On 11/29/06, Angelus Novus <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
But abstract labour *is* an ideal! It is because commodities are exchanged through a universal medium (money) that their physical qualities are necessarily abstracted from in favor of a shared "essence."
I disagree: abstract labor isn't an ideal or an essence as much as a specific set of characteristics that are shared by all of the various concrete labors in a commodity-producing society (the production of use-values that can be exchanged for others). Capitalism tends to reduce concrete labors to being nothing but these shared characteristics (the real essence), of course. They try to get rid of all aspects of concrete labor that do not contribute to producing exchange-value (and surplus-value). We could say that capitalists see such labor as "ideal" (desired). Labor resists this trend, so it is never fully realized.
... there is a great analogy by Marx about how it's like in addition to all these real animals like rabbits or tigers there actually existed an independent, actual being called an "animal." That's precisely what is so topsy-turvy about the value form. It is an idealization with material force.
does Marx say why he dropped this analogy? Perhaps because it's too idealist? And what is meant by an "idealization with material force"?
Lenin once remarked that intelligent idealism is closer to Marxism than vulgar materialism.
don't get me wrong. I don't see idealism and materialism as polar opposites, as mechanical idealists and mechanical idealists do. But when studying the world, it is important to be materialist -- and realist -- in espistemology. -- Jim Devine / "Crime seems to change character when it crosses a bridge or a tunnel. In the city, crime is taken as emblematic of class and race. In the suburbs, though, it's intimate and psychological - resistant to generalization, a mystery of the individual soul." -- Barbara Ehrenreich
