Re: (OPE-L) logical order and historical order

[Rakesh Bhandari <rakeshb@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Title: Re: (OPE-L) logical order and historical order

> While Marx, at various steps in _Capital_, suggests that a
> particular logical category or trendency is mirrored by an
> actual historical process, the question is whether this
> represents a _necessary_ step in the dialectical reconstruction
> in thought of the subject matter.

do not understand why this is the question, Jerry. I don't think Marx is pointing to necessary steps but practical problems in the lower forms of value as having motivated their development. Marx's dialectic is at least partially a logic of practice, of real history. Hegel's seem for Marx too idealist, too logical, too confined to changes only in political constitutions, thus too removed from real history.

>  You will, of course, recall
> what Marx wrote in the "Introduction" to the _Grundrisse_
> about
> why one should _not_ begin with population.

don't quite understand relevance of this.

>
> I suppose we could go on to discuss
> simple commodity production

I think the tendency to exchange at value is  weak in simple commmodity production on the basis of an accepted universal form of value and weaker still in the expanded and simple/accidental forms of value. Marx should have made this clearer in the first part of Capital, volume I. The tendency towards exchange at value gains in strength the more exchange tends to be at (transformed) value: the law of value only actually governs in indirect form.

rb