Indeed. It's become a shibboleth for the faithful -- one more reason I don't call myself a Marxist. (Marx didn't either.)
"The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth — i.e. the reality and power, the this-sidedness of his thinking in practice. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking that is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question."
As someone once said. What practical or intellectual value has value theory displayed for about a century? I can debate the fine points of value theory with the best of them, but I don't see the point. There's nothing that Marx does with value theory, a tool he was sort of stuck with as the dominant view of political economy in his day, that can't be done easier or better without it. That's the real lesson of the neo-Ricardan critique.
However, I am afraid that you and I are talking across an unbridgable divide here.
--- tfast <tfast at yorku.ca> wrote:
> Classic, just classic. Theology indeed.
>
> Travis
>
>
> >
> > I'm just a junior law prof at a fourth tier law
> > school, unable to repress anyone except maybe some
> > students.
> >
> > However, I can observe that Marx would not say
> that
> > value theory was an "eternal truth," even if he
> > thought it was true, he thought it was true only
> of
> > generalized, highly commoditized market societies.
> (A
> > point insisted on by Lukacs, inter alia.)
> >
> > I don't concede the point, and don't care to argue
> it;
> > it strikes me as boring theology at this point.
> Time
> > remains important and illuminated by Marx's
> thought,
> > but not by the value debates. Those that think
> > otherwise are free to believe and write as they
> like.
> >
> > What is interesting to me here is that in the
> > mid-1960s Soviet and American social scientists
> > thought that time was a politically neutral
> subject --
> > a genuinely draw dropping assumption that reveals
> a
> > depth of ignorance about Marxism that itself tells
> us
> > a lot about the the nature of the cold war and
> what,
> > in the end, was won or lost in that conflict.
> >
> > --- tfast <tfast at yorku.ca> wrote:
> >
> > >
> > >
> > > > Time is after all the core of Marx's critique
> of
> > > > political economy -- not just in the
> refinement
> > > and
> > > > debate (please let it rest) about value
> theory, >
> > >
> > > Eternal truths, they never rest, but always
> resist
> > > repression. It is one of
> > > the great events of life that I was alive to see
> > > this debate so squarely won
> > > by the LTOV.
> > >
> > > Travis
> > >
> > > ___________________________________
> > >
> >
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