File spoon-archives/marxism-thaxis.archive/marxism-thaxis_1996/96-11-23.164, message 80


Date: Tue, 19 Nov 1996 11:17:28 -0500 (EST)
From: Gerald Levy <glevy-AT-acnet.pratt.edu.pratt.edu>
Subject: M-TH: Value, conscious action, vulgarity


Response to Juan:

Is there *anyone* today in the _entire world_, other than the
Argentinian-accountant-genius Herr Inigo, who is a Marxist who has written
on the subject of political economy? Perhaps Juan will be so kind as to
tell us the _specific names_ of these individuals?

Jerry

<snip>
> Mainstream economics is not just mainstream economics. It is mainstream
> _vulgar_ economics. As such, it is the opposite to the production of the
> scientific cognition about the simplest forms of the present-day general
> social relation. Its reason of existence is the production of the
> apologetics of capitalism, and therefore, of the very negation of science:
> ideology. Only an inverted "law of value" can be pushed out into vulgar
> economy and become a "credible version" from its point of view.
> I very much doubt this could be Kliman or Freeman intention. And, yet, they
> are trapped inside the limits traced by vulgar economy itself, that turn
> the essential real determination of the simplest form of our general social
> relation, the value-form of the social product, into a _concept_ that can
> be interpreted, and hence defined, in many different ways. This is
> precisely a point Kliman and I start to discuss through a direct exchange
> (since he is not a member of Marxism-lists and I have been banned from
> ope-l by Jerry's political discrimination). Kliman explicitly asserts that
> it is about "interpreting Marx's value theory" in a way that shows it free
> from internal inconsistency. I sustain it is about facing with one's
> thought capital in reality, to follow the development of its simplest
> specific forms until reaching its revolutionary potencies, thus reproducing
> the necessity of one's concrete action in one's thought. And it is in this
> reproduction that "Capital" necessarily comes in: armed with it, our
> reproduction of the real social forms in thought acquires the strength of
> being a process of recognition from the social point of view.
> For reasons of length, I can't present here how Kliman and Freeman's, and
> mine opposite starting points develop. But after following the complete
> development of commodities into capital-commodities, and therefore of
> values into prices of production, I find no incoherence at all in Marx's
> own reproduction. But I do find that the path followed by Kliman and
> Freeman by interpreting concepts produces by itself a mass of incoherences
> where there was none.
<snip>




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