Victor
The social relations are not embodied in a particular coat or in a
particular bale of linen. These are material objects whose concreteness
are
beyond the capacity of human conceptualisation. After all a particular
linen coat may have been made by an apprentice and taken twice as long to
produce than a similar coat made by a master tailor. The linen coats and
bales of linen cloth referred to by Marx are not actual material coats and
cloths but an abstract representation of them. And that's not all.
Labour
value itself is not a description of physical and sensual labour activity
but of abstract labour. Labour from which all concrete relations have
beenabstracted out but for labour time or the average time necessary to
produce a particular object. It does not take into account whether the
labourer was weakened by starvation, was preoccupied with whether he could
pay next months rent, or couldn't find whetstone to sharpen his scissors.
^^^^
CB: Sounds like the difference between " the coat" and "a coat".
^^^^
The 'thing' Marx is referring to is not the physical sensual thing as it
comes off the production line, but the abstract idea of the thing as it is
manifested in the consciousness of the labourer, his boss, the salesman
who
sells it and the purchaser who buys it. A commodity is not a physical
sensual object but a concept of objects, objects abstracted into things to
be bought and sold and that's it.
^^^^
CB: "The thing" , for Marx , is to _change_ the world. "Things" are
importantly activity, world changing activity, not just the objects that
result. The thing is practical-critical _activity_. Goods and _services_
constitute things.
^^^^^
Ilyenkov explains that plain materialists and idealists alike make the
error of viewing the boundary between the material and the ideal as being
the world of the inside versus that of the outside of each individual
human
head. In contrast, he argues that according to dialectical materialism,
ideality and materiality must be distinguished in terms of the composition
of each
object
^^^^^
CB: Object and activity. Objective reality _is_ human activity, practice,
especially, for Marxists.
^^^
- both the composition of the physical
attributes, which of course are the sources of its materiality, and the
composition of its social origins and social context, which are the
sources of its ideality - just as Marx analyzed the composition of the
commodity. According to Ilyenkov's theory, OBJECTS within the human
cultural realm objectively possess both materiality and ideality, just as
commodities in a market economy possess both concrete and abstract labor,
possess both use-value and exchange-value.
^^^^
CB: Objects _and_ activity; an "object" is the human activity in relation
to
it. Objects: "the ball", "the rock", "the tree", "the star". These _are_
the
human activity in relaion to them. "A ball" is an human activity in
relation
to it.
Labor is activity. The resulting commodity is the labor in it or in
relation
to it.
^^^^^^
This is not, by the way, Ilyenkov's invention, but the essence of Marx's
critique of Feuerbach in Ad Feuerbach and of Lenin's critique of Plekhanov
in the Conspectus. The boundary between ideal and real is objective,
external to the subjective consciousness of the individual.
^^^^^^
CB: Yes, the boundary between the ideal and real is itself objective to
the
individual, and both the ideal and real are taken into the consciousness
of
the individual consciousness, as well. So , the boundary is both inside
and
outside of the individual.
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