1. yes there are different levels of abstraction. The production of surplus value is studied in abstraction before the approach to the phenomenal world in which one finds industrial and mercantile enterprises. This distinction is not provided at the more abstract level; the point is that this first approximation throws into relief something lost at the lower levels of approximation--the determinants of the production of the total mass of surplus value. As Dobb noted correctly, that's why we don't throw away the first approximation once we have the second, as Samuelson--a vulgar economist-- suggested Marx should have done.
2. Hall confuses this form of abstraction with the use of ceteris paribus clauses--holding certain premises constant. We can say that Marx assumed the rate of exploitation would remain constant in his study of the changes of the OCC on the rate of profit. As far as I can tell, Marx's use of such an artifice is one of Brad DeLong's criticism of Marx.
3. Mattick Jr only denied that the explanatory movement towards the reproduction of the concrete in thought was ever intended to reach the level of relative prices or predictions of the earnings outlooks for individual companies and the like. It was the movement in the rate of profit--along with concentration/centralisation, the crisis cycle, the growth of the reserve army of labor--that Marx attempted to explain--that is, the economic law of motion. His idea here seems similar to Karl Korsch's in *Karl Marx* and Mattick Sr's chapter on the labor theory of value in *Marx and Keynes*.
I must say my head is spinning from the nastiness in the other exchange, so I apologize for the poor quality of my response.
On Sun, 3 Jan 1999, Doug Henwood wrote:
> Rakesh, I just read this bit from Stuart Hall's essay "Cultural Studies:
> Two Paradigms" that says exactly what I was trying to say about my problems
> with Paul Mattick's talk the other week. Bertell touched on this in his
> comment, but Hall makes the point more explicitly, starting with the quote
> from Marx that Mattick himself cited:
>
> "'In the analysis of economic forms, neither microscopes or chemical
> reagents are of assistance. The power of abstraction must replace both.' Of
> course structuralism has frequently taken this proposition to its extreme.
> Because thought is impossible without 'the power of abstraction,' it has
> confused this with giving absolute primacy to the level of the formation of
> concepts - at the highest, most abstract level of abstraction only: Theory
> with a capital 'T' then becomes judge and jury. But this is precisely to
> lose the insight just won from Marx's own practice. For it is clear in, for
> example, Capital, that the method - whilst taking place 'in thought' (as
> Marx asked in the 1857 Introduction, where else?) - rests not on the simple
> exercise of abstraction but on the movement and relations which the
> argument is constantly establishing between different levels of
> abstraction: at each, the premises in play must be distinguished from those
> which - for the sake of argument - have to be held constant. The movement
> to another level of magnification (to deploy the microscope metaphor)
> requires the specifying of further conditions of existence not supplied at
> a previous, more abstract level: in this way, by successive abstractions of
> different magnitudes, to move towards the constitution, the reproduction,
> of 'the concrete in thought' as an effect of a certain kind of thinking.
> This method is adequately represented in neither the absolutism of
> Theoretical Practice, in structuralism, nor in the anti-abstraction
> 'Poverty of Theory' position...."
>
> Doug
>