Date: 25 Nov 95 18:33:45 EST
From: "Chris, London" <100423.2040-AT-compuserve.com>
Subject: 3 J's on value


John:
------- 
Should capitalism find itself opposed by significant 
forces, it would be nice if we knew how capitalism itself 
operated. Given our working hypothesis that Marx can  
help us in this quest, we continue. If we are taking up 
too much time and space on the list with all this, please 
tell us.  None of us seem willing to let go and I'm sure 
we could find space elsewhere.  

Chris:
--------

It is very specialised but IMO very important. Please go on 
until you have got to an agreed standstill, drawing lines
of demarcation, which cannot be further resolved for the time being.

I am uneasy about Juan's disrespectful tone but
I do get the impression you have 
rather lost the wood for the trees. Are you sure you 
are not looking for a closer correspondence between
prices and value than occurs?

 It feels to me like the 
 psychiatrists who are always looking for the cause
of schizophrenia. There are 443 causes of schizophrenia.

Really the question is wrong. Like schizophrenia 
capitalism is a self-organising self-reproducing 
self-perpetuating system, which varies in its main 
parameters in broadly determinate, but specifically
indeterminate ways. Marx's mathematics are 
intended to illustrate the process rather than mechanically
reproduce it. 

They should all be fed into a computer operating on 
fuzzy logic.

If there is something fundamentally wrong with your
approach, I don't think you should be attacked. I think 
we should see it as a symptom of the pressure 
bourgeois economics puts on marxism. It poses the wrong
questions. We now have decades of experience of critics 
of Marx discovering some logical flaw or inconsistency.

It is like learning a foreign language always out of a dictionary
and then suspecting logical discrepancies. 

It is like always concentrating on the details of the notes
of a piece of music, and playing only the notes, clumsily,
and never getting round to playing the music.

With some differences of emphasis, really Marx and Engels were
presenting a complex, reasonably internally coherent picute of 
the motion of capitalism society.

It is true that it self-replicating processes have come to need greater 
attention than the processes thought for a time to lead with historical 
inevitability to socialism. But it is broadly coherent. If we always 
accept the terrain of debate of bourgeois critics looking for 
illogical features, we never present the whole sweep. 

Nor should be accept any implication that to be any good it must 
be narrowly predictive. The complexity of the phenomena is that
that is not possible. No school of economics can do that.

The challenge for us should not lie in these directions. We should 
not get bogged down in these battles on the enemies terms. The
challenge is to show the broad relevance of a marxist approach,
to non-marxists.

Chris

PS  John  asked:

 Do you accept Marx's idea that the turnover of fixed capital
   would form the material basis for a theory of crisis?


- Could you give a reference by chapter and para number, for this
idea?



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