>>> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 05/29/00 10:16PM >>> Charles, ops, I disregarded the part where you said "unlike art".. again, in my view, this text (Pol Eco) was misinterpreted by vulgar materialists and non-political marxists a lot. I am not quite sure if MArx really intended that "economics can be done with the exact precision of natural sciences", as you seem to be suggesting ________ CB: Biology is a natural science. Economics could be about as exact as biology ( and I don't mean in the sense that production addresses directly physiological needs). ___________ ...I don't see, for example, why "art", unlike "economics" cannot be studied from a historical materialist perspective, the perspective that Marx approached very differently from other bourgeois materialist thinkers preceding him.. Since both "art" and "economics" constitute the part of social reality, and since both carry "political" meanings behind immediate appereances, both can be studied in the way that Marx suggested. Why should we need to dichotimize them? ___________ CB: Actually, don't postmodernism, semiotics , etc. render even art rather exact in some ways ? Scientifically exact linguistics existed in Marx's time from India, no ? But by today, there is a lot of exactness in linguistics. __________ What I am trying to say is that we should not read Marx in the below text as imposing the ontological superiority of economics over other sciences (in the name of natural sciences). ______________ CB: Yes, I think I agree with this. I'm not quite sure what the ontology status of economics is, or in what sense you mean it. Also, sciences don't exactly have ontologies ,. do they ? Their subject matters may... Basically, by saying that economics can be rendered fairly exactly, and art, etc. cannot, he is saying that art cannot be reduced to economics, no ? _________ In the final analysis, economics is not a natural science; it is a social science, and even in natural sciences we have "accuracy" problems too. _________ CB: Yes, Marx implies that economics is not, in the final analysis , a natural science , because he says "In considering such transformations a distinction should always be made between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophic, in short ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out". If economics was a natural science , Marx wouldn't have to say that economic conditions could be determined with the precision of a natural science. He would say it is a natural science , which would say already that it can have the precision of a natural science. No doubt , natural sciences struggle with precision too. _________ This "accuracy" or "precision" problem can be minimized by the materialist method as understood by Marx. Such a method locates nature in dynamic history as oppposed to other methods which reify and naturalize nature (ideology problem) comradely, Mine >>> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 05/27/00 10:03PM >>> >Charles: >> >So, Marx says in the Preface to to the Contribution to the Critique of >> >Polit Economy that economics can be done almost with the exactness of a >> >natural science, unlike art, etc I don't exactly think so, Charles. Last semester, we discussed this text in my Gramsci class and came up with a slightly different interpretation. The same Marx in the same text says that a social phenomenon can not be understood with the "exact" precision of natural sciences: "In considering such transformations a distinction should always be made between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophic, in short ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out" (Tucker, p.5). good night! ___________ CB: Comrade, elsewhere on this thread , I just cited the exact words you quote above as SUPPORTING what I am saying. What gives ? CB
