[lbo-talk] law of value

bhandari at berkeley.edu bhandari at berkeley.edu
Fri Nov 30 13:02:48 PST 2007


Seth, Most quickly I mean only this at this point by contradiction : "two demands, both necessary for the successful working of the same system, but mutually incompatible." (Andrew Collier)So following Collier I gave the example of the system demanding both the ossification and the fluidity of the personality. Perhaps not a contradiction in the same aspect, at the same time, but the person may certainly feel pulled apart. Haven't yet Richard Sennett's work on this question.

I also tried to indicate how the system of general commodity production which is both a form for the organization of social labor and a system of private appropriation creates both a dynamic tendency for price to be regulated by value while creating another contradictory tendency for price adjustments to allow for profit rate equalization. Both tendencies are real or at least virtual, yet they are incompatible; the question is how they are reconciled. Marx's answer of course: price of production.

Now there are much deeper questions: how is the value form a contradictory unity of relative and general positions? We'll have to work through Ilyenkov here. All this is on line. See for example the chapter on contradiction in Dialectical Logic. There is also interesting works by Sean Sayers on his website. Collier does not want to go as far as they do in challenging law of non contradiction and law of excluded middle. ANd I haven't done so.

And then there is the work of those towering Marxist scientists--JBS Haldane, Hyman Levy, Joseph Bernal, Marcel Prenant and their heirs Levins and Lewontin and Garland Allen. Bukharin's Philosophical Arabesques is less concrete but quite stimulating in parts.

And as I said I have been reading William Byers' book on paradox and ambiguity in mathematics which echoes some of Haldane's findings.

Sorry to drop names, can't do more now.

Given the presence of so many stimulating minds on this list, I would love to see this dicussion go on and on.

YOurs, Rakesh



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