>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.
No one was talking about explaining relative prices or doing profits projections lime some Wall Street tout. What I'm objecting to is the style of Marxian PE that treats the "essence" of the game as abstracting from history, nations, politics. I don't see how you can say anything terribly enlightening about capitalism since WW II without talking about, say, US-Japan rivalries, the rise of East Asia, the transformation of the international monetary system, the liberation of cross-border capital flows, the evolution of the multinational corporation, etc. Hall's point is that Marx's innovation and power depends "not on the simple exercise of abstraction but on the movement and relations which the argument is constantly establishing between different levels of abstraction." I heard none of that in Mattick - only the kind of abstraction that Hall attributes to the structuralists (whom he opposes to the culturalist/experiential school of Raymond Williams & E.P. Thompson). And, as I said the other day, Harvey is right that you can't talk about capitalism without talking about how it plays itself out across space, which means abstracting from nations and capital/trade flows takes you in exactly the wrong direction.
Doug