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

[Ted Winslow <egwinslow@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Jim Devine wrote:

> labor in the ideal community isn't completely (is that what
> "essentially" means?) different from all prior forms or from labor
> under capitalism. It's definitely different, but there are some shared
> characterists. There is a tranhistorical "essence" to labor, as in
> Marx's CAPITAL, vol. 1, chapter 7, section 1.

In a process of development characterized by "internal relations,"  
later forms "sublate" earlier forms so "essentially different"  
doesn't mean completely different.  Thus the "worst architect" shares  
with the best that she first creates the structure in the mind before  
building it in reality.

My point was that the "new" that comes into existence through this  
process can't be completely elaborated in terms of characteristics  
shared with what has previously been actual.  It actualizes "forms"  
that have only existed previously as potentials.

Historical explanations that invoke, as an essential explanatory  
factor, "forms" that have hitherto only existed potentially have such  
"forms" in common with Plato's ontology.  There's reason to believe,  
in fact, that, in Marx's case, they "sublate" this and other features  
of that ontology.

In this, Marx is also sublating Hegel who, in the Philosophy of  
History, approvingly cites the following claim of Sophocles:

“Sophocles in his Antigone, says, ‘The divine commands are not of  
yesterday, nor of today; no, they have an infinite existence, and no  
one could say whence they came.’ The laws of morality are not  
accidental, but are the essentially Rational.”
http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/hi/history4.htm

The same idea is impliict in following claim in the Critique of the  
Gotha Programme:

"In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving  
subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and  
therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has  
vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life's  
prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the  
all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co- 
operative wealth flow more abundantly -- only then then can the  
narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and  
society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability,  
to each according to his needs!"
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch01.htm

This also makes the "all-around development of the individual" a  
prerequisite for the actualization of the ideal ethical form pointed  
to at the end.

Ted