Re: The materialist road...

[djones@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (rakesh bhandari)]

 David, I am really confused by the passage from Althusser (below) which
you cited.  Does Marx begin with the abstraction of value?  Isn't it this
exact misinterpretation of his method which Marx corrects in--ironically
enough for Althusser-- Notes on Adolph Wagner?   Doesn't Marx begin with
the commodity, not as Althusser would have it "the abstraction of value"?
Martha Campbell has a very elegant reconstruction of  how Marx "connects
the dominance of the commodity to capitalist production by a series of
sufficient conditions for the commodity's presence."  (142-3) I think there
are complex reasons why Marx does not begin by POSITING capitalist
relations of exploitation.  But surely this must be a topic for sustained
investigation.

 Martha Campbell's essay is in Fred Moseley, ed. Marx's Method in Capital:
A Re-examination.

                                        rakesh


>
>"In an infinitely more subtle form [than in the _German Ideology_ and the
>1859 Preface-- D.M.], this same idealism haunts _Capital_ itself.  We have
>learned to recognise in _Capital_'s 'mode of exposition', however
>impressive, the fictive unity imposed upon it from the outset by the
>requirement of beginning with the abstraction of value -- i.e. with the
>homogeneity imposed upon it by the field of commensurability -- without
>having previously posited capitalist relations of exploitation in the
>process."
>
>(_Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists and Other
>Essays_, p. 272)



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