Alan writes, appealing to Bertell Ollman and Derek Sayer:
I've been only half following all that has gone one here but I've kept on thinking about Ollman's chapter, in Alienation, titled "Words Like Bats" and, rereading a couple chapters of Derek Sayer's book, The Violence of Abstraction, I found this:
"An important corollary of Ollman’s argument — but a thesis which can also be independently defended on other grounds — is that Marx’s general, transhistorical categories (like those of the 1859 Preface) acquire substantive definition from, and only from, the particular historical contexts to which they are applied. They are not applicable without change across space and time, because their content changes with the reality they seek to comprehend. This means that they cannot be substantively defined transhistorically; as general categories, they are necessarily empirically open-ended. We cannot offer a universally applicable definition, of an empirical sort, of what for instance productive forces or production relations are. Conversely, in so far as Marx’s concepts are substantive categories the concepts of concrete empirical phenomena — they are necessarily historical categories: a feudal force, a capitalist relation, and so on. Their content is historically specific, and their validity historically circumscribed."