Laws and Tendencies in Marxist Political Economy1
نویسنده
چکیده
Whilst terms like ‘law of the tendency’, ‘tendency law’ and „tendential law‟ appear in Marxist political economy, their meaning is unclear. This paper identifies the main conceptions of laws and tendencies buried in these terms and disambiguates them. Part one differentiates three conceptions of law: (i) event regularity; (ii) event regularity/tendency and (iii) tendency. Part two focuses on (ii) identifying five interpretations: tendency as a trend, cyclical variation, stochastically specified law, counterfactual event and a deliberately imprecise and under-elaborated concept. Part three introduces a sixth interpretation: tendency as the (transfactual) way of acting of a thing with properties. Part four explains why this conception of (genuine) tendency is impossible to mathematise.
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