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Greetings to all! We have seen that “an empty commodity can create value for its holder, once he or she possesses that "social capital" it takes to meander their way through the system” (Moses Geply), we have read the trio – Robert Dorfman, Paul A. Samuelson and Robert M. Solow, in Linear Programming and Economic Analysis (Dover Publications, 1987): “however, fingers were made before forks, and we cam imagine this situation as it might appear to a naïve scientist from Mars who had never heard about prices and competitive private enterprise. He might still ask the noncommercial question: what is the “optimal” pattern [primal=dual, bisector line] of world production of food and clothing between England and Portugal? I he were acute, the Martian scientist would be troubles by his own question, particularly by the word in quotation marks – optimal. Optimal in what sense? Certainly not – as we have already agreed – in the sense of money value, since this is a precommercial Martian. The scientist might be tempted to consider evaluating food and clothing by their “intrinsic worth”; but unless he had been contaminated by a course in heavy German philosophy [sic! Is that Marx’s economics?], he would soon realize that this is an indefinable concept for food and clothing in a world where some people are more like peacocks and others more like gluttons” (p. 33). Everybody knows that the inverse proportionally function, y = f(1/x), has no limit at the formal logic space. Some mathematicians say that the limit of this function can be 0 (zero) or ¥ (infinite), but these cannot be true because if 1/x=0, then 1=x.0, which is an absurd. In another words, the contrariety or contradiction seems to have no end at the formal logic space, which conform itself just to the “form” and live aside the “content”. Therefore, the limit of this function does exist, although it is the limit of this formal logic with the dialectical logic which surround it (F logic Ì D logic).[i] This limit happens to be at (1,1), the unity: 1/x=1, 1=x.1, 1=1.1, 1=1. The nonexistent of the limit at formal logic space implies the impossibility of nullification of the opposite pole (except canceling it). The Spanish language brings an optimal, therefore optimized, representation of this fact through the pronoun “nosotros” (we others) because it does not present the fact separated, disjoint, but as whole. The other side, dialectical logic cannot detach formal logic because just doing with it dialectical logic foment the explanation of the “form” and the “content” of the things and human facts – the social facts. Something very similar happens to CET and the Marxist Economic Theory (MET) because the first is contained into the second (CET Ì MET) so that the mainstream must use of sleight of hand or prestidigitation to keep CET dominant and exuberant academically, and this way causing “deformations” on economic professionals, unilateralism, that can only think about the prices of the “things” or commodities, and merely remind that those “things” have values, that these things follow the “Law of Value”, and not the “law” of the market or “invisible hand”.[ii] Still about the limit as the unity or bisector line, It is important to observe two facts that CET (using only the formal logic) tries to aggregate them by the stochastic econometric models (introducing the qualitative variables – “dummy variables”), but it unfortunately has obtained no success. These facts are: 1) Lenin presented us the “salto vital” or “vital dive”[iii] to explain the passage from the dominant pole to the unity; many others classical thinkers has presented the “cognitive dive”; 2) by the other side, seems to be Spinoza the first one to observe the opposite aspect of this “cognitive dive”, that is the “residue” of the dominated pole – that people rarely note, and the statisticians just denote it as “error” – that has the power and/or potentiality to reverse the process and establish the synthesis or the “positive resolution of the antagonism”[iv] – “wild anomaly”, Spinoza; “anomalie”, Comte; “crazy atom”, Plekhanov; “residue” Pareto / Durkheim; “Minimum details”, Trotsky; “animal spirit”, Keynes; “nitty-gritty”, Binmore / Weibull; “the little corner of the world” or “however terrible and disgusting the dissolution under capitalist system, of the old family ties may appear, modern industry…creates a new economic foundation for a higher form of the family and of the relations between sexes” (Marx, 1986, volume I, p. 460).[v] Among the most extended and profound devastation of all the families, the “referential family” emerges, even as “residual”, to establish the equivalent exchange (value) at both worlds – material, the ”world of commodities” or “things” and immaterial world or subjectivity. This family actually plays the part of the proletariat played at the French Revolution as “the bolder ally”[vi] (Marx, 1978, p. 41). That means the “referential family” actualizes relations by introducing the reciprocity, the value relation and establishes, definitively, the moral. We all know that the contrariety, more specifically the contradiction (the “class struggle”), moves this world where a simple shake hands can be substituted by a commodity (for example, the tele-message): “I shop, although I am” prevails on “I think, although I am” . This because the “exchange has a history of it own. It has passed through different phases. There was a time, as in the Middle Ages, when only the superfluous, the excess of production over consumption, was exchanged [ev < uv]. There was again a time, when not only the superfluous, but all products, all industrial existence, had passed into commerce, when the whole of production depended on exchange. How are we to explain this second phase of exchange – marketable value at its second power? [ev > uv]… Finally, there came a time when everything that men had considered as inalienable became an object of exchange, of traffic and could be alienated. This the time when the very things which till then had been communicated, but never exchanged; given, but never sold; acquired, but never bought – virtue, love, conviction, knowledge, conscience, etc. – when everything, in short, passed into commerce. It is the time of general corruption, of universal venality, or, to speak in terms of political economy, the time when everything, moral or physical, having become a marketable value, is brought to the market to be assessed at its truest value” (Marx, 1966, p. 29)… Questions: Could you, please, help me find the problem my Brazilians comrades (at the Brazilian Society for Political Economy’s list) can’t understand that “optimal value” is Marx’s value? Isn’t this identification enough to turn Marxist economics taught as main paradigm? Doesn’t it solve the problem brought by the French students (Post-Autistic Economic Movement)? Could you, please, manifest your opinion? I do believe we are not “in the world where some people are more like peacocks and others more like gluttons” (trio), because we are here at the Capital & Class’ list, so we must reflect about these questions to be able to transform the world. Am I equivocated? -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [i] “The function f(x)=1+1/x approaches the limit as x®¥ (x approaches infinity). However, this result cannot be obtained by substituting ¥ for x in 1+1/x because 1/¥ does not equal zero. A/B=C implies that A=B.C. If 1/¥=0, then 1=(¥).