A reply to Allin's ope-l 4429.
There's a difference between "THE economic law of motion" and "lawS of
motion."
I think it is an important difference. The folks who misquote the phrase to
appropriate Marx's prestige for their attempts to work out the behavioral or
structural interrelations in capitalist economies are generally talking about
multiple laws of motion and their systematic interactions. I for one cannot
interpret Marx's phrase in this way. Nor would I find plausible the
suggestion that the ultimate aim of _Capital_ was to lay bare that commodities
exchange in proportion to their relative vertical integrated labor
coefficients, which seems to be the law of motion Paul C. had in mind.
"there's no doubt that Marx had great admiration for Darwin and his method."
I'm pretty sure he admired Darwin's discoveries, but I've got doubts about
method. I remember reading something in which Marx ridiculed Darwinian
ideology as Hobbesian.
Andrew Kliman