Chris had written:
> Yes indeed and one could add ontological priority when marx keeps
> insisting something must be created before it can be distributed even if
> there is no temporal gap. This seems to be the main thing motivating his
> treatment of transformation and the main thing Fred starts from.
and Fred wrote
> Yes, indeed !!
On reflection I may not have properly understand what Chris and Fred
understood, or meant, by the words 'even if there is no temporal gap' in
Chris's original post.
I think the fundamental issue is that of temporal succession, rather than
temporal distance.
Things can succeed each other temporally even if there is no temporal gap,
or if the temporal gap reduces to zero.
In a longer response to Allin on another matter, I give the example of a
light-switch. Switching a light on takes no time at all; there is no period
of time during which the light is 'neither on nor off' and thus no temporal
gap between being off, and being on. Nevertheless, the light goes on after
it was off. The two states of the light succeed each other in time, even
though there is no temporal gap between them.
Marx explicitly states, for example, that he treats the time of circulation
as zero. There is therefore no 'temporal gap' between one period of
production and the next one. This does not eliminate the question of
temporality. It does not mean that the two production periods happen at the
same time. One still happens after the other, even though there is no
temporal gap between the end of one, and the start of the next.
I think that the appropriate concept to discuss Marx's ontological
principle is not temporal gap, but temporal succession; and we may be in
agreement on this, in which case I think we can progress significantly.
The way I would like to put the point is that one may not distribute
something 'before' it has been created, exactly as Chris puts it in the
first part of his sentence; that is, distribution must temporally succeed
creation.
Now, Chris's sentence might then have one of two meanings. It might be a
simple re-statement of what I consider to be the fundamental temporal
principle, which is the principle of temporal succession; in this case, one
may not distribute something 'temporally before' it has been created. In
this case, I agree that it is irrelevant whether there is a temporal gap,
since one does not need a temporal gap in order to distinuish 'before' from
'after'.
Or, Chris might be seeking to distinuish two meanings of the word 'before',
one being temporal, and the other being non-temporal. Thus he might really
have meant something like:
> Yes indeed and one could add ontological priority when marx keeps
> insisting something must be created before it can be distributed even if
> there is no temporal succession.
Or, he might not have meant that, but Fred might have understood that. In
which case the agreement is less exclamatory than we first thought.
This doesn't seem to me to be the sense of what Chris was saying but I
thought I had better check. Also to check which meaning Fred took from the
statement, when he added his exclamation marks.
As a final clarification, why not just write the statement as follows?
> Yes indeed and one could add ontological priority when marx keeps
> insisting something must be created temporally before it can be distributed.
Would either Fred or Chris disagree with that restatement of (Marx's)
principle?
Alan