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Philip Dunn wrote "for instance, uncultivated land may have a price, though it has no value, since no human labor has been incorporated in it." Here it is the assumption that all value is embodied labour value that causes the problem. Similarly, it is questionable whether the value of money and the value of labour-power are best understood as embodied labour. ----------------------------------------------- ////Mehmet Catagay has responded to the foregoing as I was typing this, but anyhow why not put it something like this: uncultivated land in the desert, the middle of the ocean, air in space have no value, nor price, unless: as with uncultivated land, sea or space that has the potential to be husbanded in any way, be it pasturage, crop planting, subsurface mineral potential, location of industrial or residential property or what have you, earth's materials and surrounds derive value from their potential or present capacity to have commodity value realized from them by being developed by human labor. Otherwise, they have no value in the sense in which this term is used in Marx's analysis of capital. Think oxygen bars in central Tokyo. Marxmail's purpose as I understand it is to explicate and develop what Marx wrote and more importantly to relate this as well as possible to what we've experienced in the past and present, bringing in events as they either raise problems for and call into question, are illustrative of the utility of Marxist perspective, or call for further development of Marx's incomplete theorization of capital. That is not a task for dilettantes, which I call myself unless I am familiarizing myself with Marx's precepts and method; it is nevertheless a task for those who aspire to understand, and it might if more consistently implemented on this list result in a much-reduced quantity of exchange (though I suspect not for long) and a much higher quality. Without that effort, we don't get very far past the current headlines. In that spirit I have over the years read Marx's Capital volume 1 several times, most recently with the help of David Harvey's excellent online 13-session course. I have also just received his newly-published "A Companion to Marx's Capital", I'm reading volume 2 for the first time (I am an exasperatingly slow reader, at least until I begin to get it, although I can race through fiction), and I'm about 190 pages into Harvey's newly published, updated edition of "The Limits to Capital". It would be helpful to me to have an online course on volumes 2 and 3 of Capital. I asked Goldner if he could go online with his present course in NYC on volume 2, and he replied that he and his cohort teacher are not so sophisticated. I'm learning that, If what I understand to be the purpose of the Marxmail list is correct, I don't see how people have the temerity to hold forth here unless they as a prerequisite have thoroughly understood or are with due humility in the process of trying to read and understand what Marx wrote, as well as finding the more trenchant objections to his critique of capitalism. Everything short of that largely results in a surfeit of blather, and it dilutes and can destroy a list like this. That's so basic to keeping our thinking caps on straight, or else losing the vitality of discussion. Case in point is what happened several years ago to the old unmoderated Socialist Register list, and what takes place on other lists similar to this, as they atrophy and disappear. I don't think shifting this range of tasks to Levy's invitation-only list, however well it works there or whatever the original intent, is appropriate any longer. As long as the discussion is moderated so as to avoid one-upping and pettifogging. A now-deceased CP friend taught Capital during the 30s Depression in workers' groups and observed that once it was presented clearly to experienced wage workers, whatever their formal education, they got it immediately. Even some who may have thoroughly absorbed Marxian theory and with whom I agree on most issues, I question. Leo Panitch, for example, is a well-respected, challenging and very productive thinker and doer on the left, who professes to be a Marxist. I am searching through his writings online and in the Socialist Register but do not yet see how Panitch in a recent inerview can say, "I have never been particularly attracted to value theory, in the sense that the only surplus is produced by workers, in a narrow industrial sense" and "I have never put much stock in the falling rate of profit as an explanation for capitalist crises" (http://platypus1917.org/2010/03/02/is-marx-back-an-interview-with-leo-panitch/ at 9:20 to 9:40 Part 1). Of course, he qualifies his questioning of value theory by adding "in a narrow industrial sense", whatever that means to him. To me, everything in Marx's writings hinges on the former at least - and so far in my experience also on the latter as a tendency as applied to crisis - and anyone who abjures these basic precepts is to my mind for the most part floating out there in the realm of political theory and action without THE lodestone which is essential to a transformational project. But as Harvey writes somewhere (and Panitch too), moving beyond our working assumptions is accomplished in part by constantly and consciously confronting the barriers to their practical implementation - something which a dynamic capitalism has repeatedly accomplished in its compulsive drive to expand. So I want to find out more about the objections to Marx's Theory of Value and Tendency of the Falling Rate of Profit which may have survived refutation - and in the process obtain a deeper assessment as to the usefulness of these concepts. And as to the discussion of dialectics that so far comes to little resolution on this list, I looked briefly at Rosa Lichtenstein's presentations on her website and I find there nothing dispositive in attacking dialectics - only its misuses. When she maintains that the lack of success of Marxian socialism can be ascribed tout court to the distorting effects on it of the presence of dialectics, this seems to me such a sophomoric, mistaken assertion that among other things I can't believe that she has ever read any of the volumes of Capital, with a view to how Marx in these works achieves his astonishing results through the tacit employment of the penetrating capacity of dialectical thought in getting beneath surface appearances, as opposed to blip blip static snapshot superficial processes of thought associated with modes of bourgeois Western thought - that have among other things produced the isolating, paralyzing effects of arbitrary compartmentalization and constriction of knowledge, as in economics and other departments in the "social sciences" in schools and universities. And the very notion of dialectical process leaves always open to question and to further offloading or recasting of all that we tend to assume as received wisdom. Here's what Harvey has to say about Marx's use of the dialectical method in the Introduction to his newly published "A Companion to Marx's Capital" on pages 112, 113: Capital is nothing if not on the move. Marx is incredibly appreciative of that, and he sets out to evoke the transformative dynamism of capital. That's why it is so very strange that he's often depicted a s a static thinker who reduces capitalism to a structural configuration. No, what Marx seeks out in Capital is a conceptual apparatus, a deep structure, that explains the way in which motion is actually instantiated within a capitalist mode of production. Consequently, many of his concepts are formulated around relations rather than stand-alone principles; they are about transformative activity. So getting to know and appreciate the dialectical method of Capital is essential to understanding Marx on his own terms. Quite a lot of people, including some Marxists, would disagree. The so-called analytic Marxists - thinkers like G.A. Cohen, John Roemer and Robert Brenner - dismiss dialectics. They actually like to call themselves "no-bullshit Marxists". They prefer to convert Marx's argument into a series of analytical propositions. Others convert his argument into a causal model of the world. There is even a positivist way of representing Marx that allows his theory to be tested againsr empirical data. In each of these cases, dialectics gets stripped away. Now, I am not in principle arguing that the analytical Marxists are wrong, that those who turn Marx into a positivist model builder are deluded. But I do insist that Marx's own terms are dialectical, and we are therefore obliged to grapple in the instance with a diaslectical reading of Capital. Also, this recent article by Harvey on a transition is helpful http://davidharvey.org/2009/12/organizing-for-the-anti-capitalist-transition/ Ralph ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
