Carrol Cox wrote:
If necessary labor (in Hannah Arendt's sense of _merely_ necessary
labor
in contrast to work or action) is to be reduced to the absolute
minimum,
and men/women are to be fishers in the morning and critics in the
afternoon, that necessary labor needs to be rationalized and
The ontological idea of internal relations, the idea that makes
Marxs analysis of capitalism dialectical, leads to the treatment of
law as immanent. The nature of individuals, in the case of human
individuals the degree of their rational self-consciousness as
expressed in their motives and,
I didn't set off the quote from Marx. It's the passage beginning
within the capitalist system. It's also from Chap. 25 of Capital
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch25.htm. Also, I
meant to say: Individuals immiserized in this way would _not_ be
subjects of this kind.
Ted
Marx sets out the differentia specifica of capitalist production in
the following passage from Chap. 25 (that this is an expression of
motivation dominated by greed is made clear in other passages in
Capital and elsewhere). This too is an absolute law of this mode of
production in the sense
Ralph Johansen wrote:
Where do you find in Marx any reference to innate greed as the
motivation for accumulation under capital? Greed, sloth, etc., are
among the
seven deadly sins of western mythology and religious doctrine, the
basis of
Judaeo-Christian guilt, not the basis for accumulation
David Shemano wrote:
Is Marx making an empirical point?
Yes. It's an empirical claim about the psychology dominant in
capitalism. The idea of greed' as an irrational passion is ancient.
As Marx points out in Capital, it can be found in Aristotle.
Aristotle opposes Oeconomic to Chrematistic.
Gil Skillman wrote:
From a certain theoretical standpoint--and I'm talking mainstream
theory,
not Marxist--these questions are irrelevant. Given competitive
markets (or
indeed, just competitive markets for firm equity shares), it can be
shown
that, whatever their personal consumption goals,
Charles Brown wrote:
Perhaps a scientific worldview enhances achievement of
self-determinaton
through greater mastery of necessity and thereby freedom. Radical
acknowledgement of objective reality implies the existence of
subjective
reality.
Darwin, Lewontin, Levin and Gould's work concern an
Jayson Funke quoted Sweezy:
Marx was a strong adherent of the abstract-deductive method which was
such a marked characteristic of the Ricardian school... Marx believed
in and practiced what modern theorists have called the method of
'successive approximations,' which consists in moving from the
Daniel Davies asked:
was he right?
Hegel's logic elaborates an ontology. One of its key concepts is
internal relations. Individual entities are internally related where
their essences are the product of their relations. This contrasts
with the concept of external relations which conceives
Jim Blaut wrote:
Think of the way we vilify or
ignore Dewey. Russell. Whitehead. Mead. The positivists. Etc. These
folks represent the main line of thinking in philosophies that are
friendly to science and are to one degree or another materialist
(although the word of course scared them). Nor are
Ken Hanly wrote:
What is assumed as just is that a
person should be able to appropriate the value of what they produce
through
their labor and that private property in the means of production makes
this
impossible and so is inherently unjust.
The ultimate idea of right that Marx defends is from
Doug Henwood wrote:
But is that because market prices aren't reflecting buying and
selling, or because the buyers and sellers are irrational? Like I
said, market prices can be efficiently reflecting nonsense.
One expression of irrationality is an inability to learn from
experience. In part, this
James Devine wrote:
I doubt that anyone wants to be put on permanent display.
I think at his own request, Bentham;s stuffed and clothed skeleton
adorned with a wax replica of his head is permanently on display in
University College. The original head is in a box between his feet.
Ted
Sabri Oncu asked:
What does _objective_ political economy mean?
The premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas,
but real premises from which abstraction can only be made in the
imagination. They are the real individuals, their activity and the
material conditions under which
On Jun 2, 2004, at 12:00 PM, Tom Walker wrote:
It may be helpful to non-statisticians to point out that the bell
curve is
not a theory, a fact or a physical law. It is an observed regularity
that
occurs often when looking at large numbers of cases. It has to do with
the
randomness of the
Doug Henwood wrote:
Which brings me to a question about the politics of this. Mark Jones,
may he rest in peace, was a big fan of Petroconsultants, who are
major catastrophists, right? But aren't the catastrophists in the oil
industry eagerly lobbying for tax breaks and reduced environmental
Jim D. wrote:
I think that profit-max is a better description of firms than
utility-max is as a description of people.
