Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] relations of production as fetter on production
CB: The high tech , chip and computer technological revolution has _not_ been fettered or prevented from developing by the bourgeois property relations. The success of the high tech rev within bourgeois property relations means that it is not likely to cause a change in those property relations. Social revolutions result from property relations and material productive forces in conflict. With the chip revolution, the productive forces and relations are not in conflict. WL: I have a different conception of Marx specific meaning of fetter as a concept concerning the general law of the development of society. Nor is it suggested that technology is not developed or the productive forces are not revolutionized by the bourgeoisie. Bourgeois property by definition does in fact act as a fetter on the material factors of production, at all stages of the evolution of the technological regime. This does not mean production is not revolutionized. The most historical presentation of the question of the fetter on production is the market barrier created by bourgeois property, that limits consumption - due to the working classes limited wages, or the crisis of overproduction. The development of the productive forces and their continuous expansion is blocked - fettered, by the circuit of capital as reproduction and its need to sell and realize a profit. In addition to the overproduction crisis, their is our current crisis of overcapacity in various industries. The auto industry world wide is the most classical example in our country. The revolution in technology exacerbates the crisis of overproduction and overcapacity as ever larger segments of labor are rendered superfluous to production along side of a lowering of the value of labor power. Then again the actual development of the material property of the productive forces are fettered by the bourgeois property on the basis of how the extensive and intensive development of equipment takes place. For example, single function tools and machinery are considered more profitable for the bourgeoisie because they extract a higher degree of surplus value from the individual and pin the worker to the machine. This form of the laboring process is a fetter on the overall expansion of the productive forces. The most fundamental fetter of the bourgeois property relations resides in the actual self movement of production - reproduction, on the basis of bourgeois need. Marx speaks of this extensively in his Philosophic Manuscript of 1844. Capital as bourgeois property does not reproduce to satisfy authentic human needs but rather inherits these human needs and creates a different set of needs that becomes its condition and precondition for expansion and reproduction. Capital produces for profits. By definition the positive results of science are channeled into and realized on the basis of bourgeois need or the circuit of capital peculiar to bourgeois production and this is at all times a fetter on the overall expansion of the productive forces. There is simply no way around the statement that relations of production or production relations - in standard American English, are the laws defining property and the relationship of people to property in the process of production. Relations of production or social relations of production also embody the physical act of producing, based on a specific state of development of the technological regime and this old technological regime stands in contradiction with the new means of production that have spontaneously emerged within the old system - and not simply an abstract concept of property and ownership. The impact of the revolution in the technological regime in our society and world wide is qualitatively reconfiguring industrial society. One of the result in the realm of communist strategy has been that no one speaks of a policy of industrial concentration that characterized the communist movement of the previous generation. * CB: Serious candidates for the bourgeois property relations fettering the development of the forces of production in a way necessary to human survival at large, are with respect to global warming, oil depletion, and nuclear weaponry. In these cases, there have to be profound modifications of the use of productive forces that capitalist property relations will not make. WL: Without question the productive forces will be restructure and reconfigured to better conform to authentic human needs and brought into alignment with the metabolic process of the earth and wo/man. Such is the vision and goal of modern communism. The issue of global warming, oil depletion and nuclear are serious of course. The fetters of which Marx speaks within the mode of production in material life describes a spontaneous process internal to the self movement of capital and production and capital as production. It seems
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Graham Priest: Dialetheism Marx
