I am very interested in the ongoing discussion on academia, intellectuals, jargon etc. and look forward to having enough time to compose a response. For now, I'd just like to pass along an anecdote on Capital.
The first time I tried to read Marx, I was a second-year graduate student at UC Berkeley (in English) and I simply could not understand what he was talking about. __________
Yes, you must have read it in english--couldn't have read it in Brad's economics dept or about it in the journal which he edits. By the way, have you read SS Prawer's wonderful Karl Marx and World Literature? ________
Anyway, I spent an entire year sitting with every employee in that company: accounts payable, billing, cost accounting, etc. and documented every step of their jobs. THEN I read Capital again and realized that Marx was making nothing up. He was simply describing/analyzing the way things really work in the real capitalist world. __________ the problem here of course is that the first part does not analyze the labor process per se.
True enough, Marx attempts to show that each act of labor can be described in terms of its concrete aspect (as tailoring, weaving, etc) and in terms of an abstract aspect (as an aliquot of the social labor time upon which any society depends for its reproduction).
Of course no act of labor (save one) immediately counts as socially necessary labor time in this society; it is only through the exchange of its product that an act of labor proves itself to have been socially necessary, to have had a place in social labor. For that to be accomplished, each commodity then has to request an exchange with the money commodity which always already incarnates value. Marx tries to explain this polarization between commodities and money in a dizzying, dialectical exposition.
Marx also tries to show that in the exchange relationship these commodities count as aliquots of social labor time, as value, as the expenditure of the *abstract* labor which they represent.
Marx corrects the classical labor theory of value by respecifying it as an abstract labor theory of value. Nine out of ten commentators on Marx don't grasp this--for an important exception, see Wm J Blake Marxian economic theory and its criticism. NY: Corden Press, 1939
In the exchange relationship commodities do not count in terms of their use value which results from their qualities as derived from the concrete labor embodied in them. Of course a commodity must prove to have been a social use value to be a value, but its use value which results from the kind of concrete labor embodied therein is not expressed in the exchange relationship itself, in its price.
The obvious objection is that land, golden meteors all have exchange value but embody neither any form of concrete labor nor represent any fraction of social labor.
Marx says that he begins by restricting himself to the vast accumulation of commodities produced by means of wage labor. this is what is distinctive and new about capitalism; the secrets of this social formation are to be discovered in the examination of this characteristic product.
Yours, Rakesh