ZeroNowhere

Ah I found it, but you actually said "valorization of value", although, for Marxists, I suppose value is labour and vice versa, right? Here: http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.p...&postcount=180, about 4 paragraphs up from the bottom.

Hello Zero, quick question if you don't mind; what do you mean when you talk about the "valourization of labour"? Thanks.

Oops, it wasn't the contribution, it was Theories of Surplus-Value.

Actually, when I first read that piece attempting to debunk the myth of SCP, I searched MIA and found that Marx uses that exact wording in one place in his works, I think the 1859 Contribution, so calling it Engels' is probably misleading. I would guess Engels saw the term in the Contribution and thought it described what Marx was on about fairly well.

I remember the user BAM (Whatever happened to him anyway?) posting something similar about how if we analyse supply and demand more deeply we come up with labour as the source of value. It does seem mind-blowingly obvious when you think about it... but economists are not exactly known for their free scientific sense of inquiry.

I sincerely hope for your own sake that you are merely coquetting with such mystical phraseology based on a rigid adherence to tradition

I'm actually drawing up a blank on that question. Although after re-reading Ludwig Feuerbach and S:U&C I think I see what you mean. Engels explicitly rejects philosophy in favour of a summing up of scientific results in a dialectical manner, which seems more or less what was meant in the German Ideology when it was said that philosophy would be replaced by a summing up of the general results or 'abstractions' from empirical investigation which serve to arrange the material. As an interesting side note, Engels got Hegel's political stance (moderate reformist as opposed to hard conservative) right.

Well, at the moment I've been forcing myself through something of a purgatory by hair-splittingly analysing all of Marx's work (You may have noticed that through the two or three fairly large posts on indirectly social labour I made recently). Afterwards I'd planned to pile through Engels and see what similarities and differences I could make out. Your view sounds interesting, and I'd be intrigued to see what you have to say on the subject. I have noticed that while in his review of the Contribution Engels says that Marx's analysis proceeds historically, Marx seems to take a different view. For example, industrial capital is treated before merchant and finance capital, even though the latter two proceed the former in terms of historical evolution. I'd be interested what you think on that topic.

I've glazed over all the posts by 'the youth dialectic', so that would explain my inability to get what you were trying to do in that post. As for the Beiser work, I found it in my college's library, and haven't been able to read substantial amounts of it because it's a fairly large work, not really conducive to being read in breaks between lessons. What I've read so far seems pretty good, but I'm not a Hegel expert so not really in a good position to judge.

Thanks for the comment, but what makes you describe Marx's theory of alienation as an "economic" theory? I really recommend the Sayer article, and I've seen you say good things about Sayer in the past on Violence of Abstraction, so I think you'll enjoy it.