Date: Mon, 28 Oct 1996 22:43:11 +0200 (EET) From: j laari <jlaari-AT-cc.jyu.fi> Subject: Re: M-TH: marxian, marxist, and the LTV Justin wrote: > I disagree with the cornerstone position of the LTV. I think you can > acknowledge the basic antagonism between capital and labor and the > exploitative character of capitalism without it. Might be so. I guess I should read your Nous article before I say anything on that. (I've never really understood why exploitation should be seen as a negative factor - except, perhaps, from common sense viewpoint: it somehow insults our 'intuition' that we own our bodies and therefore its fruits should belong to us?) For us non-economists it's quite hard to follow finesses of economic theory. > According to this, Marx might have made false analyses (in > > Capital), and he surely was one-sided in his analyses (an 'economist' > > who reduced the whole social world into economic basic relations), > > Well, I differ here too. I think Marx's theiory is not a form of economic > reductionism, nor one sided in the way that you suggest. It depends from what angle you're looking at it. Either as theory of society or as social theory it surely is. That is, from sociological viewpoint ("Marx as a sociological classic"). I should have said it. I'm not qualified to value his work in the light of pol. economy. By the way, we had Capital group in early eighties (after that I haven't read much Marx, except some shorter writings - my shame) and that was our final result. In a sense, problem was to choose whether to skip diamat or value law, histomat or LTV - so to speak: alternatives weren't exactly those - and we decided to keep 'scientific' Marx without leninism-stalinisms. Years passed and I never really had to think about LTV or value law, until recently. > I don't quite follow this. Are you saying that if liberal or other > bourgeois ideoloigy cannot live up to iys own promises because of the way > capitalism works, that's an argument for change? Surely it is, but Marx > suggests a different basis, namely that capitalism cannot live up the > expectations and values generated in class struggle by the workers, in > opposition to bourgeois ideology. Yes, but today it's hard to find such working-class expectations and values as clearly (and hopefully powerfully) stated alternatives to bourgeois ideologies. On the contrary, issues that concentrate on wage (and other labour market policy questions) are the ones where workers and capitalists understand each others very well. And that concerns not only social democrats. Both social democratic and ex-communist trade unions are quite strongly against labour time cuts. At least here in Finland. Main issues concern wage. In this sense capitalism does live up expectations and values of workers. It can afford couple of pennies more every now and then. > So, we agree on that. What happened to the "cornerstone" thesis, then? I guess I left it to eighties... I should have written at the beginning that *earlier* I used (etc)... I have never really went through Marx's economic writings as economic ones because I don't know economics that much (dare I say that I even skipped Marx's 1861-3? manuscripts, I even can't remember anymore that year). So the point was to find out what capitalism causes to social relations in general (guess this is one of the reasons exploitation never really seemed to be of major importance). And, say, 'frame of reference' we used to use when reading Marx, 'capital logic', concentrated on inner logic of Capital rather than on its objective truth (not much references to contemporary research) in order to clarify whether Marx delivers what traditionally have been understood as his contribution. I was able to refresh my memories few weeks ago when I read lectures on Marx by H-J Schanz, Danish veteran of capital logic. Capital logicians concluded that 'communism' didn't meant for Marx such stahanovian enterprise as it has been understood especially in marxism-leninism. Rather it was a question of cuts in labour time. 'Fisher in the morning, poet in the afternoon and critical critic in the evening' sort of idea. To me it sounded overtly romantic one (beautiful, yes, but unrealistically romantic). Utopian one, I'm afraid. I guess these kind of reasons pushed us to stick to more 'scientific' causes of social critique. Hard to remember after all years. Jukka --- from list marxism-thaxis-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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