Re: [OPE] Marx's Method

Sorry all for the misfire.

I'd like to add a question to the quote Dogan provides. This is directed to value form theorists and others who argue that money and exchange existed before capitalism but that value as such requires capitalist relations of production -- how could the human mind work for more than 2000 years to get to the bottom of something that still lay in the womb of the future?

We've discussed this before of course and my question is rhetorical. But Dogan's quote is particularly persuasive evidence that Marx did think value existed in the precapitalist social formations. I don't recall it having been discussed in this connection. I would be interested in interpretations that read this consistent with the argument that value in Marx's analysis requires capitalist social relations.

howard

howard engelskirchen
he31@verizon.net
  ----- Original Message -----
  From: D. Göçmen
  To: ope@lists.csuchico.edu
  Sent: Sunday, November 29, 2009 2:24 PM
  Subject: [OPE] Marx's Method

  Dear All,

  in the "Preface" to the first edition of *Capital* Marx makes a methodological remark:

  "Every beginning is difficult, holds in all sciences. To understand the first chapter, especially the section that contains the analysis of commodities, will, therefore, present the greatest difficulty. That which concerns more especially the analysis of the substance of value and the magnitude of value, I have, as much as it was possible, popularised. The value-form, whose fully developed shape is the money-form, is very elementary and simple. Nevertheless, the human mind has for more than 2,000 years sought in vain to get to the bottom of it all, whilst on the other hand, to the successful analysis of much more composite and complex forms, there has been at least an approximation. Why? Because the body, as an organic whole, is more easy of study than are the cells of that body. In the analysis of economic forms, moreover, neither microscopes nor chemical reagents are of use. The force of abstraction must replace both. But in bourgeois society, the commodity-form of the product of labour — or value-form of the commodity — is the economic cell-form. To the superficial observer, the analysis of these forms seems to turn upon minutiae. It does in fact deal with minutiae, but they are of the same order as those dealt with in microscopic anatomy."

  And in Grundrisse (the chapter "The Method of Political Economy") he says:

  "Bourgeois society is the most developed and the most complex historic organization of production. The categories which express its relations, the comprehension of its structure, thereby also allows insights into the structure and the relations of production of all the vanished social formations out of whose ruins and elements it built itself up, whose partly still unconquered remnants are carried along within it, whose mere nuances have developed explicit significance within it, etc. Human anatomy contains a key to the anatomy of the ape. The intimations of higher development among the subordinate animal species, however, can be understood only after the higher development is already known. The bourgeois economy thus supplies the key to the ancient, etc."

  My question is whether anybody on the list can suggest any literature on these methodological remarks of Marx's.

  Thank you,

  D.Göçmen
  http://dogangocmen.wordpress.com/
  http://www.dogangocmen.blogspot.com/

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Received on Sun Nov 29 16:10:49 2009