Raghu writes: > The point is that Marx's categories (the most important one being > capital/labor) are clearest and most unambiguous in the old factory > system of the 19th century. Over time there has been a lot of blurring > of these categories and hybrids and ambiguous cases of various sorts > are everywhere.
It's not Marx's categories that have blurred. Categories, if defined clearly, stay clear (since they are only in one's mind). The problem is that to some extent, objective reality (outside of one's mind) has changed so that some real-world cases straddle categorical lines. In Marxian political economy, this is really important for the case of productive vs. unproductive labor. Luckily, that case is largely irrelevant. It's a categorical distinction that was very important to Smith but not to Marx (who used quite a different definition). Of course, Shane will disagree... > This certainly does not mean that the capital/labor distinction is not > relevant or useful (it most certainly is), but it is only a part of > the overall picture. When we have a really impressive hammer in our > hand, it is sorely tempting to look at every problem in the world as a > nail and all that.. Of course the capital/labor distinction is only one part of the overall picture. Do you know anyone on pen-l who has ever said otherwise? who is this straw man, anyway? -- Jim Devine / If you're going to support the lesser of two evils, at the very least you should know the nature of that evil. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
