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)
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.
Do the cultural-historical and the psychological meet here?
Andy
At 08:30 PM 12/01/2001 -0800, you wrote:
>Andy,
>
>Ilyenkov's discussion of money in Dialectics of the Abstract and Concrete
>reveals it to be the symbolic manifestation of the ideal that governs
>capitalist economics and hence permeates all aspects of the social formation
>dependent of the reproduction of the capitalist mode of production: value.
>As such one could speculate about the ways in which social relations
>structured through the value relation provide the initial matrix of
>relations that any child in such a society would have to learn to be able to
>participate in other significant social relations of the system. This would
>suggest that the pattern is not so much a leading from some childhood
>"unreal world" to an adult "real" world, but rather learning the symbolic
>systems of expressing the very social relations that were learned initially
>at the level of being and later working up to those of concept (symbol).
>This would be very much in line with a Vygotskean perspective and would also
>account for any predisposition of children learn to manipulate the symbolic
>systems of mathematics in "concrete" monetary terms before being able to
>transpose them to other more abstract domains.
>
>Paul H. Dillon
>
>
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
| - Andy Blunden - Home Page - http://home.mira.net/~andy/index.htm - |
| "It has been said that the very essence of civilisation consists of |
| purposely building monuments so as not to forget". L S Vygotsky 1930 |
~ Spirit, Money & Modernity, Melbourne Uni Summer School 23/24 Feb '01 ~
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