[Xmca-l] Re: Vygotsky,Marx, & summer reading

[David Kellogg]

What other than commodities are the units of capital composed of? That's
easy. Commodities are human relations in a congealed form. Ergo, units of
capital are made of human relations in an uncongealed form. You are not a
fetishist, are you?

My point about actions and activities was precisely that activities are NOT
made up of anything more than actions; that's why activity fails the third
test.

I think that Engestrom tries to show some of the abstract rules, the
community relations and the division of labor that subtends all this
activity, but the distinctions between (e.g.) rules and division of labor,
or division of labor and community, are not too clear. As you say, blurring
is a problem, if our goal is analysis, and an analysis that shows the
heterogeneity (the distinctiveness) of parts.

dk

David Kellogg
Macquarie University

Recent Article: Vygotsky, Halliday, and Hasan: Towards Conceptual
Complementarity

Free E-print Downloadable at:

http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/W7EDsmNSEwnpIKFRG8Up/full

On Tue, Aug 22, 2017 at 9:37 AM, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net> wrote:

> Wow! That's a radical claim, David! What other things (or events) are
> activities composed of??
>
> And while you're at it, what other than commodities are units of capital
> composed of?
>
> Andy
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> Andy Blunden
> http://home.mira.net/~andy
> http://www.brill.com/products/book/origins-collective-decision-making
> On 22/08/2017 6:21 AM, David Kellogg wrote:
>
>> Helena:
>>
>> Yes, the idea that activity is made up of actions, and that if we take
>> away
>> actions from activity nothing remains (Leontiev). To me, this is an
>> admission that the whole is merely a sum of parts. Compare Vygotsky's
>> thought experiment of structuring a game in such a way that we take away
>> all the roles and we see that abstract rules remain (Chapter Seven in*
>> "Mind
>> in Society")*.
>>
>>
>>
>