[Xmca-l] Re: Fwd: Re: What is science?: Where to start doctoral students?
Andy Blunden
andyb@marxists.org
Wed Nov 7 18:41:23 PST 2018
er: "determinant of value"
------------------------------------------------------------
Andy Blunden
http://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/index.htm
On 8/11/2018 1:18 PM, Andy Blunden wrote:
>
> See
> https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/pr/property.htm#PRn62
>
> Hegel sees need (i.e., use-value) as the determinant of
> need. Although later he says that a commodity cannot have
> value unless it is the product of labour, he never
> suggests that the /quantity /of labour needed for its
> production determines value. Thus Hegel accepts the common
> sense view of things, that the value of a thing is
> determined by how useful it is. He did not see the
> contradiction in this claim.
>
> Andy
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> Andy Blunden
> http://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/index.htm
> On 8/11/2018 8:55 AM, Greg Thompson wrote:
>> Andy,
>> I'm interested in the conversation but have very little
>> time to read or dig or do anything other than quickly
>> skim. I was just wondering if you could provide a little
>> bit of the explanation/background for this argument (of
>> yours):
>> "Marx's theory of value is sharply at odds with Hegel's
>> (as elaborated in the /Philosophy of Right/)"
>> It sounds interesting but it also sounds different from
>> what I would have thought/said about it. So I suspect
>> that I have something to learn...
>> If you have no time either, no worries, I'll leave it be.
>> -greg
>>
>>
>> On Wed, Nov 7, 2018 at 5:14 AM Andy Blunden
>> <andyb@marxists.org> wrote:
>>
>> Haydi, you must agree with me that the content, the
>> real significance, of what people say often differs
>> from what they say of themselves and their
>> protagonists. I am a Marxist, and have been since my
>> first reading of Marx in 1967. But you are justified
>> in examining what I do and say, rather than taking me
>> at my word. Everyone knows that Marx made the
>> well-known criticisms of Hegel that you mention. We
>> also know that he praised Hegel and made criticisms
>> of "the materialists." But the point is to examine
>> the content of his action and in particular his
>> scientific writing.
>>
>> "Capital" (particularly its early sections) is
>> modelled on Hegel's Logic. Marx tells us this in the
>> famous passage (/Method of Political Economy/) where
>> he gives the best explanation of the Logic that I
>> know of. As you point out, he went on to make some
>> crucially important criticisms of Hegel in that same
>> passage ("the real subject ..." etc). Obviously Marx
>> is not = Hegel.
>>
>> There are elements of Marx's approach which he takes
>> from Hegel and elements which are in opposition to
>> Hegel's approach. I tried to make this crystal clear
>> in my little article
>> https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/Hegel-idealist.pdf
>> .
>>
>> The ontology of "Capital" is sharply at odds with
>> materialist ontology as it would have been known in
>> the 1860s and equally at odds with the ontology of
>> positivism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries
>> which arose from the crisis of natural science at
>> that time which put an end to naive realism. Marx's
>> theory of value is sharply at odds with Hegel's (as
>> elaborated in the /Philosophy of Right/) and
>> methodologically also at odds with Hegel in that it
>> was not speculative but had a significant streak of
>> empiricism in it. (I describe this in
>> https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/Goethe-Hegel-Marx_public.pdf
>> ).
>>
>> If you look at the MIA Library
>> https://www.marxists.org/archive/index.htm and run
>> your eye down the first 80% of so of the writers
>> listed there. Almost all of these writers declared
>> themselves "Marxists" (not the last 20% or so) and
>> yet you will see a very wide spectrum of views here.
>> No-one has the last word here. My conviction that
>> Marxists have much to learn from Hegel was not
>> lightly arrived at.
>>
>> Andy
>>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------
>> Andy Blunden
>> http://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/index.htm
>> On 7/11/2018 10:22 PM, Haydi Zulfei wrote:
>>> Nice !! Not to get Marx involved in the
>>> discussion!This is the whole thing!
>>> Because if Marx is involved in his original writing
>>> and making the last quote easier:
>>>
>>> Concepts need Conceptioners and conceptioners are ,
>>> as said here also , [Material] Human Beings living
>>> and Acting in their respective Material Surrounding
>>> out of which process Social Relations arise which in
>>> their turn , give birth to Thoughts and Ideas ,
>>> concepts and categories , ideas of the Idea , Logic
>>> and the Absolute , cultures (in Bibler's
>>> terminology) which make Real?? Cosmologies (of
>>> course as META-physics beyond Physical Natural Hard
>>> sciences as these latter sciences deal also with
>>> atoms , electrons neutrons , positrons , quarks ,
>>> galaxies , planets , etc. in their abstract or
>>> Hegelian (concrete as Concept)
>>> ontological/existential?? dependencies (the World
>>> which is outside Mind through Lenin's quote by some
>>> esteemed scholars and the World/s which need a Mind
>>> to claim existence) which is O.K. and in full respect.)
