On May 19, 2012, John Vertegaal wrote:
Both you and I know that Conrad
The name is Conard, which has an..interesting...significance in French
is spouting unadulterated BS. We also
both know that to logically make a point we have to reason from
axiomatic principles...
Wrong. To make a point logically (without the barbarism of splitting
infinitives) we have to reason from explicit premises. Only in
mathematics are those premises axiomatic. In regard to practical
realities those premises (for Marxists and other scientists as well as
for the general run of humanity) are always *a posteriori*, never *a
priori*. They are generalizations from experience and are always
subject to verification/refutation *in practice*. Marx said it all in
the second Thesis on Feuerbach: "The question whether objective truth
can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is
a practical question."
From my own set of them, capital rolls out to be a
debt; and capitalization a societal to be resolved debt, that no
amount
of financial shenanigans can turn into a depletable positive entity...
...As I understand it, Marxians, just like (ueber) capitalists,
axiomatically
hold capital to be a depletable positive entity.
Marxians, on the basis of the empirical generalization known as
historical materialism, view all modes of production as means of
distributing the labor power of society according to the uses valued
by the society. Capital is the specific expression (in the mode of
production known as capitalist) of a social relationship: domination
by a ruling class through the exploitation of labor to produce and
accumulate materialized surplus labor as surplus *value* (an
empirical, not axiomatic, category). As surplus value accumulated in
material form (the only form in which surplus labor can be
accumulated) capitalized labor is continually being depleted (losing
its efficacity as means of exploitation of labor) both through
material wear and tear and through the formation by competitors of
more exploitatively effective capital objects. Every capitalist,
private or state, has continually to be concerned with such depletion
at pain of competitive ruin. This is a material fact and has nothing
to do with "axioms."
Shane Mage
"When we read on a printed page the doctrine of Pythagoras that all
things are made of numbers, it seems mystical, mystifying, even
downright silly.
When we read on a computer screen the doctrine of Pythagoras that all
things are made of numbers, it seems self-evidently true." (N. Weiner)
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