From: Paul Zarembka (zarembka@BUFFALO.EDU)
Date: Wed Jun 02 2004 - 10:18:49 EDT
Howard Engelskirchen <howarde@TWCNY.RR.COM> said, on 06/02/04:
>Was water H20 in Ancient Greece?
>We are talking about continuity of scientific reference.
Howard, I'm learning from this dialogue. To continue, does the above mean 'value', for you, is like H20? If so, then, ...
>In Poverty of Philosophy Marx says that economic categories are the
>theoretical expression of the social relations of production , that they
>are the theoretical expression of the historical movement of production
>relations and if we want to know why a particular principle was manifested
>(or not) at a particular point in time we have to analyze the productive
>life of people at that point in time.
Are you claiming that 'value' was NOT an economic category for Marx? Yet, *Poverty of Philosophy* includes the following: "Economic categories are only the theoretical expressions, the abstractions of the social relations of production."
...
>Hindsight is exactly what is involved in saying the anatomy of a man is
>the key to the anatomy of an ape and there is nothing ahistorical in
>treating the evolution of understanding in this way.
I'm not so concerned with the "evolution of understanding", than with the applicablity of a concept generated within the capitalist mode of production ('value') for any other mode of production, ihncluding in Aristotle's time. I think we both agree 'value' as a concept was produced within capitalism.
>I'm sorry I missed this. Perhaps you can explain a little more fully.
>M-C-M' is the general formula for capital, not value. Do you collapse
>these two distinct forms of social relations?
I'll repeat what I wrote: I've thought that object of exchange is important and that, in M-C-M', expansion of the quantity of value (value is a scalar) is the object, while in C-M-C the object is to obtain a use-value that is lacking (a qualitative object). The latter is pretty close to the petty-bourgeois neoclassical world view, while the former goes to the core of capitalist social relations of production (including buying and selling of labor power, i.e., generalized commodity production). Value is reserved for M-C-M'.
>> [Paul, refering to 'value':]... In my classes I
>sometimes made it analogous to the theory of gravitation pull (you cannot
>see, feel, smell, or touch gravitation pull but it has proven extremely
>useful). And, a la Althusser, I could understand gravitation pull as a
>produced concept. Why not value as a produced concept. But I think this
>is far away from what you are arguing and perhaps is not consistent with
>Marx's own formulations on value. Marx seems to be arguing that the very
>fact that commodities exchange with a certain regularity suggests a
>'third' something behind commodiities, namely, value. Maybe. But is this
>a physical property? or a produced concept? If it is a physical property,
>why would it 'disappear' if the use-value is consumed, not exchanged?
> [Howard:]
>When you drop a stone, what pulls it to earth? A physical property? or a
>produced concept? The concept is a theoretical expression of your
>understanding of a physical power. ... I
>think reducing value to a 'third' behind commodities, while a significant
>part of theoretical analysis, if proposed as a definition of value offers
>an inadequate grasp of the power to which it refers.
Marx writes on his third page of Vol. 1: "The two things [being exchanged] must therefore be equal to a third, which in itself is neither the one nor the other. Each of them, so far as it is exchange-value, must therefore me reducible to this third". This passage is what I had in mind. Consider what comes next: "there is nothing left but what is common to them all: all are reduced to one and the sort of labor, human labor in the abstract".
Human labor in the abstract is pretty abstract, isn't it. We cannot see, touch, smell or feel it, can we? This reads to me as an abstraction, a theoretical category, a produced concept. Where am I wrong? It is NOT H20, as far as I can understand.
Paul
P.S. By the way, up to the last time I studied it, physicists could not exactly say what 'gravity' is, any more than they can say what an smelled 'odor' is? What IS the smell of a rose?
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