-----Original Message----- From: Cian O'Connor <cian_oconnor at yahoo.co.uk> To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Date: Tuesday, January 01, 2002 4:23 PM Subject: Re: Marxism is a science
>I think you're talking about something else. Unless
>I've read Scott very badly wrong, he's saying that
>Marx's investigation was not a dispassionate objective
>one. Rather Marx came with preconceived ideas about
>morality, the way the world is, etc and tried to prove
>them.
Not exactly. Marx had a preconceived sense of morality - everyone does - but he sought explicitly to understand the way things are, not the way he would like them to be. I think a good case can be made that his predictions of an inevitable proletarian revolution were optimistic and tinged by his deisre that such a thing come to pass, and a case can be made that no one is ever completely able to escape thier preconceptions, but in that sense Marx tried very hard to be objective.
Subjective is not a synonym of preconceived. Subjective merely means that something may only make exist within a certain framework of ideas. Marx established a theoretical framework which he thought explained the phenomena occuring around him better than the alternatives and could inform better actions than other existing frameworks.
I don't mean that Marx decided in advance what he thought was right and simply sought out information to support it. Or at least, I don't think he did so more than anyone else does.
I think you and I are using different definitions of "subjective." Subjective is not the same as opinion. Phillip K. Dick definied reality as things that are still there when you've stopped believing in them. (Bruno Latour seems to define reality in the same way.) If you stop believing in electrons, you'll have a hard time finding them. Nonetheless, electrons are not just an opinion that varies from person to person. Subjective is any phenomena whose existence is linked to the perspective of the observer: their theoretical framework, their physical frame of reference, the mediating tools that they perceive the universe through.
By this standard, Marxism is subjective, but then so is physics. But it isn't arbitrary, and it isn't just opinion.
>The problem with the objectivity of value, as I see
>it, is that objects and actions quite obviously have
>different value to different people. Unless one moves
>to a transactional world based upon something other
>than money, I can't really see any model other than
>the free market which can deal with this. And if there
>is a good replacement for money I'd love to know what
>it is.
Marx certainly admitted that individuals have personal notions of use value. That is one definition of value. There are other definitions of value that don't depend on individual opinions, but aren't inherently more "real." I don't think anyone argues that labour value as Marx definied it is fictional, but such a measurement isn't necessarily good for anything. The argument against labour value is that you don't learn anything by making such a measurement, and Marx' argument is that you do learn useful things by such a measure.
We could define, for example, a "corn value" for everything in the world by measuring how much corn was consumed in its manufacture. This value is just as subjective (and just as objective) as labour value. But no one argues that "corn value" means anything. It seems to me that Sraffa made an argument of this sort.
It is ridiculous to conflate labour value with use value or price determined on a market. They are no more the same thing than weight and height: two related measurements, but not measurements that are directly convertable by a simple formula into each other.
Scott Martens