Re: [OPE-L] on the political economy of the working class

From: Rakesh Bhandari (bhandari@BERKELEY.EDU)
Date: Mon Apr 11 2005 - 11:02:07 EDT


At 12:24 AM -0400 4/11/05, michael a. lebowitz wrote:
>
>Rather than dismissing the Inaugural Address as 'a propaganda text',
>I think that if you are going to talk about these matters, you
>should demonstrate your point that Capital is a critique of all
>political economy and not of simply the political economy of capital.

What do we mean by critique? If by we critique  we mean something
like the Kantian transcendental analytic, then Marx is interested to
determine the conditions of possibility of political economy as such
(see Michel Henry). What are the conditions that make possible  the
impossible equation of xcommodityA=ycommodityB?  Or perhaps critique
should be understood as the delimitation of the domain under which
concepts have some, perhaps practical validity (see Mattick jr,Gideon
Freudenthal)? If such questions can be sensibly formulated and shown
to have animated Marx's scientific work, then it does seem that it
would be misleading to say that Marx is simply advancing a kind of
political economy.
Rakesh


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