[lbo-talk] profits

Ted Winslow egwinslow at rogers.com
Thu Aug 19 09:32:37 PDT 2010


Carrol Cox wrote:


> Roberet
> Albritton (and I'm wrting this from vague memory since I can't check the
> text) suggests three "levels" in respect to economic activity. There is
> Critique (as in Marx) of the "ideal average" of capitalism; there is
> mid-level theory (as in dealing with a particular form of capitalism (as
> with British 195h-c liberal capitalism) and there is HISTORY, which
> deals with present economic activity.

This is the Japanese "Marxism" Albritton has appropriated from Uno and Tom Sekine.

Like your own, its version of the "dialectic" of Capital has no space for Marx's.

Marx's sublates Hegel's idea of "the dialectic" as "the higher dialectic of the conception," an idea incorporated, among other ways, in the role in the development and actualization of "self-conscious reason" assigned to "self-estrangement" within the labour process.

Understood in this way, the opening three chapters of Capital and the work as a whole are implementing the claims made in the 1843 letter to Ruge that:

"Reason has always existed, but not always in a reasonable form. The critic can therefore start out from any form of theoretical and practical consciousness and from the forms peculiar to existing reality develop the true reality as its obligation and its final goal." http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/letters/43_09.htm

Ted



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