Date: Mon, 7 Jun 1999 07:57:18 -0600 (MDT)
Subject: Re: BHA: Marx's form-content paradigm and Critical Realism




Here are three more arguments why I think Marx
is the first dialectical critical realist.

(1) Without saying it in so many words, Marx uses the CR
concept of reality.  Value, the abstract labor congealed in
the products, is "real" in the sense that it generates its
own causal effects, efects which go far beyond the motives
and preferences of the individuals handling the commodities.
This als contains the concept of emergence, and the
stratification of society into the "social" and the
"individual."

(2) Bhaskar says in RTS (p. 14 in 2nd edition) that causal
laws are the ways of acting of things.  In order to explore
the causality emanating from value one therefore has to
understand what value is.  Marx says the same thing in
different words: he emphasizes that one has to understand
the quality of value, and he derives money etc. from the
quality of value.  Indeed Marx's main point of criticism
of Ricardo is that Ricardo ignored this qualitative aspect.


(3) Absences play a much larger role in Marx's theory than
in any other theory I am aware of.  Marx treats them very
explicitly as absences, and he attributes real effects to
them qua absences, although he never remarks in general
about the ontological status of absences.  Here is a list of
absences in Volume One of Capital which I sent to the
Bhaskar list in July 1998, with the chapter number in
parentheses:


Exchange value is not reducible to use value (1.1)

Money is not active but passive (1.3)

Commodity forms do not reveal the underlying
social relations (1.4)

The value of the commodity labor power is not
determined by the value it creates (6)

Machines do not create value (12)

The commodity labor power is not traded as
labor power but as labor (19)

The limits of population growth will not lead to
a permanent rise in wages (25)


Hans Ehrbar



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