Again, I think the dominant view ignores alternative approaches.
If capitalism is a social system whose characteristic relations
generate psychopathology i.e. some degree of
Michael Perelman wrote:
I don't think that craziness is relevant to the evaluation of a
person. I would not
change my mind about Bush if someone convinced me that he were
mentally unbalanced or
if he were healthy. At the same time, I think that mental states are
relevant in
forgiving people.
I
Jim asked:
okay, while we're on the subject of answering rhetorical questions,
can corporations attain orgasm?
Jim D.
No. They can play an important role, though, in the orgasms of those
for whom they are a fetish object. The sex involved is anal sadistic
and non-consensual. This is thinly
Jim wrote:
My feeling is that C was saying that a jury of 12 would be more
accurate in its processing of the facts they were given -- to make a
_binary decision_ (guilty/not guilty) -- than would be a jury of 1 or
6, assuming that one of the two verdicts is actually valid. It's like
saying two
James Surowieki wrote:
Generations of advertisers and business gurus have banked on the
premises of Sigmund Freud's ''Group Psychology and the Analysis of the
Ego,'' a slender volume with a big argument: when people assemble en
masse, all the raw material making up the individual psyche (libido,
Jim Devine wrote:
In his classical contribution Condorcet (1785) described a committee
as a mechanism that eciently aggregates decentralized information.
In his famous jury theorem he argues that (i) increasing the number
of informed committee members raises the probability that an
appropriate
Jim Devine wrote:
Ted writes:
I think it's a mistake to see psychopathology as ever functional.
Success can't be furthered by unrealistic thinking.
unrealistic thinking -- e.g., schizophrenia -- usually doesn't further
success in capitalist enterprise, on the level of practical reason.
But it
I think it's a mistake to see psychopathology as ever functional.
Success can't be furthered by unrealistic thinking. Even if we
interpret success as making money, psychopathological thinking will
be less successful than rational thinking. In Keynes's analysis of
financial markets, for instance,
Jim wrote:
So Ted assumes that I thought it was brilliant in general rather than
in a very specific way.
Ted had asked:
What specifically from the summary of his ideas by Mirowski would you
select as demonstrating brilliant insight into human motives and
behaviour?
in response to Jim's claim that:
k hanly wrote:
I thought the appropriate psychological orientation for success in
capitalism was to be a psychopath. At least that is the hypothesis of
the
Corporation documentary.
http://www.thetyee.ca/Entertainment/current/
The+Corporation+Shrinking+the+Psychopath.htm
By a quirk of legal
From the section (pp. 335-49) in Philip Mirowski's *Machine Dreams* on what has come in retrospect to be regarded the signal mathematical development in game theory in the 1950s, the event most consequential for the subsequent history of *economics*, the invention of the 'Nash equilibrium'
Jim D. wrote:
just because Nash was crazy doesn't mean that he was always wrong.
Who are you arguing with here?
What specifically from the summary of his ideas by Mirowski would you
select as demonstrating brilliant insight into human motives and
behaviour? He believed himself possessed of such
Jim D. wrote:
it's true that you didn't draw out the conclusions you had come to
from all of the quotes from Mirowski. As far as I could tell, you were
saying that because Nash was crazy, NE was wrong in some sense. I feel
it's enough to think that NE is wrong due to other reasons.
I did say
Jim Devine wrote:
But the idea of Nash equilibrium and GT don't necessarily say that
people are calculating machines. It could be interpreted as saying
that in certain circumstances (in games) people act _as if_ they
were calculating machines -- or that people might be assumed to act
this way as a
Jim Devine wrote:
this is an excellent statement of the game-theoretic way of thinking,
seen in its starkest way in the kind of paranoia that characterized
John Nash. It also points to the often-unnoted psychic costs of
thinking that way.
