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
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.