In part, WS wrote;
>>Marx, being a closet Aristotelian, assumed that economic essence i.e. value resides in things themselves - because only then it requires an explanation of its origins. The nominalist position does not require any explanations other than referring to pure convention - in fact seeking an "explanation" whether there is a causal relation between a name and what it denotes is an interesting philosophical speculation which nonetheless does not get very far (cf. Wittgenstein).>>
Well, to make the comparisons more contemperaneous than Plato and Aristotle but broader than Wittgenstein, perhaps we might say that Marx ends up taking a position more like Meinong than Frege about 'abstract things'. That is, his position, if we bother to thing about it as an abstraction about an abstraction, could be characterized as 'objective idealism' over all out Platonism.
(I might add that modern economics might take some clues from Brentano and Meinong and could benefit from a more complete psychology--even the sort Brad DeLong does--than the threadbare behaviourism that characterizes it now.)
Next, WS also writes:
>>I think it was a very clever rhetorical trick that served the cause of labor well - but its usefulness expired when the labor was able to obtain better terms of employment, and the power struggle between labor and capital shifted to new dimensions. The realist notion of value i.e. is something embedded in things being exchanged rather than a mere product of the system of exchange is not tenable -as it can be easily demonstrated that that things whose material properties are ndistinguishable from those of others things have nonetheless a greater value than those other things (which is what makes the fashion industry possible). The proposition that the rich are rich because they stole something tangible from the poor is silly and can be easily debunked. There are more effective and defensible ways of criticizing systems of exchange that produce gross inequalities or wasteful use of resources. So LTV should be but to the museum of human thought.>>
Here I have to disagree. Labour could organise and produce under cooperatives or government corporations (and does so around the world, regardless of how oblivious most Americans or British are to this) and, so long as such entities did not function as capital, labour would not be exploited to the extent that it is in the capitalist-controlled production of goods and services--simply because capital/capitalist management (such as managers with stock holdings) would not and could not extract profits. This is why, until credit unions were forced to become more like banks (by overt legislation in the case of the US), credit unions could return more interest on a savings account and give out car and housing loans and lower interest rates to borrowers with more lax standards of 'credit worthiness'. Credit unions didn't have to pay out to capital and its demands for its parasitic, unproductive share, whereas banks have to pay out hundreds of millions even billions of dollars to capital. So Marxist concepts such as the Marxist notion of LTV still has pragmatic value in analysing the current state of things and how things could be changed for less exploitation. Work isn't necessarily exploitation. Extraction of profits to pay capital (with its owners equity as its 'natural right') is.
Next, Turbolo, in part, contributed and rhetorically asks:
>>The concept of abstract labor has been a major difficulty in the interpretation of the labor theory of value. Is it simply a theoretical construct, invented by Marx for analytical purposes? If so, it would seem vulnerable to the following objection: Why (one may ask) are we justified in conceiving of labor abstractly? If the only answer is that labor, unless so conceived, could not figure as the substance of value, Marx might be justly accused of arguing in circular fashion. In what follows, we shall argue that the reduction of concrete to abstract labor takes place not merely in the mind of Marx, but in reality; that this reduction is necessary for the reproduction of capitalist society.>>
I think it was already an abstraction long before Marx grabbed a hold of it. But even in a totally materialist scheme of conception one is forced to admit that a model or representation of a social-economic-political entity is still a MODEL. But, paradoxically, it must be pointed out that even the model then becomes part of the thing it is supposed to, in part, model. That is the trap all social thinkers who wish to change the world (or not) are stuck in. Marx is no more circular than any other social-political-economic theorist; he's just more systematic and complete and interesting than people like Bradford of Berkeley.
Now I find the Keynesian and Friedmanite critiques of Marx laughable, but critiques of Marx can go in other directions. Some post-structuralists read Marx for his Hegelianism; others emphasised his forerunner status as a 'STRUCTURALIST'. Guattari said that Marxism lacks 'desire', and so he might say things like this:
"Marxism, in all its forms, is lacking in desire and loses its essence by tending towards bureaucratism and humanism, while Freudianism has not merely ignored the class struggle from the first, but has, further, continually falsified earlier discoveries relative to unconscious desire by trying to handcuff them to the family and social norms of the prevailing order....Detached scraps of Marxism can and should contribute to the praxis that bears on the class struggle. The very notion of a theory of and a separation between the private pursuit of desire and the public field of conflicts of interest leads implicitly to capitalist integration. Private ownership of the means of production is intrinsically bound up with making desire the property of self, the family and the social order. First, every approach to desire on the part of the worker is blocked, by familialist castration and the traps of consumerism, and so on; after which it is not hard to take possession of his labour-power. It is Capital's first requirement to separate desire from work. The mission of the theorists who serve it is therefore to separate political economy from the economy of desire. Work and desire are in contradiction only in the framework of the clearly defined production relations, social relations and family relations of capitalism and bureaucratic socialism. No alienation of desire, no psycho-sexual complex, is radically and ultimately isolable from external repression and psycho-social complexes. "
And:
"A society in which all production is geared to the law of profit tends to make a permanent separation between desire-production and social production. The former falls into the individual sphere, whereas the lattre is bound up with working for profit. The question we must ask is whether the things produced by desire--a dream, an act of love, a realized Utopia--will ever achieve the same value on the social plane as the things produced commercially, such as cars or cooking fat? The value of anything depends, of course, on the combination of labour-force and available technology (that is, variable and fixed capital), but also, and far more basically, on its relation to the dividing line between what is accepted by desire and what is rejected. All the capitalist cares about are the various desire and production machines that he can link up to his exploitation machine: your arms if you are a street-sweeper, your intellignece if you are an engineer, your looks if you are a cover-girl; not merely does he not give a damn about anything else--he doesn't even want to hear people talking about it. Any voice that might be heard speaking up for other things can only interfere with the order of his production system. So, though desire machines proliferate among the industrial and social machines, they are always being closely watched, channelled, isolated from one another, put into compartments. What we have to find out is whether this alienating control, which is believed to be legitimate and indeed inherent in the social situation of human beings, can ever be overcome." ("Molecular Revolution and Class Stuggle", in 'Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics', 1984, Penguin/Peregrine Books, pp. 254-5)
To conclude, I should think that, if a communist thinker as vital a Guattari has use for LTV, we still do as well. It's not a matter of taking one perspective but appreciating some of the better ones. Now to do something about the mono-cultural, nativist bent of the discussion about psychotherapy. Fugazy
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