[PEN-L:2362] Re: The V-word

[blairs@xxxxxxxxxxx (Blair Sandler)]

At 11:02 AM 1/15/96, Mike Meeropol wrote:
>Marx's approach stated that the relationship was the result of HUMAN EFFORT
>-- both past and present.
>
>I still haven't been convinced that he or his followers have made a good
>enough case for that particular yardstick.  the biosphere, the "gaia-given"
>resources make significant contributions and their abuse changes the type of
>human effort needed to produce things drastically over the eons!

I also found Alan's post helpful in clarifying some things. In regard to
Michael's point, I think here is one instance of the value ;-) of
"overdetermination": We can "define" value as human effort, and recognize
that the amount of human effort required to produce any given use-value is
radically contingent, constituted by all kinds of social and natural
processes, themselves in part constituted by their own conditions of
existence, including, inter alia, value!

To put the thing in the overly-simplistic terms of popular
environmentalism, overdetermination is the equivalent in epistemology of
the ecological concept that the whole world is a web, that everything is
connected.

Blair