marxism

Like stuff like

Perhaps it wasn’t his intention, but the impression Harvey has left us with is that Marx’s starting point in analyzing the capitalist mode of production was arbitrary. This is utter bullshit. In fact, just by looking at the foot notes to this section — twelve in all — we can see Marx was trying to map his own categories to the categories commonly employed in contemporary political economy.

Is just misrepresentative on the one hand (literally, i have an epub of harveys companion in front of me, and several of the quotations the author cites, the author has altered[1]) and on the other hand fails to fully comprehend what a priori means (i.e. that starting with previously known knowledge as a priori premises is also a priori). The negative connotation of a priori the author is using is colloquial and develops from criticism (academic and anti-intellectual) of the recieved knowledge

[1] e.g. article says, my emphasis

While Harvey is saying:

“Marx abstracts from all the useful qualities of commodities because we cannot perform experiments.

But the author has actually cut out massive portions of this quote, without indicating it, to massively change the meaning. What harvey actually wrote is:

[Marx] abstracts from the incredible diversity of human wants, needs and desires, as well as from the immense variety of commodities and their weights and measures, in order to focus on the unitary concept of a use-value. This is illustrative of an argument he makes in one of the prefaces, where he says that the problem for social science is that we cannot isolate and conduct controlled experiments in a laboratory, so we have to use the power of abstraction instead in order to arrive at similar scientific forms of understanding.

I.e. harvey is not saying that marx abstracts from the diversity of needs, wants, etc, because we cannot preform experiments, but rather that marx's need to abstract from the diversity of needs, wants, etc is illustrative of an argument marx makes in the prefaces about his method.[2]

The misrepresentation in this point goes still further. The author of the article writes:

But is this why Marx abstracts from the particular useful qualities of the commodity? In fact, Marx abstracts from the particular useful qualities of the commodity in order to establish these qualities play no role in value.

But, in fact, marx does both in chapter one of capital—and in the quote, harvey is describing the first three paragraphs of chapter one, where marx is, exactly as harvey says, abstracting away from the manifold human needs and their measurements to focus on use value.[3]

[2] Specifically harvey is referencing the preface to the first edition, the end of paragraph 3:

Moreover, in the analysis of economic forms neither microscopes nor chemical reagents are of assistance. The power of abstraction must replace both. But for bourgeois society, the commodity-form of the product of labour, or the value-form of the commodity, is the economic cell-form. To the superficial observer, the analysis of these forms seems to turn upon minutiae. It does in fact deal with minutiae, but so similarly does microscopic anatomy.

And to bring it back to the authors bullshit about "how dare harvey use words like cryptic"—here is marx, being similarly self-depracatory about his work. The workings of capital are, in fact, cryptic, arcane, obscure, enigmatic! If they were not, there would be no commodity fetish!!

[3] specifically Marx writes:

The wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as an 'immense collection of commodities ' ; the individual commodity appears as ib elementary form. Our investigation therefore begins with the analysis of the commodity.

The commodity is, first of all, an external object, a thing which through its qualities satisfies human needs of whatever kind. The nature of these needs, whether they arise, for example, from the stomach, or the imagination, makes no difference. Nor does it matter here how the thing satisfies man's need, whether directly as a means of subsistence, i.e. an object of consumption, or indirectly as a means of production.

Every useful thing, for example, iron, paper, etc., may be looked at from the two points of view of quality and quantity. Every useful thing is a whole composed of many properties; it can therefore be useful in various ways. The discovery of these ways and hence of the manifold uses of things is the work of history. So also is the invention of socially recognized standards of measurement for the quantities of these useful objects. The diversity of the measures for commodities arises in part from the diverse nature of the objects to be measured, and in part from convention.

The usefulness of a thing makes it a use-value. [Etc]

Which also aligns exactly with what harvey talks about (in even the same order!), in contrast to the authors insistance that Marx never does this

Overall, bad, bad, bad article imo, author is evidently some sorta shitstirrer who's maliciously misrepresenting people. Harvey helped get me through capital, i find most of the people criticising him to have a much less firm grasp on it than harvey tbh. He has issues (e.g. he misrepresents his accumulation by dispossesion as a critique of marx instead of the return to marx's original critique against the distortions from the 1910s on it actually was)