From: Rakesh Bhandari (bhandari@BERKELEY.EDU)
Date: Sat Apr 28 2007 - 12:36:57 EDT
> Fred writes: >"Detour" suggests something temporary and >inessential. Isn't that what you want to suggest, that the detour is in fact not necessary? That it temporary and inessential? Marx's point of course is that the sociality of our labor need not be established ex post facto in the mediated value form but could be established ex ante. Marx is not arguing for the elimination of mediations (it's hard to imagine that he does not accept some aspects of Hegel's critique of immediacy), only against the temporal deferment of the establishing of the sociality of labor. For this reason, detour may well be a superior translation than mediated which does not suggest temporal deferment. As for commodity owners, I think of purchases at Home Depot. One buys building materials not from a commodity owner but from a check out machine. One scans the purchased items and then one's credit card. I face the machine, not the commodity owner or his human proxy; the machine recognizes not me as a living affectual human being but a credit card. I may as well be another machine. Commodity exchangers have only a shadowy existence or ghostly presence in the exchange realm of the economy on which economic theory focuses. The things which do exchange are simply center stage. Can there be a drama of things? There have in fact been many dramatic histories organized around commodities, things. Isn't that strange, asks Bruce Robbins http://www.columbia.edu/~bwr2001/papers/commodity.pdf One of Marx's great accomplishments was that in his chapters on the production of surplus values he was able to pitch out of the depersonalized orbit of economic theory into the human needs of people. No Ricardo, Walrasian, neo Ricardian, or neo classical economist has ever kept so close to the ground of the living needs of workers. Rakesh
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