Tom wrote:
> In my case, I maintain that a Marx-informed reading of the evolution of
> the Marshall-Chapman-Pigou-J.M.Clark concepts of external economies,
> externalities and social cost shifting provides a perspective on
> environmental/labor issues that cannot be found exclusively within the
> "Marxian tradition."
Interesting.
One of my obsessions is clarifying the fundamental *identity* between
so-called scale economies (external or internal increasing returns),
labor cooperation (the sharing of means of production by workers,
broadly understood), and the nature of what they call "finance," i.e.
the social forms that flow from \int_0^T social labor time dt = social
labor power_0 = true wealth_0 = (-1)*"uncertainty"_0, i.e. social
forms that constitute the layered structure of "production" =
"appropriation" = (-1)*"alienation," all the way up to those legal and
political figures that we call "contracts" = "rights" (since all
rights are "ownership rights") = "bonds" \supset {"money," "non-money
securities," "policies" (as in monetary or fiscal policies, or as in
insurance policies)}. As you can see, I believe I have the basic
framework down -- in my head. A propos of which, petulant as this may
seem, I find András Bródy's quotation of John von Neumann (which I
plugged on Wikiquotes) so adroit:
"If one has really technically penetrated a subject, things that
previously seemed in complete contrast, might be purely mathematical
transformations of each other."
To which I'll add that mathematical transformations are nothing to
fret about. They are, if I can put it this way, the mental forms that
capture the pulsations of the physical world as it impresses itself
upon the set of blunt senses that our bodies (a subset of that
physical world with reflective properties) possess (as "augmented" by
that system of artificial sensors that -- for lack of a better term --
we call "physical wealth") and in so doing gets awfully deflected and
distorted. For more on this, cf. the way in which David Bohm
rediscovered Hegel in physics. Re. the von Neumann quote,
Konstantinov et al., the authors of the old Marxist-Leninist Soviet
philosophy manual, put all that in a much simpler phrase: "the oneness
of the world." Or was it the "unicity of the world"?
Of course, the real problem is the presentation, the reconstruction of
the concrete, a task that intimidates me to the point of paralysis.
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