RD, Sorry not to respond earlier, but between writing up on Ilyenkov (it turns out to be a review and justification of Lenin's concept of real with a couple of surprising - to me at least - twists) and working full-time corresponding is a luxury. About an age ago (a year or so) I developed something of an interest in Paraconsistent Logic (mostly from the general systems point of view). Was reading works by a number of Czech systems people who were and apparently still are trying to model it by a modification of fuzzy logic programming (probably x-students of my professor of general systems Georg Klir at SUNY-Binghamton). I wasn't terribly impressed, probably because of its extremely formalist and mechanist modelling of the reasoning process. Like Andy Blunden, I find set theory, even fuzzy set theory, inadequate to describe the dialectical deduction of the concrete from the abstract. Another logical system, Sheldon Klein's 'Appositional Transformational Operator' from Analogy and Mysticism and the Structure of Culture 1983 Current Anthropology vol 24, pg 151, was much more interesting because unlike paraconsistency and dialetheism it incorporates essence (significance or meaning) as an integral part of the logical system. SK based his model on the dialectical categorizing system of the I Ching and then expanded the abstract formal method to other similar categorical systems, e.g. the directional logic of pre-Columbian Americans, some Buddhist imagery and so on. One of the interesting features of ATO systems is that the entire conceptual space of the universals they process are described by them in the form of a bifurcating genetic tree which is reminiscent of and, indeed, related to the dendritic mappings of genetic algorithms. Moreover, the routing process whereby one deduces, (going from the top, abstract root of the tree to its branches) concretes from abstractions or induces (going from the bottom, the branches to the top, root, of the tree) abstractions from the concretes in ATO systems is similar to the genetic algorithm. As a past-time diversion I've experimented with several ways to remodel SK's ATO system to represent Hegelian dialectics. I think I figured out how to do this about 2 or 3 months ago. The basic difference between the I Ching /SK ATO model and Hegelian dialectics is that though carried out diachronically they produce what is in essence a synchronic model, while GH's dialectics are diachronic in execution and in representation. Also, while the path making algorithm of the ATO model simply follows a continuous genetic line, the Hegelian system's algorithm must jump back and forth between lineages (the negation and the negation of the negations of Hegelian dialectics) thereby producing all the lineages/branches of the tree in one blow. So, while the I Ching /SK ATO the algorithm generates each lineal path in turn, the algorithm of the GH model, based on the triadic structure of the dialectic, simultaneously builds all the branches simultaneously. Unfortunately, ATO systems suffer from the same bias as does GH's dialectics; the incorporation of essence as an integral part of the logical system limits the degree to which it can be described by mechanical forms, i.e. numbers, hence they are described as mystical and uninteresting by mathematically inclined academic logicians. It's really hard to get much information on them, but if you're interested you can check out http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/cgi- for the Sheldon Klein article and http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1056663.1056733 for the only other on-line article Propositional analogical generation of coordinated verbal, visual musical texts: U. of Wisconsin ACM SIGART Bulletin Issue 79 (January 1982) SPECIAL ISSUE: Special section-Natural Language Pages: 104 - 104 Year of Publication: 1982 ISSN:0163-5719 on the subject of ATO's (You have to pay for both) Regards, Victor - Original Message - From: Ralph Dumain [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Sunday, September 11, 2005 22:01 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Graham Priest: Dialetheism Marx Priest, Graham. 'Was Marx a Dialetheist?', Science and Society, 1991, 54, 468-75. While I don't expect everyone to be held spellbound by this question, it is illustrative of a recurring problem in intellectual history (and also in popular intellectual culture, which is another story. Priest's views on dialetheism (logic which admits contradictions) is controversial among his fellow logicians, and he responds to objections in his book. Probably his fellow logicians (except those interested in Marx, among which there are more than a few) are not terribly concerned about his views on Marx, and in fact he says nothing about Marx in his book. However he did get a response to his earlier article on dialectics and dialetheism: Marquit, Erwin. A Materialist Critique
[Marxism-Thaxis] relations of production as fetter on production
CB: The high tech , chip and computer technological revolution has _not_ been fettered or prevented from developing by the bourgeois property relations. The success of the high tech rev within bourgeois property relations means that it is not likely to cause a change in those property relations. Social revolutions result from property relations and material productive forces in conflict. With the chip revolution, the productive forces and relations are not in conflict. WL: I have a different conception of Marx specific meaning of fetter as a concept concerning the general law of the development of society. Nor is it suggested that technology is not developed or the productive forces are not revolutionized by the bourgeoisie. CB: What is suggested by Marx is that the bourgeois property relations will not be revolutionized and overthrown by the successful development of the productive forces, but by the failure to develop the productive forces. ^^ Bourgeois property by definition does in fact act as a fetter on the