[lbo-talk] Anselm Jappe

abu hartal abuhartal at hotmail.com
Mon Sep 18 00:47:29 PDT 2006


Not surprised to discover Angelus defending Jappe who wrote a very fine book on Debord.

"Jappe considers most of Marx's empirical work " obsolete" for our times."

What is meant by Marx's empirical work? Why and how is it obsolete? Jappe must have something of an argument here. Marx is always obsolete--his value theory is obsolete, his empirical work is obsolete, his work has been rendered obsolete by Keynes, the collapse of non market alternatives has made Marx practically obsolete. But he remains more than ever the next great thinker.

I am also skeptical of the importance given by Jappe to abstraction and value. How does Marx theorize the role of use value in the capitalist economy?

I am not sure what is meant by the dominance of value but I don't see how an abstraction can successfully subordinate all that is material or concrete.

Is this the old Polanyian argument that pre capitalist economies are embedded in society while capitalist economies are autonomous, governed by a strictly economic logic? But this can easily be shown to be a mystified image of both pre capitalist and capitalist economies.

Also, the so called self expansion of value can find barriers in the material means of production in which capital value has already been sunk.

So is the argument here that capital misunderstands itself as a pure abstraction or that it is in fact a pure abstraction. And what is abstract here again?

Angelus, I did not find this review very helpful. It seemed to be speaking to people already in the know.

Confused yet again, Abu Hartal

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