Paul Zarembka (633) wrote:
in reading Marx you can take value as kind of a proposition or assumption
and begin reading after Part I, then come back to what you can learn from
Part I. Is not taking value in another wage leading to dogmatism?
I reply:
I guess, as a pedagogical approach, one can take value as a kind of
assumption and begin after Part 1, but then would miss:
1. the theoretical grounding of this assumption in the analysis of
the commodity (as I have discussed in other posts).
2. the derivation of money as the necessary form of appearance of
abstract labor, which is necessary because capital is defined in terms of
money.
So I think this approach would be bad pedagogy. It would seem to lead to
more dogmatism, not less, because the theoretical justifications for Marx's
presuppositions in Part 2 would not be explained.
But my main point is that Marx, in constructing his theory, could not have
skipped Part 1 and begun with Part 2. Part 1 provides the logical
presuppositions for Part 2 and beyond.
Fred Moseley