From: Howard Engelskirchen (howarde@TWCNY.RR.COM)
Date: Sat Dec 31 2005 - 01:39:09 EST
In this post I resopnd to Antonio's points in his post of 12/25 about definition. Antonio offers a 'minimalist' definition of a commodity as something produced by someone for exchange. I recognize this is informal, but it works for the point that there can be communist commodities, so perhaps it is worth emphasizing that as stated it is too minimalist. As Engels makes clear in the last paragraph to section 1 of Capital (and Marx, e.g. in the Kugelmann letter), a commodity must be offered for *private* exchange. This actually pushes the question of definition back a step, of course, but at some point we're going to want to be precise about what kind of social structures underly and give rise to exchange. Anyway, if adding "private" to the definition is not to defeat the idea of communism with commodities, then this must be because communism is consistent with private exchange. (I haven't read Resnick and Wolff's book on the Soviet Union -- I hope I can do so soon, but I can't turn to it now, so I will have to rely on your reports of it, Antonio.) Also problematic is what place definition ought to have in social theory. Antonio writes: "So it seems to me that your difficulty here is not with the matter of a consistent definition of a commodity. You have one and they have another . . . ." But how is this difference to be resolved? Resnick and Wolff write in Knowledge and Class (p.32), "It is not sensible in and for Marxist theory, to imagine or seek after any absolute criteria of an absolute truth. Truths are intra-theoretic rather than intertheoretic; they are in a very particular sense, relative to the theories in which they are constructed." If I read this right this means there isn't any argument at all because we're just talking past one another. They have their truth and I have mine and that's that. But that can't be right. I agree truth claims are relative to the theories in which they are constructed, but their truth depends on the way the world is, not the theories. We want to use definition in science not to decide how we shall use words, but in an effort to pick out causally potent features of the world so that we can accommodate our practice to them. We try to give an account of how they persist as what they are and how they behave so we can take the steps materially required to transform them. The fact that our interpretations are always a product of our understandings and that these always reflect difference of standpoint, etc., by no means makes the things understood standpoint malleable. The neo-cons, I recall, had the idea that reality in Iraq was up to them to define. Perhaps I have oversimplified. I for one would welcome a much broader discussion of postmodern materialism across the range of issues presented on the list. Thanks, Howard
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