>>>
>>> This is what Marx meant in the last word of the last
>>> quote by "**[[Hence, in
>>> the theoretical method, too, the subject, society,
>>> must always be kept in mind as
>>> the presupposition.]]**"
>>>
>>> Neither the Social Relations have independent Being
>>> nor the sciences which arise from them.
>>>
>>> Every body has the right to think that "phenomena"
>>> of Mind/Thinking have the same Ontology as the
>>> Ontology of the Substantial/Material/Corporeal
>>> Universe does but ascribing this to Marx would be
>>> problematic. This was the beginning of the worry!
>>>
>>> In the same vein , no problem with "Any Category"
>>> first , but no imposition on Marx the more so that
>>> one might keep people in waiting for just a single
>>> evidence to one's Big Claim :-)).
>>>
>>> Marx is quite Robust in his Materialism and towards
>>> Hegel in full clarity and stance with quite
>>> indubious remarks:
>>>
>>> The best of the very Marx for Hegel:
>>>
>>> FROM CAPITAL VOLUME ONE:
>>>
>>> My dialectic method is not only different from the
>>> Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. To Hegel,
>>> the life process of the human brain, i.e., the
>>> process of thinking, which, under the name of “the
>>> Idea,” he even transforms into an independent
>>> subject, is the demiurgos of the [[real]] world, and the
>>> real world is only the external, [[phenomenal form]]
>>> of “the Idea.” With me, on the contrary, the
>>> ideal is nothing else than the material world
>>> reflected by the [[human mind]], and translated into
>>> forms of thought.
>>> The mystifying side of Hegelian dialectic I
>>> criticised nearly thirty years ago, at a time when
>>> it was
>>> still the fashion. But just as I was working at the
>>> first volume of “Das Kapital,” it was the good
>>> pleasure of the peevish, arrogant, mediocre Επιγονοι
>>> [Epigones – Büchner, Dühring and others]
>>> who now talk large in cultured Germany, to treat
>>> Hegel in same way as the brave Moses
>>> Mendelssohn in Lessing’s time treated Spinoza, i.e.,
>>> as a “dead dog.” I [[therefore]] openly avowed
>>> myself the pupil of that mighty thinker, and even
>>> here and there, in the chapter on the theory of
>>> value, coquetted with the modes of expression
>>> peculiar to him. The mystification which dialectic
>>> suffers in [[Hegel’s hands]], by no means prevents
>>> him from being [[the first to present its general
>>> 15 Afterword to the Second German Edition (1873)
>>> form of working]] in a comprehensive and conscious
>>> manner. With him it is standing on its head. It
>>> must be turned right side up again, if you would
>>> discover the rational kernel within the mystical
>>> shell.
>>>
>>>
>>> FROM GRUDERISSE WHICH INCLUDES ALSO THE METHOD OF
>>> POLITICAL ECONOMY
>>>
>>> But do not these simpler categories also have an
>>> independent historical or
>>> natural existence pre-dating the more concrete ones?
>>> That depends. Hegel, for
>>> example, correctly begins the Philosophy of Right
>>> with possession, this being
>>> the subject’s simplest juridical relation. But there
>>> is no possession preceding
>>> the family or master-servant relations, which are
>>> far more concrete relations.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> It follows then naturally, too, that all the
>>> relationships of men can be derived from the concept
>>> of man, man as conceived, the essence of man, Man.
>>> This has been done by the speculative philosophers.
>>> Hegel himself confesses at the end of the
>>> Geschichtsphilosophie that he "has considered the
>>> progress of the concept only" and has represented in
>>> history the "true theodicy". (p.446.) Now one can go
>>> back again to the producers of the "concept", to the
>>> theorists, ideologists and philosophers, and one
>>> comes then to the conclusion that the philosophers,
>>> the thinkers as such, have at all times been
>>> dominant in history: a conclusion, as we see,
>>> already expressed by Hegel. The whole trick of
>>> proving the hegemony of the spirit in history
>>> (hierarchy Stirner calls it) is thus confirmed to
>>> the following three efforts.
