From: OPE-L Administrator (ope-admin@ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu)
Date: Wed Apr 14 2004 - 13:15:52 EDT
----- Original Message ----- From: "Jur Bendien" <bendien88@lycos.com> Sent: Wednesday, April 14, 2004 4:13 PM Subject: Papers Hi Jerry, Haha... The papers I mentioned haven't been written yet, they just exist in my head - it was partly a satirical joke, although I do aim to write them (I doubt however that I could get a paper published with a title such as "Rescuing Marx from Marxist self-activity"). As long as I have been interested in Marx I have noticed numerous papers which are titled "Towards an analysis of..." without really making the analysis itself. This is a kind of writing which I want to stay away from - I think that either I should briefly suggest how I think an analysis could be made, or else make the analysis myself, but the idea of claiming academic credit for a paper which suggests an analysis but doesn't make it, is something I don't really believe in. I might as well just refer to papers I haven't written yet... as I did in my previous mail to you. In point of fact, I have not written up about two dozen texts because my life got derailed and my attempts to put it back on the track weren't very successful yet for various reasons (you can have too many people meddling with you so that you cannot make good decisions anymore - I've often ended up feeling like a rat in a Skinner box and that is not conducive to constructively finishing my research projects). I have only done a rough draft of an essay on the transformation problem, which I posted on Marxmail (which ought really to be a book, since, to correct the mistaken interpretations of Marx's modelling of the transformation of values into prices of production requires the completion of Marx's theory in regard to such topics as capitalist competition and price theory; I personally very much regret that Marx did not make a more explicit analysis of the concept of price itself, since, if he had done that, then there would have been a lot less fuss about value theory). You might argue that mentioning papers I haven't even completed yet is a bit fraudulent of me to do, but think of this way: in contemporary capitalism, which features a spectacular growth of what Marx called "fictitious capital" and is driven increasingly by gambles by people in "futures economics" which is said to have a "hyper-reality" - in which wealth in the present is founded upon claims to future wealth and the displacement of costs incurred by the consumption of that wealth to the future and to others elsewhere - people are constantly claiming credit for things they don't in truth possess, or haven't really created. But although this rationalisation of life today is based on projections into the past or into the future, nobody calls them "frauds" however; it seems to have become a perfectly acceptable practice. So if I imply I can write those papers, refer to them and claim that they will exist in the future, I am doing nothing wrong... or am I ? I leave it to the learned scholars to adjudicate (I am not at present attached to any scholarly institution - but there are actually scholarly institutions nowadays which are speculating in hedge funds). Certainly my purpose, apart from a bit of humor, is not to deceive or pretend anything. Although I am very interested in Marx from the point of view of social science, I personally reject the very idea of "Marxism", because this transforms Marx's critical-scientific and philosophical thought into an all-encompassing ideological system or cosmology, which stifles individuality and innovation and can lead people to try an impose ideological or political systems on others which disrespect or violate the real natures of those people. So I think you can be a socialist or communist etc. but being a "Marxist" typically causes attempts to reconcile the irreconcilable, and a form of thinking which is no different from religion, except that religious people normally exhibit healthier forms of association. I accept though that this is a minority viewpoint and that there are many self-styled "Marxists" who do perfectly good research or pursue a successful politics with honorable motives. As regards value-form theory, I think it offers some important insights but really I don't think it reflects what Marx really intended. Value-form theory really suggests to me an inability to apply Marx's research method and that it "Hegelianises" Marx's method in an erroneous, idealist way. Marx suggested that inquiry must proceed both through an empirical analysis of the facts and through criticism of the interpretation of the facts by economists and social theorists. It was a question of discovering the dialectics in the empirical material and in the evolution of interpretations of that empirical material. Only then could the subjectmatter be dialectically represented. However, what the value-form theorists try to do is to derive and develop concepts and analyses from Marx's value theory in a way which only provides a social phenomenology. The result is that either the empirical analysis doesn't conform to Marx's concepts, or that theorising is done which has no empirical content. But that just suggests that Marx's theory cannot be applied to real experience. Marx makes it absolutely clear towards the end of Capital Volume 3 that he thinks that, while he aims to examine capitalist conditions in their "ideal average", the deviation of labour-values from output prices just isn't all that great, and the empirical tests of this claim suggest that Marx was correct in this. But obviously output prices are not the only prices there are, and in examining the cost structure of production we must reckon with the fact that relative prices of outputs are influenced by prices of assets outside of the sphere of production; and we also have to acknowledge the effects of monopolisation of markets (blocking price-competition) on price structures. But I don't really think that affects the validity of Marx's own argument. I hope to return to this topic at a future date. Best regards Jurriaan
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