The delusional aspect concerns a great deal more than
Michael Perelman wrote:
I didn't get any responses from my note about Nobel prize-winning
economist, Harry
Markowitz, as the cofounder of one of the two infamous military
contractors
associated with the prisoner abuse scandal.
Keynes connects the mistaken use of logic to predict the uncertain
Jimmy D. wrote:
Of course, Churchill isn't cited as the
war criminal and racist that he was because
(1) his last stint as PM involved a war against
a generally-accepted bad guy; and (2) he won.
Blair Bush may not win, while it's possible
that they could become generally accepted as bad
guys.
Tom Walker wrote:
The reference is to page 706 of the English translation, Vintage
Books. At
some level the distinctions between wealth, value and capital may be
straightforward but they're not so at the margins. Marx, as I read the
passage, quotes approvingly of the notion that real wealth is
Charles Brown wrote:
CB: Is it Marx's meaning or the amended view of Marx that takes
account of
the irrational factors you mention ?
I think that Marx's meaning does, but that it doesn't do so adequately.
That it takes account of irrationality is demonstrated by the
contrasting, in the passage
Jim wrote:
If I'm not mistaken, Ted is referring to the problem of the expression
of public opinion through plebiscites. If people are isolated, having
few or no popular organizations that allow popular discussion and
self-education, people tend to veer toward the most individualistic
ideologies.
Chris Doss wrote:
People see what they want to see, and ignore what they don't.
Earlier he wrote:
You were dissing the Russian public, something close to my heart.
As is true of the US public or the Canadian public, the Russian
public must consist of differing types characterized by differing
Chris Doss wrote:
it annoys me when some foreigner lambasts the inhabitants of a country
in which he or she (presumably) has never been for not supporting his
or her views. It is, well, arrogant. Russians have very good reasons
for feeling as they do.
This must apply generally, mustn't it e.g.
Chris Doss wrote:
It's all a function of geographic location and knowledge of the
relevant language. :)
Perceiving others truly is a bit more complex than this suggests, isn't
it? :)
Ted
Louis Proyect quoted Mark Jones:
In the West, if an oil corp. finds oil, they want
to pump it out as soon as possible.
If it's knowable and known that oil will be soon be depleted, rational profit maximizing management of the resource will incorporate this into the current price via what Keynes
Sabri Oncu wrote:
My point was that there is no one out there who
exactly knows what the future will bring us, so in
that sense everybody, is a noise trader, meaning
that their decisions are guided by hueristics and
biases.
Put differently, there are no rational traders,
whatever rational means.
Mike Ballard wrote:
Marx and many
others thought that the French--espeically the workers
of Paris--had reached at least a level of class
consciousness sufficient to begin to junk the old
State machinery and to attempt to create a class
dictatorship of their own: the Paris Commune of 1871.
Of
Jim wrote:
Just because I said the issue of enlightenment was normative doesn't
mean that I don't think it's important. However, my reading of Marx
wouldn't emphasize individual enlightenment and capacity for judgment
as much as collective (class) consciousness (enlightenment, capacity
for
Michael Perelman wrote:
the
Soviet Union had the advantage of (a relatively crude) socialist
organization of production.
Was it socialist in a sense derivable from Marx?
Marx claims at the start of the passage from the 18th Brumaire I quoted
recently that the state power is not suspended in the
Jim wrote:
I don't think arguing about the meaning of words is useful.
Why isn't it useful (i.e. essential to understanding the phenomena
involved) to distinguish social relations that presuppose a high degree
of enlightenment and capacity for judgment on the part of the related
individuals from
Jim wrote:
When you write of social relations that presuppose a high degree of
enlightenment and capacity for judgment on the part of the related
individuals from those that presuppose significant superstition and
prejudice you help define what socialists are in favor of. That kind
of normative
Chris Doss wrote:
Russian peasants in the quasi-feudal tsarist era would work
intensively for the three months or so of the year when the ground was
usuable for agriculture, and then sit around on their asses the rest
of the year, in any case.
