Date: Wed, 12 Feb 1997 09:47:02 +0000
From: MA Jones <majones-AT-netcomuk.co.uk>
Subject: re: M-I: Value theory /Was LTV


What Justin's response to Chatterjee shows is just how necessary was and
is the debate about dialectics and the Marxian critique of philosophical
epistemology, which serves to strip away the last fig-leaf covering
reactionary social models like "market socialism" -- the scientistic
appeal to objectivity.
Justin wants to show that Marxism is actually just one science (or a
current within the dismal science of economics) alongside other sceinces
and subject to the same fashions, obsoletion and general rules.

And that is another absolute divide between those who think that Marxism
is the foundation of a proletarian world view, which understands all
science including physics as epiphenomena of commodity-producing
society, as 'superstructural phenenoma', as radically mystified and
fetishishistic 'spheres' of alienated human activity. And those who do
not; who suffer from the mystification in its most obscurantist form,
the one which even reduces Marxism itself to the status of a bourgeois
science.
Justin wants to argue that Marxism is just one current among many others
within the social sciences. It is a single step from there to argue that
just as the rubrics and canons of bourgeois science are eternal, so is
commodity production eternal. Marxism in this view, if it has any
meaning at all other than as a footnote to cultural history, is one of
any number of more-or-less helpful meliorative, reforming social
doctrines. 
-- 
Regards,
Mark Jones
majones-AT-netcomuk.co.uk
http://www.netcomuk.co.uk/~majones/index.htm




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