(0). Since this is untrue. The problem must be resolved by a different reasoning, namely by an application of the definition of the limit” (Henderson & Quandt, 1980, p. 366). What other different reasoning if not the dialectical? [ii] There is no way “to encourage departments to be more heterodox. Moreover, a department, for example, that eschews (as far as possible) mathematical modeling and promotes pluralism can be attacked not for what it does, but rather for what it does not do” (Clarke & Mearman, 2003, p. 72). [iii] “Engels plainly employs the salto vitale method in philosophy, that is to say, he makes a leap from theory [antithesis] to practice [thesis]. Not a single one of the learned (and stupid) professors of philosophy, in whose footsteps our Machians follow, would permit himself to make such a leap, for this would be a disgraceful thing for a devotee of “pure science” to do. For them the theory of knowledge, which demands the cunning concoction of “definitions,” is one thing, while practice is another. For Engels all living human practice permeates the theory of knowledge itself and provides an objective criterion of truth. For until we know a law of nature, it, existing and acting independently and outside our mind, makes us slaves of “blind necessity.” But once we come to know this law, which acts (as Marx pointed out a thousand times) independently of our will and our mind, we become the masters of nature. The mastery of nature manifested in human practice is a result of an objectively correct reflection within the human head of the phenomena and processes of nature, and is proof of the fact that this reflection (within the limits of what is revealed by practice) is objective, absolute, and eternal truth. (Lenin, 1982, p.144) [Griffon is ours] [iv] “The co-operative factories of the laborers themselves represent within the old form the first sprouts of the new, although they naturally reproduce, and must reproduce, everywhere in their actual organization all the shortcomings of the prevailing system. But the antithesis between capital and labor is overcome within them, if at first only way of making the associated labors into their own capitalist, i.e., by enabling them to use the means of production for the employment of their own labor. They show how a new mode of production naturally grows out of an old one, when the development of the material forces of production and the corresponding forms of the social production have reached a particular stage. Without the factory system arising out of the capitalist mode of production there could have been no co-operative factories. Nor could have developed without the credit system arising out the same mode of production. The credit system is not only the principal basis for the gradual transformation of capitalist private enterprises into capitalist stock companies, but equally offers the means for the gradual extension of co-operative enterprises on a more or less national scale. The capitalist stock companies, as much as the co-operative factories, should be considered as transitional forms from the capitalist mode of production to the associated one, with the only distinction that the antagonism is resolved negatively in the one side and positively in the other” (Marx, 1986, volume III, p. 440). [v] “The direct, natural, and necessary relations of person to person is the relation of man to woman. In this natural species-relationship man’s relation to nature is immediately his relation to man, just as his relation to man is immediately his relation to nature – his own natural destination. In this relationship, therefore, is sensuously manifested, reduced to an observable fact, the extent to which the human essence has become nature to man, or to which nature to him has become the human essence of man. From this relationship one can therefore judge man’s whole level of development” (Marx, 1982, p. 89). [vi] “In the first French Revolution the rule of the Constitutionalists is followed by the rule of the Girondists and the rule of the Girondists by the rule of the Jacobins. Each of these parties relies on the more progressive party for support. As soon as it has brought the revolution far enough to be unable to follow it further, still less to go ahead of it, it is thrust aside by the bolder ally that stands behind it and sent to the guillotine. The revolution thus moves along an ascending line [bisector line or value]. It is the reverse with the Revolution of 1848. The proletarian party appears as an appendage of the petty-bourgeois-democratic party. It is betrayed and dropped by the latter on April 16, May 15, and in the June days. The democratic party, in its turn, leans on the shoulders of the bourgeois-republican party. The bourgeois republicans no sooner believe themselves well established than they shake off the troublesome comrade and support themselves on the shoulders of the party of Order. The party of Order hunches its shoulders, lets the bourgeois republicans tumble, and throws itself on the shoulders of armed force. It fancies it is still sitting on those shoulders when one fine morning it perceives that the shoulders have transformed themselves into bayonets. Each party kicks from behind at the one driving forward, and leans over in front toward the party which presses backward. No wonder that in this ridiculous posture it loses its balance and, having made the inevitable grimaces, collapses with curious gyrations. The revolution thus moves in a descending line [bisector line or value]. It finds itself in this state of retrogressive motion before the last February barricade has been cleared away and the first revolutionary authority constituted.” (Marx, 1978, p. 41). It is important to observe the mathematical norm ruling this Marx’s comment about the French Revolution, and the “first revolutionary authority” that we will comment later on this paper.