Date: Mon, 13 Sep 1999 15:57:35 +0100
From: Mervyn Hartwig <mh-AT-jaspere.demon.co.uk>
Subject: Re: BHA: Marx's form-content paradigm and Critical Realism


Dear Hans,

Do you have anything re the below you want to report? It would need to
reach me by Friday if it's to go into *Alethia* October 1999. If you
can't make that it could always go in April 2000.

Best, Mervyn

Hans Ehrbar <ehrbar-AT-keynes.econ.utah.edu> writes
>
>I would like to thank all those who expressed their
>preliminary interest in an international seminar about
>Marx's method and Critical Realism.  I should know by the
>end of June whether the grant proposal has been accepted, and
>then we can discuss the character of this seminar in more
>detail.  As Mervyn suggested, we should then also write up
>a description of this initiative for Alethia.
>
>Marx was the first great Critical Realist, he was one before
>Critical Realism even existed, and I think we can learn a
>lot about CR and DCR by studying Marx.  My Annotations to
>Marx's *Capital*, which I use as study guide for my email
>course, but which I intend to publish eventually as a book,
>try to make sense of Marx's Hegelianisms in terms of CR.
>They are based on Bhaskar's conjecture that Hegel "took the
>place of critical realism as the missing methodological
>fulcrum of Marx's work."  If this conjecture is true, a
>Critical Realist reading of Marx should allow us to get a
>clearer and more accurate understanding of Marx than a
>reading which uses Hegel.  My Annotations show that Marx's
>thinking was shot through with CR concepts, and CR also
>allows me to clarify many obscure turns in Marx's argument.
>
>
>Here I am reproducing a few paragraphs from my Annotations,
>in order to make the point that the labor theory of value
>cannot even be formulated without a clear awareness of the
>differences and dependencies between the various generative
>mechanisms operating in an economy.  Mervyn, if you think it
>is appropriate to put a link to the Annotations on the CR
>web site, or to mirror my copy there, I would be very
>pleased.  The URL is
>http://www.econ.utah.edu/ehrbar/annota.htm
>
>
>Now here is the excerpt from the Annotations:
>
>
>
>When we observe the commodity producers trading their goods
>on the market, we are witnessing what is really the second
>act in a two-act drama.  The first act is the production of
>these goods.  Although the commodity producers do this
>privately, production is an inherently social process.  They
>produce for others, together with others, and use inputs
>produced by others.
>
>A lot of coordination is necessary to fit the countless
>interdependent production processes together.  In a market
>economy, this coordination is not established at the point
>of production, but it is a side effect of the market
>activity of the commodity producers.  The interactions in
>which they try to make the best deals on the market have the
>unintended side effect of directing production.  If
>something cannot be sold, then its production will be
>curtailed, and if there is excess demand, production will be
>expanded.  I.e., the first act of the drama we are observing
>obtains its social coherence through the second act.  The
>market is an environment in which the producers, driven by
>their self-interest, choose to do things which are necessary
>for the functioning and reproduction of the kind of economy
>they live in.
>
>
>From what I just wrote one might conclude that it is
>necessary to study the market in order to understand the
>capitalist economy, since the market creates the social
>context for production.  But this is not Marx's approach.
>Marx maintains that production is primary and the market
>secondary.  The causality goes from production to the
>market, not vice versa.  It is not the market which creates
>the social context for production, but production in a
>market economy, although ostensibly carried out in private,
>already has a very specific social dimension.  This social
>dimension is not *created* in the market; it *manifests*
>itself in and is *mediated* through the market, but it
>invisibly already exists in the production process itself
>and can be defined without reference to the market.
>
>Marx means this invisible social dimension of the production
>process when he says that the labor process in capitalism
>has a double character: besides producing tangible objects
>it also produces a homogeneous social substance, value,
>which governs social production.  At the point of
>production, value is real but not yet actual; it is
>actualized (Marx uses the word ``realized,'' but
>``actualized'' is a more modern terminology for it) in the
>exchange process, and it has money as its exterior measure
>and independent form of existence.
>
>
>The labor theory of value therefore says that the organizing
>principle of capitalist market economies must not be sought
>in the markets themselves but in the fact, valid in the
>capitalist economy, that all labor counts as an
>instantiation of a homogeneous society-wide reservoir of
>"abstract human labor."  This social equality of all labor
>does not govern production directly but through the
>mediation of the market.  The market is the social
>institution which induces the producers to take the actions
>by which, behind their backs, abstract labor is elevated to
>the governing social principle of production.  Marx uses for
>all this the shorthand formulation that exchange value,
>i.e., the ability of commodities to exchange themselves for
>other commodities, is "the mere mode of expression, `form of
>appearance,. of some substance distinguishable from it."
>
>
>Hans Ehrbar
>
>
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-- 
Mervyn Hartwig
Editor, 'Alethia'
Newsletter of the International Association for Critical Realism
13 Spenser Road
Herne Hill
London SE24 ONS
United Kingdom
Tel: 44 (0)171 737 2892
Email: mh-AT-jaspere.demon.co.uk



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