[OPE-L:2245] Re: value form

["Michael J Williams" <michael@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

In reply to Chris:

I have in mind predication as something stronger than merely a grammatical
device - more like a kind of ontological commitment that constrasts a
predicate (or property) to a substance (or, in some accounts 'subject',
possible as in Kant, a purely logical construct) that has or bears such
predicates or properties.
Thus I assert:
'C is valuable (= has Value)'
'C is *not* Value'
'M aspires to be Value for itself'
'K self-valorises' (= has increasing Value)

Does that make sense?

Michael
____________________
Dr Michael Williams
Economics and Social Sciences
De Montfort University
Milton Keynes
UK
fax: 0870 133 1147
http://www.mk.dmu.ac.uk/~mwilliam
[This message may be in html, and any attachments may be in MSWord 97. If
you have difficulty reading either, please let me know.]
----- Original Message -----
From: C. J. Arthur <cjarthur@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <ope-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Wednesday, January 19, 2000 3:39 PM
Subject: [OPE-L:2230] value form


> Mike W wrote
> "Approaching it from another angle, Value neither is nor has a substantial
> content. Value is rather a predicate. A social system predicates and
> re-predicates a value 'to' commodities. Goods and services are not value,
> rather they have a (n exchange) value and so are Commodities. The social
> object nearest to actually *being value* as can exist is Money, the sole
> autonomous manifestation of value. In this sense it is (almost) pure value
> form; contentless form; a predicate without a substantial subject. It is
> this tendential escape of the value-form from any link with use-value
> (itself already a systemically alienated form of existence of human
> usefulness) that constitutes the void at the centre of capitalism. Of
course
> it is absurd to have the allocation of human creative work regulated by a
> near contentless form. But it is the actually existing systemic absurdity
of
> capitalism, not the absurdity of a mistaken conceptualisation."
>
> Grammatical predication covers a wide range of substantive attributions.
> Compare 'C is valuable'; 'C is a value"; 'M is value for itself'; 'K is
> self-valorising value'. marx said all these; but clearly the attribute
> predicated is more essential at each level. Which do you accept? If any
but
> the first then you are committed to the position that value is a social
> substance of some sort - or else that the rest are all figures of speech.
> Chris
>
> P. S. Please note that I have a new Email address,
> <cjarthur@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
> but the old one will also run until next summer. (To be doubly sure load
both!)
>