File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1998/marxism-international.9802, message 456


From: brumback-AT-ncgate.newcollege.edu
Date: Thu, 26 Feb 1998 12:14:35 -0800
Subject: Re: M-I: On Nancy Brumback


It is very good that Nancy (and Boddhisatva too)
>want to go beyond the 'ether' of socially necessary labor time in an
>attepmpt to analyze contemporary capitalism. But their efforts seem
>similar to those of the intellectuals in the USSR toppling statues of
>Lenin. That is, they appear to be discarding the essence. Attacks on the
>LTV (law of value) is not new. In this, the capitalist economists, 
>quacks and some 'Marxists' have formed a united front. But their arguments
>(I have studied some of them) are not scientific and have a high polemical
>content.

What! You're kidding! Are you telling me that my theory of value "discards
the essence" of capitalism and belongs in the same category as capitalist
and quack economics? My theory which proposes that the capitalist class,
which owns and controls the means of production, accumulates value by
ripping off all of the rest of us, as well as nature? And shows how all the
aspects of a person's identity -- race, sex, class, age, sexuality, etc. --
are used to facilitate that rip off? And how all these ripped-off aspects of
people are related within the whole of the class which doesn't own and
control the means of production, i.e., "all of the rest of us"?

Well, I guess I'd better pack up my history books and my dialectical
materialism, go home, and seek comfort in the comfortable and reassuring
familiarity of *Capital.* (Which a number of people on this list seem to use
as a Bible, not as a methodology.)



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