Date: 15 Dec 96 15:33:50 EST
From: Chris Burford <100423.2040-AT-CompuServe.COM>
Subject: M-TH: Juan's thesis


I thank Juan for his two part reply of 12th December.

What further can we get out of this exchange? 


I still do not feel qualified to discuss the 
similarities and differences with Hegel, except in so far as I just noted 
that I do not recognise as familiar in Marx the idea of negation as in 

"concrete forms (in which the general laws appeared as being negated)."



The main issue is about Juan's emphasis on the idea of the 
"reproduction of the concrete by way of thought", to which Juan seems 
strongly committed.

But I read this to mean he should  present to us more of his 
valued concrete analyses of the Argentinian economy, 
(which I got the impression Hinrich was 
also encouraging), whereas Juan seems to intepret this as engaging 
in abstract discussion like this exchange itself.

But maybe I misunderstand him. He writes:

>>
I will advance on these questions in a concrete way: by presenting some
further posts on scientific method (which means to me not being able to
advance on the questions of vulgar economy, Kliman and Freeman's TSS,
Argentine economy, and some other questions I'm interested in discussing,
e.g., the computation of productive and unproductive labor in the USA, for
the time being)
<<



Concerning internationally agreed translations of marxist concepts, I think
there is a need for agreement. I thank Juan for explaining his method of 
translating, and I expect we can agree it is not necessary to declare the 
weights of our respective dictionaries.

Hinrich's advice seems to have the weight of the prevailing usage in the German
Marxist left when he says:

>>The central terms that are at stake in this and related threads are not
Anschauung nor Vorstellung, but Forschung [research, inquiry] and
DARSTELLUNG [REPRESENTATION], or Marx' Forschungsweise [of which process of
research sounds a better translation than method of inquiry]  and Marx'
Darstellungsweise [of which form of represenation is a better translation
than method of presentation] of categories of critique of Political Economy.
When Juan Inigo is talking about representation he is mostly referring to
Marx' form of representation in differentation to his process of research,
or respectively to the reproduction of the categories as both a prerequisite
and starting point for analyses of contemporary capitalism.<<


I can see why Juan wanted to translate Vorstellung as "representation" but 
there is a significant difference in the two journeys in the 
Grundrisse passage. They are to and fro, a sort of circle, or really a 
spiral. The initial starting point, is at a lower level of knowledge 
than is achieved after the use of scientific analysis. "If I were to begin 
with the population, this would be a chaotic conception (Vorstellung)
of the whole."


[BTW if Juan's files have turned themselves into unreadable binary files
he could perhaps start the cycle again, by downloading them from the thaxis 
archives via FTP or a "get" command to majordomo such as

get marxism-thaxis-digest v01.054        (- or 050 or 051 or whatever)]




In understanding the passage at the start of the section of Grundrisse on 
the Method of Political Economy, I think the problem is to understand 
the first and second journey, or journey A and journey B. I found it 
useful to mark my text.

I suggest this is linked to the contradiction between the general and 
the particular. Arguably there are two processes of cognition: 
one from the particular to the general, and the other from the general to the 
particular. Cognition moves in cycles and so long as scientific method 
is used each cycle advances human knowledge a step higher and so makes
it more profound. That at any rate is what I assumed when I read this passage 
in the Grundrisse.

I am not sure that Juan and I can take our subtly different readings of 
the lines there much further ourselves. It did however appear to be 
a remarkable claim that a long list of 20th century marxists had failed to 
understand the point about representation in the way Juan 
put it in his post of 28th Nov. 

<<But, wait, haven't all of us been taught that scientific cognition, the
highest form of thought at our reach, has by nature the form of a
_representation_ of the concrete? How could be Marx opposing the correct
scientific method as a _reproduction_ to  _representation_? And how could
he be doing so just on passing, as if this difference was a completely
familiar matter to him?

The reading of Marx's paragraph belongs in the ABC of any Marxist
formation. Yet, Marx's "thought" and "reproduction" are universally taken
by Marxists (let alone non-Marxist theorists) as self-evident synonyms for
"representation." So much so, that there is not a trace of that distinction
in any of the following Marxists, that explicitly focus on Marx's method:
Adorno, Althusser, Bhaskar, Carchedi, Cohen, Gramsci, Gunn, Habermas,
Ilyenkov, Jessop, Joja, Kolakowski, Korsch, Lefevre, Lenin, Murray, Negri,
Ollman, Parekh, Plekhanov, Resnik, Sekine, Smith, Sprinker, Stalin,
Thompson, Wolff.>>>


Unless Juan can give more of a handle as to how his ideas link in with others
or with the concrete, my impression is it will be difficult for him to spread 
his interpretation wider.
 
I am happy if I am proved wrong.

Regards,

Chris Burford
London.

















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