>>>
>>> Critique: "humans create themselves out of nothing"
>>> Far from it being true that "out of nothing" I make
>>> myself, for example, a "[public] speaker", the
>>> nothing which forms the basis here is a very
>>> manifold something, the real individual, his speech
>>> organs, a definite stage of physical development, an
>>> existing language and dialects, ears capable of
>>> hearing and a human environment from which it is
>>> possible to hear something, etc., etc. therefore, in
>>> the development of a property something is created
>>> by something out of something, and by no means
>>> comes, as in Hegel's Logic , from nothing, through
>>> nothing to nothing. [Th. I. Abt. 2 of Hegel] p. 162
>>>
>>> Best
>>> Haydi
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Wednesday, November 7, 2018, 5:05:58 AM GMT+3:30,
>>> Adam Poole (16517826) <Adam.Poole@nottingham.edu.cn>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> An interesting point to add to the discussion is the
>>> role that ontology plays as a tacit form of
>>> gatekeeping in many disciplines and journals (though
>>> thankfully, from my experience, not MCA). I have
>>> started to find this out as I have been publishing
>>> papers on International education from my
>>> doctorate (which I am going to defend in December).
>>> As part of this experience, I have found that:
>>>
>>>
>>> The journal article form does not lend itself to
>>> prolonged discussion of ontology due to length
>>> restrictions. So much of what is fundamental to
>>> research is left unsaid, but really needs to be
>>> said! Qualitative researchers need to justify
>>> themselves more substantially than quantitive
>>> researchers because notions of positivism
>>> (validity, generalizability, etc) are normalized and
>>> therefore do not require explication. However, your
>>> typically journal article does not provide enough
>>> room for qualitative researches to justify themselves.
>>>
>>>
>>> Reviewers and journals function as gatekeepers (just
>>> like funding agencies) so it is sometimes necessary
>>> to conform to a certain 'house ontology' in order to
>>> get the work out there. An issue I have found is
>>> that reviewer's can impose their ontology onto the
>>> writer - that is, their implicit assumptions about
>>> reality function as a framework for understanding
>>> and most significantly evaluating the work before
>>> them. If the work does not conform to their
>>> framework - if there is ontological dissonance
>>> - the work is likely to be rejected or
>>> heavily critiqued, leading to substantial rewrites
>>> that change the essential nature of the paper. On
>>> the other side, writers also impose their ontology
>>> onto the reader.
>>>
>>>
>>> This is all a roundabout way to say that ontology is
>>> also inextricably linked to power, and takes on
>>> dialogic and discursive dimensions. Essentially,
>>> ontology can be invoked by either side as a way to
>>> demonize or legitimize research, depending on where
>>> you stand. Ideally, it would be possible to
>>> transcend dualism, but practically speaking dualism
>>> functions as a convenient mechanism for gatekeeping
>>> and control.
>>>
>>>
>>> So whilst I agree completely with Martin (whose book
>>> I started to read yesterday and really like) that
>>> it is imperative to develop ontologies that do not
>>> split researchers into partisan camps, actually
>>> making this happen is problematic, not least of all
>>> because the journal article itself (which I would
>>> argue is the paradigmatic academic form these days)
>>> does not lend itself to this endeavor. The issue is
>>> also an economic one: paywalls, limited space in
>>> journals, pressure to publish, and suddenly
>>> ontological idealism is compromised. I do think a
>>> new form of academic paper needs to be developed
>>> that can support greater reflexivity in order to
>>> bring out our ontological and epistemological
>>> assumptions. The standard 6000ish words, intro
>>> methods, findings, discussion, conclusion structure
>>> leaves little space for reflective/reflexive writing.
>>>
>>>
>>> Anyway, just a doctoral student's take on ontology
>>> in relation to publishing.
>>>
>>>
>>> Adam
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> ------------------------------------------------------------
>>> *From:* xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu
>>> <xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu>
>>> <mailto:xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu> on behalf
>>> of Martin Packer <mpacker@cantab.net>
>>> *Sent:* 07 November 2018 04:11:34
>>> *To:* eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
>>> *Subject:* [Xmca-l] Re: Fwd: Re: What is science?:
>>> Where to start doctoral students?
>>>
>>> Well Huw I’ll take a shot! I’ve never thought that
>>> xmca-ers worry too much about overcomplicating a
>>> thread! :)
>>>
>>> Quantitative research (and I’m talking about the way
>>> this is construed in the social sciences, not in
>>> physics, for example) is generally taught as
>>> experimental design and hypothesis testing, which is
>>> largely the model the logical positivists laid out a
>>> hundred years ago. They considered ontological
>>> (metaphysical) claims to be untestable, and so
>>> unscientific. Consequently, courses in quantitative
>>> research pay little or no attention to ontology. The
>>> result is that the researcher’s ontological
>>> assumptions are tacitly imposed on the phenomenon.
>>> After all, quantitative researchers believe (as the
>>> logical positivists taught them) that they can
>>> ‘operationally define’ their variables. That’s to
>>> say, *they* get to decide what is intelligence, or
>>> poverty, or a student, or a woman…
>>>
>>> The result is something that Alfred Schutz
>>> complained about: "this type of social science does
>>> not deal directly and immediately with the social
>>> life-world common to us all, but with skillfully and
>>> expediently chosen idealizations and formalizations
>>> of the social world.” The result is
>>> "a fictional nonexisting world constructed by the
>>> scientific observer.”
