temporal single system interpretation

[Dave B]

I am not going criticise one way or another what has been said or even for that matter passing comment on whether Karl was even right or wrong. I think what matters is a lack of understanding of the fundamental (Greek) logic from which Karl starts from. That is if two ‘apparently different’ things are equal in some way or another, or in anyway or another; the starting premise must be that something about both of them must be the same, identical or “qualitatively equal”. Thus if we go back to the kindergarten we might be presented with a reality of a small red box being equal in weight to a large blue box. We might then think that size has nothing to do with weight? And/or red is heavier than blue maybe?  But when another small blue box has the same weight as a large red box that theory collapses. The lesson or question, either never learned and understood or forgotten, is what is ‘hidden’ in the F**king boxes; or to quote from Karl chapter two, volume One, what is in the ‘material envelope’. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch02.htm  Well it is, following on from ‘Aristotle’s Greek logic’’, marbles! They have the same number of “qualitatively equal” marbles in them! So one should learn not to be bamboozled, or at least be cautious, about how the ‘apparent’ sense perceptions about big and small multi coloured boxes can throw you off track as regards the causes of equality. That is not to say of course that the colour or size theory of weight was stupid. It just didn’t stand up very well to empirical experimental testing. So Karl introduces this mode of thinking in chapter one re Aristotle;  In the first place, he clearly enunciates that the money form of commodities is only the further development of the simple form of value – i.e., of the expression of the value of one commodity in some other commodity taken at random; for he says: 5 beds = 1 house is not to be distinguished from 5 beds = so much money. [Or in other words Aristotle is not thrown by the idea that one small red box is equal to one big blue box because both are equal to a medium sized green box; as going nowhere.] He further sees that the value relation which gives rise to this expression makes it necessary that the house should qualitatively be made the equal of the bed, (contain the same number of marbles) and that, without such an equalisation, these two clearly different things.. or material envelopes, as we experience them.   …could not be compared with each other as commensurable quantities.  “Exchange,” he says, “cannot take place without equality, and equality not without commensurability". Here, however, he comes to a stop, and gives up the further analysis of the form of value.“It is, however, in reality, impossible, that such unlike things…. Ie big, small and medium sized different coloured boxes  …can be commensurable” – i.e., qualitatively equal. He gives up! Such an equalisation can only be something foreign to their real nature, consequently only “a makeshift for practical purposes.. Ie he couldn’t imagine the marbles in the boxes. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm Democritus the first chemists and scientist was light years ahead of Aristotle on this kind of thing and Karl did his Phd thesis on Democritus which was also covered in Star Trek the Next Generation where Data lost his memory; but not his logical reasoning. But there is a real challenge in human economics. In science the relative weight of sucrose, or a sugar loaf, to iron is stable and constant  at; 342.3: 55.84 If you can count the molecules/atoms; which we can. But the relative value or relationship of tables and beds to houses changes? What is happening, as Adam Smith noted, is that tables, houses and beds etc as nothing more than ‘material envelopes’ remain the same and it is  ‘the human labour spent upon it’ that changes, as the “qualitatively equal” thing that makes them, well, marble like, equal.  At the end of the day it is another blue, green and red, big and little box and marble theory. And does it stand up, what are the implications and what happens if we stress test the theory?

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