File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_1996/96-05-20.182, message 152


From: I.P.Wright-AT-cs.bham.ac.uk
Date: Tue, 23 Apr 1996 15:20:19 +0100
Subject: LTV and timelessness of historical materialism (was Re:


CR and economics)

  Huseyin Ozel writes -

> What I was trying to say is that just because the world itself is
> constituted in the historical time doesn't mean that we have to use
> historical time in our analysis.

Ah yes, it appears I got the wrong end of the stick. I agree.

> Second point, regarding the equalization
> of the general rate of profit here, we seem to confuse, again, two
> distinct and different levels: the level of the reality and the level
> of the analysis. In economics what is called "static" analysis is
> carried on by "stopping" (or "freezing" etc.) time (like having a
> "snapshot") and investigating the relations between different
> variables in a "timeless" setting. This is irrespective of the
> "tendencies" prevailing in the reality itself. In this regard, any
> value (and price determination) theory must use such a "timeless"
> framework, including Marx's LTV, and there is nothing wrong
> about this. (Of course, whether such a "timeless" framework is by
> itself adequate in understanding reality is another question).

I think Marx's LTV escapes this criticism as he is primarily
concerned with the law of value as a `law of movement', i.e.
expressing how the simple commodity economy evolves over time.
The law of value plays the role of regulator, establishing
equilibrium in the distribution of social labour amongst the
various branches of production. To quote Rubin: `value is the
transmission belt which transfers the working processes from one
part of a society to another, making that society a functioning
whole'. It cannot be stressed enough that Marx's LTV is *not*,
first and foremost, concerned with determination of the price
of commodities at a particular instance in time, but seeks
to explain how the labour of society is allocated and reallocated
amongst its various branches. I'd suggest that the LTV is the only
theory of value that does not work in `logical time', and is
a genuine attempt to understand a continually changing reality.

Perhaps I am missing your point. It was Marx's materialist dialectic
that was explicitly opposed to empiricism of price, and the
reification of historical processes: he wished to uncover the
underlying generative mechanisms that constrained the evolution of
the simple commodity economy (and hence, onwards, via modifications
to a theory of capitalism). His law of value is just such an attempt.
It was this methodology that Marx held distinguished him from
bourgeois economists.

> I am not fully articulate about this point, but it seems to me that
> the framework of the "historical materialism" is as "timeless" as the
> theory of value, though at a different level of abstraction. I was
> just referring to Giddens's distinction (in the _Constitution
> of Society_) between three levels within which time is regarded
> differently (Hans, I wasn't referring to Giddens's critique of
> historical materialism): the level of the (routinized) day-to-day
> activity which is carried on within "reversible time"; the life of
> the individual within "irreversible" time; and the "longue duree" of
> institutions within "reversible time" (sorry I dont have the book
> with me, so I cannot give page references. But in the first chapter
> there is a diagram about this).

I haven't read Giddens I'm afraid. I still do not understand this
distinction between `reversible' and `irreverisble' time. It sounds
very mystificatory to me.

> This last level, the level of institutional relations, seems to me,
> corresponds to the general aspects of human existence, which is the same
> throught human history, in Marx's historical materialism. For example, what
> Marx calls "the labor process" is a continuous feature of human existence
> (even of essence), it is independent of historical events.

It is only analytically independent of historical events. We can call
the family of historically specific labour processes, the `labour process',
but if we reify this we will find that it does not refer. Nothing
particulary strannge about this, as long as we are careful with
our abstractions.

> What is historically specific is the particular form of the labor process
> (capitalist etc.).

Yes, I agree.

> Or, in Braudel's account, this is the level of the
> "longue duree" where biological, physical, geographical etc. factors
> are effective in humanity's existence (like the Mediterreanean [sp?]
> region itself is an actor in the history of Europe) and where time is
> taken as stationary. Thus, at this level, what we are dealing with is
> again "logical" or "reversible" time. I don't know if these thoughts
> make sense or not. I would like to hear more about this.

The rate of change of social evolution far surpasses the rate of change
of biological evolution, so it would indeed seem sensible to
consider some of the ontology of biology as a constant, static, or
`logical' causal factor in the determination of human agency. The
same kinds of considerations apply to geography, and the laws of
phsyics etc. But this need not imply a timeless `essence' of humanity,
a biological human nature.

I don't know if this is addressing your main concern. I am sceptical
of the use of such terms as `reversible' and `irreversible' in this
context. I also do not understand why you want to argue the `timelessness'
of historical materialism (HM). It was Marx's HM that broke with
the `timelessness' of previous conceptions of man, which were
essentially concerned with an individual, ahistorical essence. Instead,
HM *throws `man' away* and starts with the historically given economic
formation, and the given relations of production, and holds that these are
the real determinants of human agency. This doesn't sound like a timeless
conception.

Comments?

-E.


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