Remarks on the theoretical significance of Marx's Grundrisse

In recent years much play has been made with the significance of the Grundrisse for the reinterpretation of Marx's thought. The text has been represented as a vindication of those who have treated Marx's work as a relatively direct development from the early writings of 1843 and 1844, and a rebuttal of those who have sought to establish that Marx's later works constitute a radically distinct project from that of his youth, the two projects being separated by an epistemological break. This paper examines the theoretical structure of the Grundrisse, the kind of concepts that it contains and the objects constructed by these concepts. I argue that the result of such an examination demonstrates that the latter of the two positions outlined here is the correct one. The Grundrisse is shown to be an incoherent, transitional work, and its ambiguities an index of the presence of a number of theoretical obstacles.     

On the production and structuring of scientific knowledges

Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions has contained within it a series of discrepancies, which combine to render impossible the actual theorising of changes in scientific knowledges, and their foundation in a break with a previous theoretical ideology. This paper is a close textual investigation which shows the precise nature of these discrepancies, how they mutually support each other in a discourse founded in a positivist epistemology continually undermined by attempts to theorise discontinuity in knowledges. The outcome of this is that changes in scientific knowledges appear irrational, for Kuhn presents no means with which such shifts can be thought.     

Economic property and the theorisation of ground rent

The theory of capitalist ground rent that Marx develops in CapitalVol. III is customarily regarded as either unproblematic, or susceptible to technical improvements. This paper argues that there are profound difficulties in Marx's theorization of ground rent and the relation of landed property to capitalist production in agriculture, and draws attention to the concepts of 'property' and 'commodity' that Marx deploys. The persistence of a philosophical anthropology in the later works of Marx emerges clearly in the deficiencies of these concepts when used in the analysis of capitalist agricultural production.     

Development of an Antibody Hapten‐Chip System for Detecting the Residues of Multiple Antibiotic Drugs*

Abstract: The abuse of antibiotic drugs during animal production remains a worldwide problem and the subsequent detection of the residues of various drugs present at low concentrations in complex biological matrices poses significant analytical challenges. The present study outlines a practical biochip assay system to identify antibiotic residues in different animal tissue extracts. The system uses a simple but efficient multiresidue sample extraction procedure to isolate the antibiotic residues which were then identified directly using high‐affinity monoclonal antibodies presented in a competitive immunoassay with conjugated antibiotic hapten‐chips. The hapten‐chip can analyze six samples each for eight antibiotics on a single chip within 3 h. The analytical results with both artificial positive standard samples and the incurred samples show that the antibody hapten‐chip system has a comparable accuracy and a similar sensitivity to a standard ultra performance liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry (MS)/MS assay. In conclusion, an effective analytical screening system based on antibody hapten‐chip was developed for detecting multiple antibiotic residues from multiple samples.