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Re: "Blindly operating averages" and price-value divergence

--- Jim Devine <jdevine03@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> The word "essence," unfortunately, has idealist
> connotations.

But abstract labour *is* an ideal! It is because
commodities are exchanged through a universal medium
(money) that their physical qualities are necessarily
abstracted from in favor of a shared "essence."

In the first printing of Capital, unfortunately not
reprinted in the subsequent edition but reprinted in
Iring Fetscher's five-volume Marx anthology, there is
a great analogy by Marx about how it's like in
addition to all these real animals like rabbits or
tigers there actually existed an independent, actual
being called an "animal."  That's precisely what is so
topsy-turvy about the value form.  It is an
idealization with material force.

Lenin once remarked that intelligent idealism is
closer to Marxism than vulgar materialism.





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