From: Rakesh Bhandari (rakeshb@STANFORD.EDU)
Date: Fri Feb 06 2004 - 20:59:45 EST
Jerry wrote: > the point that I'm >making here (having to do with assumptions and 'givens') is a >methodological one related to the unfolding and ordering of the >analysis in a systematic dialectical presentation of the bourgeois mode >of production. (Jeez ... I'm beginning to sound like an amalgam of >Mike W and Tony S.). > But Marx's movement from the accidental to the expanded to the general form of value is not meant simply as a dialectical unfolding of ideas in an analysis; it is also a a practical dialectic. Exchange beginning in simple barter--the purely occassional exchange of this for that--did develop into systematized exchange, into buying and selling, which presupposes logically and historically an accepted universal form of value, distinct from and opposable to all particular exchange values, whatsoever. In a word, exchange begets--Money. At every point the movement of Marx's dialectical analysis (the inadequacies or incompleteness of the lower forms of value) reproduces (or claims to reproduce) the actual historical movement. Money did grow out of barter. Whether Hegel's dialectic is also historical as well as logical is another question of course. Jerry also wrote: >Yet, there is a systematic divergence of >individual values from market prices (diversity) that, in Marx's theory, >leads to the concept of prices of production (unity-in-diversity). Which leads me to ask in what way could Value be understood as the unity term between use value value and exchange value? Rakesh
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