Re: (OPE-L) Ajit's paper

From: Rakesh Bhandari (rakeshb@STANFORD.EDU)
Date: Tue Jun 01 2004 - 19:42:49 EDT


At 9:55 AM -0400 6/1/04, Paul Zarembka wrote:
>Rakesh Bhandari <rakeshb@STANFORD.EDU> said, on 06/01/04:
>
>>How is Marx's theory of value to be
>>verified or confirmed? How is the retroduction (Bhaskar) to value
>>relations to be validated? But Marx already answered that. He not only
>>deduced that value relations had to be expresed through exchange value and
>>that he therefore had to work out the mediations of that expression, he
>>was also able to explain the laws of motion on the basis of his mediated
>>theory of value.  ...
>
>>Marx's deduction is sounder than Bohm Bawerk's (only if there is a common
>>substance is it likely that exchange ratios would have some stability;
>>general use value is not a good candidate on simple logical grounds as
>>abstract labor--see Hilferding, Boudin, William J Blake, Carchedi); Marx's
>>deduction is retroactively validated (Postone) by the real relations that
>>he able to lay bare on the basis thereof. Which includes intertemporal
>>change in exchange ratios, as Shaikh and others have argued.
>
>>   So the answer to my questions: the same way that Eddington confirmed
>>Einstein. Marx is validated by the real tendencies that he was able to
>>explain and predict--concentration, centralization, general crises,
>>structural limits to working class advance, eventual working class
>>retrogression, the breakdown of capitalist fraternity. Wassily Leontief
>>realized the towering superiority of Marx over all rivals.
>
>Rakesh,
>
>You are dropping names, but not answering Ajit's question what is 'value'.

I have and did speak to the questions that Ajit has been putting to
me. But I am glad that you have been following our voluminious
correspondence.


>
>Anyway, you claim a lot for Karl;

oh you haven't heard the first of it.



>  just what we always needed to be certain our revolution was just,
>true and the only possible one.


Justifying Marx's value theory in terms of Bhaskarian retroduction
hardly gives it ineluctability.

>   Actually we don't even need this list for Karl has answered all
>our questions.

I think you are jumping to conclusions.


>  Jerry, please close the list and get on with the revolution
>(perhaps starting by getting rid of "Chavez's authoritarian regime",
>quickly followed by a general uprising in Latin America under the
>banner of the "towering superiority of Marx") .

It just does not seem to me that you are speaking to what I actually write.

Rakesh

>Paul Z.
>
>*************************************************************************
>Vol.21-Neoliberalism in Crisis, Accumulation, and Rosa Luxemburg's Legacy
>RESEARCH IN POLITICAL ECONOMY, Zarembka/Soederberg, eds, Elsevier Science
>********************** http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/PZarembka


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