>>>
>>> Harold Garfinkel made a similar point: he rejected
>>> "the worldwide social science movement” with
>>> its “ubiquitous commitments to the policies
>>> and methods of formal analysis and general
>>> representational theorizing.” He saw that the
>>> statistical and formal models built by formal
>>> analysis “lose the very phenomenon that they profess.”
>>>
>>> I’ve tried to attach an article by Spencer (1982)
>>> that is, in my view, making essentially the same
>>> point, but the listserv rejects it:
>>>
>>> Spencer, M. E. (1982). The ontologies of social
>>> science. /Philosophy of the Social Sciences/,
>>> /12/(2), 121-141.
>>>
>>> Typically, social scientists are completely caught
>>> up in the ontology of their discipline, and
>>> completely ignore the ontology of the phenomenon
>>> they are studying - that’s to say, its constitution:
>>> what its constituents are and how they are assembled.
>>>
>>> On the other hand, the issue of the implicit
>>> ontology of qualitative research is the central
>>> theme of my book. I argue there that by and large
>>> Qual has bought into the ontological dualism of
>>> mind-matter, so that researches assume that the
>>> natural sciences study matter (objectivity), and so
>>> qualitative research must study mind (subjectivity).
>>>
>>> The book develops an argument for escaping from this
>>> dualistic ontology, and actually paying attention to
>>> human being - a kind of research that Foucault
>>> called ‘a historical ontology of ourselves.’ Along
>>> the way I try to do justice to what has been called
>>> the ‘ontological turn’ in anthropology, the argument
>>> that different cultures have distinct cosmologies,
>>> rather than distinct cosmovisions - that’s to say,
>>> they have different ontologies; they live in
>>> distinct realities; they don’t simply have different
>>> ways of conceptualizing a single underlying reality.
>>> Latour’s most recent work is making a similar
>>> argument about the different institutions in which
>>> all of us live - that each institution has its
>>> distinct mode of existence (its distinct way of
>>> being; its distinct ontology).
>>>
>>> So if I had my way, or my ideal winter holiday gift,
>>> it would be that qualitative research provides a way
>>> for psychology (and perhaps the other social
>>> sciences) to move beyond dualism and embrace
>>> multiple ontologies.
>>>
>>> Martin
>>>
>>> /"I may say that whenever I meet Mrs. Seligman
>>> or Dr. Lowie or discuss matters with Radcliffe-Brown
>>> or Kroeber, I become at once aware that my partner
>>> does not understand anything in the matter, and I
>>> end usually with the feeling that this also applies
>>> to myself” (Malinowski, 1930)/
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>> On Nov 6, 2018, at 11:22 AM, Huw Lloyd
>>>> <huw.softdesigns@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Best to leave that for the time being, no point
>>>> overcomplicating the thread.
>>>>
>>>> Huw
>>>>
>>>> On Tue, 6 Nov 2018 at 15:02, Martin Packer
>>>> <mpacker@cantab.net> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> And what do you take their implicit ontology to
>>>> be, Huw?
>>>>
>>>> Martin
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>> On Nov 5, 2018, at 6:33 PM, Huw Lloyd
>>>>> <huw.softdesigns@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> The problem that I was responding to before
>>>>> regarding "qualitative and quantitative"
>>>>> labels is that the adoption of these labels
>>>>> (and their implicit ontology)...
>>>>
>>>
>>> This message and any attachment are intended solely
>>> for the addressee and may contain confidential
>>> information. If you have received this message in
>>> error, please send it back to me, and immediately
>>> delete it. Please do not use, copy or disclose the
>>> information contained in this message or in any
>>> attachment. Any views or opinions expressed by the
>>> author of this email do not necessarily reflect the
>>> views of The University of Nottingham Ningbo China.
>>> This message has been checked for viruses but the
>>> contents of an attachment may still contain software
>>> viruses which could damage your computer system: you
>>> are advised to perform your own checks. Email
>>> communications with The University of Nottingham
>>> Ningbo China may be monitored as permitted by UK and
>>> Chinese legislation.
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Gregory A. Thompson, Ph.D.
>> Assistant Professor
>> Department of Anthropology
>> 880 Spencer W. Kimball Tower
>> Brigham Young University
>> Provo, UT 84602
>> WEBSITE: greg.a.thompson.byu.edu
>> <http://greg.a.thompson.byu.edu>
>> http://byu.academia.edu/GregoryThompson
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.ucsd.edu/pipermail/xmca-l/attachments/20181108/dd4d8ed2/attachment.html
More information about the xmca-l
mailing list