Andy,
you comment,
> Yes, this approach raises a lot of difficult questions, Paul. If we ask
how
> Marx was able to use Hegel's categories for _Capital_, it would seem that
> these categories are abstracted from the relations of bourgeois society in
> the first place, and if Hegel weas not entirely deluded, Reason is a kind
> of internalisation of these relations. (In Australia, we call neo-Liberals
> "economic rationalists", an interesting term)
I think that this cultural historical circumscription of Hegel is too
limited. An analogy: the development of transoceanic, worldwide travel were
historical conditions for the discarding of the ptolemaic, the adoption of
the copernican cosmological system. But the object of the understanding is
not reducible to the conditions that predisposed its development.
Similarly, one could say that the emergence of value as the determinant of
the economic system predisposed Hegel's elucidation of the dialectic but the
latter is not reducible to the former.
>
> The problem for me, is what to do about this mediation which constitutes a
> kind of "magical thinking"? (I use the term in the sense it is used in
> "Ape, Primitive Man & Child") Is it possible for people to collaborate on
a
> world-wide scale without a mediating symbol-structure such as the economy?
> Vygotsky points to a stage in thinking when we no longer need the symbol,
> we can internalise its meaning and dispense with the external aid.
Value mediates the social division of labor. One could say that the global
division of labor is the highest order activity system. One that subsumes
all the others. Money is the artefact that enables this but it also does
something else: it represents a "store of value". As such it is based on
the historical cultural form: private property. From this perspective,
one can rephrase your question: can the exchange functions of money exist
independently of the store of value functions?
Here we arrive at questions concerning the function of private property and
the issue of economic scarcity and necessity are certainly among the
elements that determine this function. So we arrive at a second question:
can we overcome economic scarcity and necessity on a global scale and thus
eliminate at least one of the bases that leads to the need for storing value
in a form that is appropriable by the individual independently of the social
relations, the division of labor that produced that value.
>
> Do the cultural-historical and the psychological meet here?
Perhaps they would cancel each other out with some kind of universal (at
least planet-wide) recognition of the interconnectedness of all living
beings that isn't mediated by a symbol that also serves as a store of value,
bearer of interest, and all the rest.
Paul
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