material factors of production, at all stages of the evolution of the technological regime. CB: In fact, they don't. Under bourgeois property relations the productive forces have been developed more than under any previous mode of production. By definition does in fact is contradictory. This does not mean production is not revolutionized. The most historical presentation of the question of the fetter on production is the market barrier created by bourgeois property, that limits consumption - due to the working classes limited wages, or the crisis of overproduction. The development of the productive forces and their continuous expansion is blocked - fettered, by the circuit of capital as reproduction and its need to sell and realize a profit. In addition to the overproduction crisis, their is our current crisis of overcapacity in various industries. The auto industry world wide is the most classical example in our country. The revolution in technology exacerbates the crisis of overproduction and overcapacity as ever larger segments of labor are rendered superfluous to production along side of a lowering of the value of labor power. ^ CB: So far, all this fettering has not caused the beginning of an epoch of social revolution , except in Russia and in various imperialist colonies. The bourgeoisie have selectively augmented the consumption of segments of the working class such that the working class has not burst asunder the bourgeois property relations. ^^^ Then again the actual development of the material property of the productive forces are fettered by the bourgeois property on the basis of how the extensive and intensive development of equipment takes place. For example, single function tools and machinery are considered more profitable for the bourgeoisie because they extract a higher degree of surplus value from the individual and pin the worker to the machine. This form of the laboring process is a fetter on the overall expansion of the productive forces. ^ CB: But this fettering hasn't arisen to such a conflict between forces and relations of production so as to initiate an epoch of social revolution. ^^ The most fundamental fetter of the bourgeois property relations resides in the actual self movement of production - reproduction, on the basis of bourgeois need. Marx speaks of this extensively in his Philosophic Manuscript of 1844. Capital as bourgeois property does not reproduce to satisfy authentic human needs but rather inherits these human needs and creates a different set of needs that becomes its condition and precondition for expansion and reproduction. Capital produces for profits. By definition the positive results of science are channeled into and realized on the basis of bourgeois need or the circuit of capital peculiar to bourgeois production and this is at all times a fetter on the overall expansion of the productive forces. There is simply no way around the statement that relations of production or production relations - in standard American English, are the laws defining property and the relationship of people to property in the process of production. ^ CB: yea. Relations of production and property relations are the same thing. ^ Relations of production or social relations of production also embody the physical act of producing, based on a specific state of development of the technological regime and this old technological regime stands in contradiction with the new means of production that have spontaneously emerged within the old system - and not simply an abstract concept of property and ownership. ^^^ CB: The physical act of producing is the productive forces, not the relations of production/property relations. This does not render the concepts of property and ownership abstract. Property relations refer to the concrete, not abstract, ownership relationships between people with
[Marxism-Thaxis] Rousseau
If the summary below and posted earlier is accurate, then Rousseau does have a bourgeois anthropological concept , as Caudwell claims. The earliest humans are characterized by the opposite of isolation. They are characterized by increased sociality, elaborate kinship systems, based on tracing relationships with living other humans through the relationships to dead ancestors. They are not differentiated from apes by individual free will, but rather greater freedom for individuals because of their elaborate kinship and culture. It was not population growth the forced greater association, but rather greater association with each other ( kinship and culture) that allowed adaptive success , and thereby population growth. Charles ^^ His subsequent Discourse on Inequality http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discourse_on_Inequality , tracked the progress and degeneration of mankind from a primitive state of nature http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_of_nature to modern society. He suggested that the earliest human beings were isolated semi-apes who were differentiated from animals by their capacity for free will and their perfectibility. He also argued that these primitive humans were possessed of a basic drive to care for themselves and a natural disposition to compassion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compassion or pity. As humans were forced to associate together more closely, by the pressure of population growth, they underwent a psychological transformation and came to value the good opinion of others as an essential component of their own well being. Rousseau associated this new self-awareness with a golden age of human flourishing. However, the development of agriculture and metallurgy, private property and the division of labour http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Division_of_labour led to increased interdependence and inequality http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inequality . ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] Compatibilism and incompatibilism
