by Devine, James
-clip- But for Marx, a "contradiction" was an empirical (real, practical) phenomenon, unlike the "contradiction" in logic. A social organization -- such as capitalism -- was a whole or totality, but in its "structure," there were different parts that didn't work together well. (Kinda like putting an English-unit part in a car that has an engine that was specified & built using metric units, as my father did once. Or like when NASA used metric and the private contractor used the English system, so the Mars probe crashed.) In Marx's case, the contradictions of capitalism were problems within the system such as class antagonism and competition amongst the capitalists, summarized by Engels as the contradiction between socialized production (the whole) and individualized appropriation (the parts). ^^^^ CB: Wouldn't you say that also for Marx, contradictions in the capitalist system are the motives for it to change into a different system, i.e. socialism ? Contradiction as the basis for change is a dialectical concept. Marx deals with dialectical, not formal logical contradictions. The contradictions dealt with in the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation are the poverty and unemployment that inherently accompany technological progress under capitalist relations of production, a contradiction of regress and progress, with regress being "absolute" and progress relative.
