"Observable relationships"?

Eric Franz Leher fr102anz at netvigator.com
Sun Aug 12 07:04:38 PDT 2001


Carrol Cox wrote:


> I agree with the whole of your post, but this part is quite wrong.
> Relationships are _not_ observable. Even the relationship of your hand
> to the card it is holding is not observable. (You can see the hand and
> the card, but you infer the relationship.) This is rather fundamental to
> Marxism: ". . .just as in general ratios [translated "relations" by
> Nicolaus] can only be _thought_ if they are to be fixed, as distinct
> from the sujects which are in that ratio to each other" (MECW 28, p.81).
> If relations were observable commodity fetishism would not exist -- and
> appearance and reality would coincide.
>

So if I had said 'able to be inferred' instead of 'observable' there wouldn't be a problem - correct?

Though I would like to pretend this was merely sloppy usage, I actually hadn't thought of this before. However, I am pleased that you have been able to connect my somewhat peripheral post to something more or less at the heart of this list - Marxism - shaky though my grasp of this still is.

And now something to annoy you. You must infer relationships, but presumably can observe objects (my hand, the card). But that can't be quite right either - many objects are composites of other objects, so in observing such an object, you are at the same time inferring the relationships between its parts. In other words there is no such thing as strict observation - observation _always_ comes with inference attached. So when I talk about 'observing' relationships, I really mean 'inferring' them!

Right or wrong? Well it doesn't help me anyway. To get off the hook I have to prove not that observation implies inference, but that they are synonomous, which they aren't. DAMN.

Enough play. Like I said above, Marxism is still a struggle for me. The concept of the dialectic is particularly difficult. I recall a while back you said you had a text file of chapter 4 (?) of Ollman's on this and were willing to pass it on. I'd like to receive this if I could. Other stuff I've looked at has been obfuscatory rather than helpful.

Many thanks in advance.

Eric Leher



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