[was: RE: [PEN-L] absolute general law of capitalist accumulation] Charles B: > For formal logic , arriving at a contradiction means > there is a > mistake, > something is false.
Chris D. > Technically, this is false. In logic, ever since > Plato, the rule has been that something cannot both be > and not be in the same way at the same time. > Dialectics in Hegel and Marx do not deny this; they > are more interested in seeing how different trends > within a single phenomenon cause it to break apart. I won't talk about Hegel any more, since I'm no expert at all on his ideas (and he's not my cup of schnapps). But for Marx, a "contradiction" was an empirical (real, practical) phenomenon, unlike the "contradiction" in logic. A social organization -- such as capitalism -- was a whole or totality, but in its "structure," there were different parts that didn't work together well. (Kinda like putting an English-unit part in a car that has an engine that was specified & built using metric units, as my father did once. Or like when NASA used metric and the private contractor used the English system, so the Mars probe crashed.) In Marx's case, the contradictions of capitalism were problems within the system such as class antagonism and competition amongst the capitalists, summarized by Engels as the contradiction between socialized production (the whole) and individualized appropriation (the parts). In orthodox or liberal economics, there's a (qualitatively different kind of) contradiction between "what's good for society" and "what's good for the individual," as in public goods theory. jd