Jim Farmelant : Caudwell seems to have held to a type of compatibilism concerning the issue of free will and determinism. As such it seems to bear more than a passing resemblance to the views of Plekhanov as outlined his essay, The Role of the Individual in History, http://art-bin.com/art/oplecheng.html as well as to view of my friend Tom Clark (who is not a Marxist), see: http://www.naturalism.org/freewill.htm Certainly, Caudwell's take on freedom can be seen as as a Spinozan and even Baconian, since for him human freedom is based not on an illusory contracausal free will but rather upon the acceptance of necessity which leads us to seek the determinants of our own behaviors which in turn makes it possible for us to become the masters of the natural and social forces that shape our destinies. Thus, for Caudwell, socialism was seen as the key for the expansion of human freedom under modern conditions. Compatibilism and incompatibilism From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Compatibilism, also known as soft determinism and most famously championed by Hume http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hume , is a theory which holds that free will http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will and determinism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determinism are compatible. According to Hume, free will should not be understood as an absolute ability to have chosen differently under exactly the same inner and outer circumstances. Rather, it is a hypothetical ability to have chosen differently if one had been differently psychologically disposed by some different beliefs or desires. Hume also maintains that free acts are not uncaused (or mysteriously self-caused as Kant http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immanuel_Kant would have it) but caused by our choices as determined by our beliefs, desires, and by our characters. While a decision making process exists in Hume's determinism, this process is governed by a causal chain of events. For example, a person may make the decision to support Wikipedia, but that decision is determined by the conditions that existed prior to the decision being made. The opposing view, that free will cannot be consistent with determinism, is sometimes called incompatibilism. The pessimistic version, sometimes known as hard determinism, is that neither determinism nor indeterminism permit free will; Hume also considered free will inconsistent with indeterminism. One incompatibilist position holds that free will refers to genuine (e.g. absolute, ultimate) alternate possibilities for beliefs, desires or actions, and that such possibilities are absent from the compatibilist definitions. In the absence of such possibilities, the belief that free will confers responsibility is held to be false. However, one compatibilist counter-argument is that such absolute alternate possibilities could only have random causes, which would actually diminish responsibility. Some views are less easily categorized. The libertarian http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarianism_%28philosophy%29 position is that our experience of free will implies the universe is not deterministic. Some advocates of this view consider it compatible with determinism in the physical universe, but believe mental events are different. A more concise description can be found in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (see link below) The thesis of determinism says that everything that happens is determined by antecedent conditions together with the laws of nature. Incompatibilism is the philosophical thesis that if determinism is true, then we don't have free will. The denial of incompatibilism is compatibilism; a compatibilist is someone who believes that the truth of determinism does not rule out the existence of free will. William James http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_James , the American http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States pragmatist http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pragmatism philosopher who coined the term soft determinist in an influential essay titled The Dilemma of Determinism http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Dilemma_of_Determinismaction =edit , held that the importance of the issue of determinism is not one of personal responsibility, but one of hope. He believed that thorough-going determinism leads either to a bleak pessimism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pessimism or to a degenerate subjectivism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjectivism in moral judgment. The way to escape that dilemma is to allow a role of chance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chance . He said that he would not insist upon the name free will as a synonym for the role chance plays in human actions, simply because he preferred to debate about things, not words. Texts ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] Free will
