Date: Tue, 2 Dec 1997 02:28:03 -0800 (PST)
From: LH Engelskirchen <lhengels-AT-igc.apc.org>
To: bhaskar-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU
Subject: Re:  BHA: Fleetwood and Aristotle (fwd)


 
 
I think Rakesh is right about the Fleetwood passage:  abstract or
homogeneous labor is a consequence of the value relation and it
would be better to look there for the source of causal powers.
 
But I think the following statement of his is confusing:  "rather
it seems by virtue of the bourgeois social relations (private
property of means of production, production of *social* use values,
wage labor) that labor produces not only use values but also values
which serve the function of social mediation once played by
traditoinal social organization.  I take this to be the meaning of
Marx's famous letter to Kugelman . . . ."
 
The Kugelmann letter is exactly the key:
 
"Every child knows, too, that the masses of products corresponding
to the different needs require different and quantitatively
determined masses of the total labor of society.  That this
necessity of the distribution of social labor in definite
proportions cannot possibly be done away with by a particular form
of social production but can only change the mode of its appearance
is self-evident.  No natural laws can be done away with.  What can
change in historically different circumstances is only the form in
which these laws assert themselves.  And the form in which this
proportional distribution of labor asserts itself, in a state of
society where the interconnection of social labor is manifested in
the private exchange of the individual products of labor is
precisely the exchange value of these products." (7/11/68)
 
First of all the value relation is more extensive than "bourgeois
social relations" in the normal meaning of that term (ie including
wage labor).  The value relation exists (at least incipiently)
wherever we can treat a productive process as autonomous and
wherever that process produces use values useless to it.  This is
a distribution of agents of production with respect to the means of
production, but it is not necessarily bourgeois in the sense of
involving wage labor and capital.  Rome.  
 
Second, the social relation which is the source of use value and
value just is the value relation.  It has a particular structure
which I've just described.  This is the source of its causal power. 
It forces exchange.  Each agent (the efficient cause) confronts his
or her circumstance (the material cause):  my product is useless to
me but useful to another.  In the act of exchange goods are equated
with one another.  We treat them as homogeneous in practice.  We
can work out their quantitative relationships by tracing how the
form of value breaks into the relative and equivalent form, etc. 
 
But, Rakesh suggests, real definitions should be reserved for
things, not relations.  ie "things" like the entities of quantum
physics?  This is from RTS 180, just posted to the list:  "The
other [possibility] is that the nature of the thing just is its
causal powers, as in the case of physical field theories.  At any
moment of time a science may have to put down its ultimate entities
just as powers to produce effects . . . It always remains possible
that he will be able to achieve a qualitative description of them,
and he must strive to do so.  On the other hand, it is also
possible that such entities are their powers."
 
I'd love to hear what others think of the meaning and implications
(implication for materialism?) of this passage (also suggesting
"the concept of a field of potential" as the "whatever is
responsible for the world as manifest").  Be that as it may, I
really don't think there is much question that real definitions
which depend on structures or relations are very much a part of the
analysis of RTS.  So I don't think that works a difference between
the study of nature and society.
 
Nor really do I think there is much question about Marx's analysis 
of value, if one really bears down on it.  Whether we call what
Marx has done a real definition or not I accept as contentious. 
But whether or not his description of the value relation is as I
have presented it I don't think is.  If I am right, what more would
we want from a definition: we identify a specific structure (a
distribution of the agents of production with respect to the
processes of production) and can explain how, as a consequence of
its structure, it tends to behave.  
 
>From the nature of a thing, we derive a tendential law; in the
example of value we extend to social phenomena the ascription of
necessity implicit in the concept of law.
 
Howard
 
 
Howard Engelskirchen
 
"What is there just now you lack"  Hakuin


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