From: Dogan Goecmen (Dogangoecmen@AOL.COM)
Date: Fri Nov 17 2006 - 02:46:41 EST
Dear Paul, I thank you very much for your comments. Abstraction as a methodological device is not a idealist hangover Don't you prepare your lectures before you go out and actually lecture and don't you plan your lectures step by step before you put it into practice? It is essential to dialectic approach. It is from cognitive and epistemological point of view an absoluetly necessary criterion. It enables us to find out the distortion between essence and appearance or, if you like, general and particular aspects of the issue in question. It enables us to find out where to start and anticipate (oversee) the whole process and build (work) consciously. Without this abstraction we cannot find out that it can be otherwise than as it exists. In a classless society we have to build a houe in our heads (and building on a paper means not more than that) before we can put it into practice. In a classless society we will have architects and manuel workers too. But this is no longer a division of labour in its traditional (hierarchical) sense. Rather, it is cooperation between people who have different expertise. In capitalist society a manuel worker is nothing but a manuel worker and an architect is nothing but an architect. In cooperative society manuel worker will have the oppoartunity to become an architect (and understand his/her work) and an architect will have the opportunity to become a manuel worker (and understand his/her work). But in practice labour has to be always a concret labour. Thank you for your kind comments Dogan In einer eMail vom 16.11.2006 22:48:12 Westeuropäische Normalzeit schreibt wpc@DCS.GLA.AC.UK: I think, Dogan, that the possibility of our building a house in our head before we build it in reality is an idealist hangover in Marx. His section on the architect and the bee has for 30 years struck me as one of the least satisfactory in the whole of Das Kapital. One can have a general intention to build a house, but nobody builds it in their head, least of all an architect. An architect builds it on paper before building labourers build it out of bricks. The whole of marx’s analysis there abstracts from class relations, from the division of mental and manual labour, and from the interaction between mental processes and the material tools of mental labour – in the architects case, rulers pencils, paper etc. For a detailed elaboration of this critique see _http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~wpc/reports/infoworkmeaning.pdf_ (http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~wpc/reports/infoworkmeaning.pdf) By the way I have been reading Dogan’s book on Smith, have only got through first third so far, but it opens up an entire new window on Smith for me. I had never paid much attention to his Theory of Moral Sentiments before. ____________________________________ From: OPE-L [mailto:OPE-L@SUS.CSUCHICO.EDU] On Behalf Of Dogan Goecmen Sent: 16 November 2006 15:05 To: OPE-L@SUS.CSUCHICO.EDU Subject: Re: [OPE-L] marx's conception of labour It refers to the projected aims of the concret work to be done. To build a house it must have been built in our heads and so on. Cheers Dogan In einer eMail vom 16.11.2006 15:00:36 Westeuropäische Normalzeit schreibt Gerald_A_Levy@MSN.COM: > I present first the general aspects of Marx’s concept of labour: > ontological, teleological and sociological. Dogan: What is the teleological aspect of Marx's concept of labour? In solidarity, Jerry
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