value vs price

["Charles Brown" <CharlesB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

 value vs price
by Devine, James
05 February 2002 19:46 UTC


> On exploitation, my take is that he noticed that in FACT,
> throughout history, exploited and oppressed classes struggle
> against their exploitation and oppression.  Opposition to
> exploitation is a human natural ethical project ; the "is" of
> history and the "ought" of what is to be done are united in
> the class struggle of exploited classes.

Accepting the FACT of exploitation doesn't autonomatically mean that one
should side with the exploited. Many -- including many members of the
working class -- have concluded that backing the (currently) winning side is
the best strategy.

^^^^^^^^^
CB: Marx and Engels' theory of historical materialism by which history is understood as a history of class struggles between oppressor and oppressing classes ( nutshelled in _The Manifesto_, but underpinning even _Capital_ and their whole approach) cognizes that every member of every oppressed class is not class conscious all or even most of the time.

Note that revolutions are rare occurrences in the total time of history in Marx and Engels schemes. In most of the actual time of history society is not in revolution, and most oppressed workers don't have the consciousness of their class , class consciousness. So, it is normal for there to be many or most of the oppressed class going along to get along, failing in rebellion, fighting each other more than the ruling class, no ? This paradox is implicit in Engels and Marx's approach. If the most of the oppressed classes of history were not confused on the issue of class most of the time , ruling classes couldn't rule, because the latter are always tiny elites oppressing mass majorities.

Revolutions are like plate tectonic shifts in geology. They occur rarely , but their potential and tension are constant even through the normal times of  small earthquakes ( That's dialectics)


So, of course, there are specific moments when groups ,even generations of workers are on the wrong side in the class battles ( Engels wrote of bourgeosification , or something like that, of some British workers).

 Marxism's founders' writing doesn't make all "what is to be done" decisions easy. Marxists don't claim that. Only those who want  to misrepresent Marxism as simplistic claim that sort of "yea, yea, or nay, nay" for Marxism.


^^^^^^^


It's not easy to derive a clear and unambiguous "ought" out of an "is."
Jim Devine

^^^^^^^^

CB: It is true that Marxism is a combination of clarity and ambiguity of concepts that are not clearly defined, i.e. rigid  binaries.  Part of this is because everything is in motion, even "ethics". This is difficult for all of us because we all have some sense that ethics ,of all things, is a system of eternal , unchanging principles.

 I say all of us because we all have some influence of metaphysical ethics on us through religion or something; Note that Engels cleverly ( double entendre) in _Anti-Duhring_ uses a quote from Jesus as the main metaphysical ethicist (for the masses in England and Europe then) who thinks in binaries: "yea, yea or nay, nay" ( see below). This is a poetic uniting of an analysis of  the "is " and of the "ought" by Engels.

^^^^^

"To the metaphysician, things and their mental reflexes, ideas, are isolated, are to be considered one after the other and apart from each other, are objects of investigation fixed, rigid, given once for all. He thinks in absolutely irreconcilable antitheses. "His communication is 'yea, yea; nay, nay'; for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil." [Matthew 5:37. ― Ed.] For him a thing either exists or does not exist; a thing cannot at the same time be itself and something else. Positive and negative absolutely exclude one another, cause and effect stand in a rigid antithesis one to the other.

At first sight this mode of thinking seems to us very luminous, because it is that of so-called sound common sense. Only sound common sense, respectable fellow that he is, in the homely realm of his own four walls, has very wonderful adventures directly he ventures out into the wide world of research. And the metaphysical mode of thought, justifiable and even necessary as it is in a number of domains whose extent varies according to the nature of the particular object of investigation, sooner or later reaches a limit, beyond which it becomes one-sided, restricted, abstract, lost in insoluble contradictions. In the contemplation of individual things it forgets the connection between them; in the contemplation of their existence, it forgets the beginning and end of that existence; of their repose, it forgets their motion. It cannot see the wood for the trees.

For everyday purposes we know and can say, e.g., whether an animal is alive or not. But, upon closer inquiry, we find that this is, in many cases, a very complex question, as the jurists know very well. They have cudgelled their brains in vain to discover a rational limit beyond which the killing of the child in its mother's womb is murder. It is just as impossible to determine absolutely the moment of death, for physiology proves that death is not an instantaneous momentary phenomenon, but a very protracted process.

In like manner, every organic being is every moment the same and not the same, every moment it assimilates matter supplied from without, and gets rid of other matter; every moment some cells of its body die and others build themselves anew; in a longer or shorter time the matter of its body is completely renewed, and is replaced by other atoms of matter, so that every organic being is always itself, and yet something other than itself.

Further, we find upon closer investigation that the two poles of an antithesis positive and negative, e.g., are as inseparable as they are opposed and that despite all their opposition, they mutually interpenetrate. And we find, in like manner, that cause and effect are conceptions which only hold good in their application to individual cases; but as soon as we consider the individual cases in their general connection with the universe as a whole, they run into each other, and they become confounded when we contemplate that universal action and reaction in which causes and effects are eternally changing places, so that what is effect here and now will be cause there and then, and vice versa.

None of these processes and modes of thought enters into the framework of metaphysical reasoning. Dialectics, on the other hand, comprehends things and their representations, ideas, in their essential connection, concatenation, motion, origin, and ending. Such processes as those mentioned above are, therefore, so many corroborations of its own method of procedure. "  etc.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/introduction.htm