absolute general law of capitalist accumulation/dialectics and logic

[Charles Brown <cbrown@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

by Devine, James


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But for Marx, a "contradiction" was an empirical (real, practical)
phenomenon,
unlike the "contradiction" in logic. A social organization -- such as
capitalism -- was a whole or totality, but in its "structure," there were
different parts that didn't work together well. (Kinda like putting an
English-unit part in a car that has an engine that was specified & built
using
metric units, as my father did once. Or like when NASA used metric and the
private contractor used the English system, so the Mars probe crashed.) In
Marx's case, the contradictions of capitalism were problems within the
system
such as class antagonism and competition amongst the capitalists, summarized
by
Engels as the contradiction between socialized production (the whole) and
individualized appropriation (the parts).

^^^^
CB: Wouldn't you say that also for Marx, contradictions in the capitalist
system are the motives for it to change into a different system, i.e.
socialism ?  Contradiction as the basis for change is a dialectical concept.
Marx deals with dialectical, not formal logical contradictions.

The contradictions dealt with in the absolute general law of capitalist
accumulation are the poverty and unemployment that inherently accompany
technological progress under capitalist relations of production, a
contradiction of regress and progress, with regress being "absolute" and
progress relative.