Tom Walker wrote:
> I wrote,
> Probably no more
> than one in twenty "marxian economists" would see commodity production as
> odd. That doesn't mean it's _not_ odd.
> And Max Sawicky replied
> This gives an unexpected meaning to the word
> 'odd.'
> It may be unexpected, but it's not original. The idea that commodity
> production is "odd" comes unembelished right out of chapter one of Capital
>-- more precisely the last section on the Fetishism of the Commodity.
Doug Henwood then wrote:
> This is an important point. In a time when so many of the dwindling band of
> radical political economists are in hot pursuit of respectability - math,
> suits and/or stockings, and everything - it's easy to lose the sense that
> capitalism is a really weird social system. Not only the fetishism of
> commodities, but the ghostly power of money, the colonization of mental and
> erotic life by what Keynes called the Benthamite contraption... I could go
> on. In finance, the capitalist subfield I spend all too much time
> following, human ingenuity and material resources are devoted to crafting
> inverse floaters, swaptions, reset notes, and butterfly spreads. Capitalism
> does give new meaning to the word odd, though by now it shouldn't be
> unexpected.
Jerry now writes:
To say that capitalism is "odd", by itself, is not a very meaningful
statement. For Marx, the object was to discover the _logic_ of capitalism
("the economic law of motion of modern society"), rather than mere
oddities. It is easy enough to talk about "oddities" -- more difficult is
developing a systematic analysis of why what appears only to be odd
represents a necessary form of appearance of capital inherent in the
value-form.
While discussion of "oddities" is a (sometimes) amusing and interesting
pastime, the task of political economy is to penetrate beyond the veil
of both the "odd" and the "normal."
Jerry
