends on identifying natural kinds then the study of social life can make no claim to science.) But recent work in the realist tradition shows that even assuming that there are things in the world that do have the characteristics just rehearsed, overall kinds are better understood as open textured, historically situated, relationally and historically defined, non-eternal and non-intrinsic constructions which are the product of methods that are socially and historically situated and irreducibly political. Then it becomes possible to talk of kinds not just in physics and chemistry, but in biology and social life as well. The point of attention to kinds is this: in both natural and social science we defer to the causal structures of the world. These are not social constructions -- or, to the extent they are, it is because we function as ordinary causal forces in the world: social relations, Marx emphasized, are material social relations. They are embedded in locations of space and physical circumstance and patterns of behavior not changed by just thinking differently about them. Identifying these structures is a matter of survival, or, less dramatically, being able to do what we do -- if induction and explanation are to frame generalizations to guide action, then we must accommodate our conceptual practices to the causal structures of nature and social life. In order to do this we need a vocabulary. That's the function of natural kind terms and their real definition. For example, if we want to explain how to make hydrogen chloride in a laboratory by heating sodium chloride with sulphuric acid then we need terms that refer to these things -- terms moreover situated in a body of theory that tells us what the nature is of the elements with which we work and how they behave. We need concepts of valency, chemical bonding and so forth. The method Marx describes in "Notes on Wagner," his last work of political economy, corresponds to this: he looks for causal structures in the social relations of laborers to nature and to each other (and not to a priori and axiomatic conclusions about their psychology) and he gives expression to those structures by terms that are embedded in a theory that tells us what kind of structures they are and how they tend to behave. At bottom, value refers to a historically specific social form, a generative mechanism, for the appropriation and distribution of labor to need -- as Marx pretty often makes explicit, and occasionally even philosophically so. Howard ----- Original Message ----- From: "Ian Wright" <ian_paul_wright@HOTMAIL.COM> To: <OPE-L@SUS.CSUCHICO.EDU> Sent: Tuesday, September 30, 2003 4:40 PM Subject: Re: [OPE-L] (OPE-L) Re: subjects and objects in capitalism > Without wishing to sound too dismissive, Kevin is making the classic > mistake of conflating use-value and exchange-value. Use-value > (which is of course a psychological relation between a mind and > an object of desire) is a condition for the possibility of the > emergence of exchange-value (an objective relation between > different concrete labours) in an economy. > > I think the problem arises from this: > > >The labor theory not only of Smith, but of Ricardo and Marx, lacked any > >mechanism or philosophical basis. > > Which is not the case, as the law of value is precisely the > *mechanism* by which subjective evaluations of the value > of goods become constrained by objective conditions not > under subjective control, namely the total available social > labour-time. > > I would sincerely recommend that Kevin reads my paper, > "Simulating the Law of Value", which explicates in great > casual detail how this mechanism operates in the case of a > simple commodity economy, and how subjective utility > evaluations coexist with objective determination of the > value of commodities by labour-time. > > _________________________________________________________________ > The new MSN 8: smart spam protection and 2 months FREE* > http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail >
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