But, in any case, I believe that attention in recent years by economic
historians has been given to the role of countless thousands of very small
innovations each year (rather than focus on the big-deal innovations) as
having been key for technological progress in capitalism. I tend to go
(hoping this will do as a tentative reply to Eric too)
Recasting Marx in algebraic, mathematical, or precise numerical form, seems
a
bit foreign to his overall project, which his understanding the nature of
capitalist society and the weaknesses that will lead to the creation of a
socialist
]'
Subject: [PEN-L:23342] RE: Question to Various comments in In
Digest 77
This does seem like an interesting fundamental disagreement
on the meaning
of the productive forces. We've basically got two views here:
1) Charles' and mine, that production is a physical process.
As Charles
Marx's idea of social forces may be grounded more in common sense than in some
deep theory. One other factors that I see in his understanding of the
transition to socialism runs as follows: people will see the tremendous social
forces (capabilities or potential) of capitalist production
dd writes,
You could envision a theory in which state of development of the
productive forces was measured by the highest temperaturebut it
has the advantage of, as far as I can tell, being monotonically increasing
in whatever the underlying variable of human development might be
AND
MIYACHI TATSUO wrote,
In capitalist society that anyone can't argue Productive forces must
produce what people want Instead, capital produce in its own for
profit,not in order to human needs
My point was that productive forces can't be defined except by reference to
what people want and need