I can imagine Caudwell saying something like the problem of free will and determinism is a bourgeois philosophical problem. Free will is another of the many expressions of bourgeois liberty, i.e. the total independence and autonomy of the individual from society and the universe. The desire that this individual will not be determined by anything but itself is the dream of bourgeois individualism and absolute individual freedom. ONce we are comfortable with the individual as especially a social individual, the lack of undetermined and free will of the individual is not so bothersome. Charles ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] relations of production as fetter on production
CB: What is suggested by Marx is that the bourgeois property relations will not be revolutionized and overthrown by the successful development of the productive forces, but by the failure to develop the productive forces. WL: The issue under discussion is not the bourgeois property relations being revolutionized. Nor is it a question of the bourgeoisie as a class failing to develop the productive forces. The bourgeois property relation as a specific form of ownership rights - as you define it separate from the actual engagement of production, cannot be revolutionized as such, but in the last instance will be shattered. In the meaning that you give relations of production as ownership rights devoid of the material quality of daily producing within an infrastructure with definite relations of production, what can be revolutionized and what has been revolutionized - (on the basis of a qualitatively new set of ingredients injected into the productivity infrastructure), is the specific form of the mode of accumulation as tool and instrument usage. The form of the mode of accumulation of wealth as bourgeois property does not take place simply because the bourgeoisie is owner. The form of the mode is predicated upon a given technology. The form of the mode of accumulation enters the picture here. Not the mode of accumulation but its form expressed as tools and instruments usage, industrial banks, paper notes, gold storage, etc. Computers and their application and use constitutes a continuing revolution in the form of the mode of accumulation as compared with say, paper and fiat money during the time of Karl Marx. Today the form of wealth has a super symbolic character. Here the word super means an abstraction of an abstraction, or a representation of an intangible, rather than a quantitative increase in the supply of money or a simply quantitative expansion of ones money holding. Money itself is symbol - symbolic, and this symbolic money is long detached from species and in turn has its symbols stored in computers: hence, super symbolic or symbolic representation of the intangible. You seem to be stating the following: 1). the bourgeois property relations . . . a). will not be revolutionized and b). (will not) overthrown by . . . c). the successful development of the productive forces, 2). but by . . . d). the failure (of the bourgeoisie) to develop the productive forces. That is to say, I understand this to mean - not imply, that social revolution today will result as the failure of the bourgeois to develop the productive forces. You state that this is what Marx implies. The bourgeoisie is the involuntary promoter of industry and its development. Social revolution comes about as the result of the development of the productive forces. The productive forces do not stop developing or stop undergoing revolutionizing. At a certain stage in their development the material power of the productive forces cannot be contained - (continue its extensive and intensive expansion and operate on the basis of the universality of the law system unique to the new qualitative addition to production) by the old relations of production - with the property relations within, and then an epoch of social revolution begins. Production and revolutionizing continues to take place but within the bounds of bourgeois property or on the basis of the needs - bourgeois needs, created as the condition for its reproduction. The concept is not the failure of the bourgeoisie to develop the productive forces, but their fettering and/or distortion by the needs of bourgeois property. I believe at this point the focus of the discussion has been lost because you state the exact opposite to what you state above in the following statement. WL: Bourgeois property by definition does in fact act as a fetter on the material factors of production, at all stages of the evolution of the technological regime. CB: In fact, they don't. Under bourgeois property relations the productive forces have been developed more than under any previous mode of production. I understand you to be saying that bourgeois property in fact, does not fetter the revolutionizing of production because the bourgeoisie have developed production more than previous modes of production. Fetter means to confine or restrain rather than to halt or stop. It is the sum total of bourgeois need that is the fetter on the productive forces and this need comes to life on the basis of capital being put to work on the basis of profitability or rather maximum profits. This is the fetter that drives a certain extensive and intensive implementation of the technological advance. The issue here is not a comparison of the bourgeoisie as a class with the classes and property relations of the society from which it emerged (feudal society), or with the mode of production from which feudal society in turn emerged. By