Did they just sit around on their asses? What, for
On Apr 21, 2004, at 10:33 AM, Chris Doss wrote:
Who knows? That way of life is dead. But in any case it was determined
by the conditions of agrarian life in a climate in which the ground is
only arable for 3-4 months out of the year. As is contemporary Russian
rural life. BTW Russia had its
Jim Devine wrote:
unlikely to be coincidence that likes of derrida foucault
approvingly
cite and reference brumaire...
Althusser also liked it, no? as have lots of others (including myself)
who aren't pomo.
In the following passage (quoted by Yoshie recently on LBO), Althusser
claims the
Jim wrote:
The big criticism of utopianism was tactical and strategic: it doesn't
do much good to show people a diagram of how socialism should be
organized (as the Socialist Labor Party used to do) and do nothing
else, ignoring the possibilities generated by the contradictions of
capitalism.
Doug Henwood wrote:
Compared to what? It's hard to argue with its capacity to grow,
innovate, and produce cheaper commodities over the centuries - at a
high social and ecological cost, for sure, but I don't think you can
win the efficiency argument from the left. It has to be on other
grounds.
There is a more fundamental way in which Marx's approach to capital differs from Becker's and makes the human capital approach an expression of fetishism. The following passages also elaborate the idea of forces of production as an expression of the development of mind i.e. as the
Carrol Cox wrote:
My position for some years has been that in his remarks on
the relations of production becoming fetters on the forces of
production Marx was plain wrong. There is simply no historical
justification for the claim. (The water wheel, far from giving us the
industrial capitalist
James Devine wrote:
most psychology -- including Freudian psychoanalysis -- is extremely
individualistic, especially in practice. Or it focuses on the behavior
and/or consciousness of the average person in society...
Kleinian psychoanalysis isn't individualistic if you mean by this has
little
michael wrote:
Davidson has an idea fixe that liberals have to find an answer to
neo-classical
economics. They can only succeed by dogmatically hewing to one line.
Keynes
has the fewest assumptions, so by Occam's razor, he is best suited to
rise to
the occassion. All others must be cut down
joanna wrote:
How do you measure the value of a woman's loving
attention and awareness of her children, without which an army of
shrinks couldn't fix the damage? I could go on a long time. But I'll
conclude by saying that economics (which finds its root meaning in the
running of the household)
Doug Henwood wrote:
Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
I honestly am not aware enough of Pollin's economic ideas to judge
them, although I am not surprised to discover that he is some kind
of left-Keynsian.
FYI, http://www.umass.edu/peri/robertpwp.html.
When Bob was at Labyrinth Books in New York a few
Jurriaan Bendien wrote:
Originally Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point -
i.e.
the heart has its reasons of which reason doesn't see the relevance or
in
which reason sees no point, i.e. the rational intellect can understand
the
reasons of the heart (affective impulses,
Jurriaan Bendien wrote:
But it is not clear what the mistake is. If a doctor is to perform
surgery
on a patient, he must separate his feelings from the patient in order
to
perform the surgery in some way, and the way in which he does so, is
important. But this way can often be grasped only
ravi wrote:
Devine, James wrote:
what kind of neurosis -- or psychosis -- do we leftists suffer from?
self-importance? determinism? is that a neurosis?
Leftists doesn't point to just one way of thinking, feeling and
acting does it? I suspect it's possible to find varying degrees of
nce, been frequently
conjoin'd, will likewise, in other instances, be conjoined in the same
manner; and that nothing leads us to this inference but custom or a certain
instinct of our nature; which it is indeed difficult to resist, but which,
like other instincts, may be fallacious or deceitful.&qu
e I quoted he claims
that it can be justified, that the conjunction can be shown to be caused by
"custom or a certain instinct": the sceptic "justly insists ... that nothing
leads us to this inference but custom or a certain instinct of our nature;
which it is indeed difficult t
Of coutrse it can't. If it could, then there would be an answer to the
problem of induction. So what's your point? --jks
The point is in the sentence following the one you quote.
Ted
--
Ted WinslowE-MAIL: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Division of Social Science VOICE:
of doubting it and
conceptually barred from justifying it. The best we can do is to
explain it.
How could Hume reach this conclusion without employing induction?
Ted Winslow
--
Ted WinslowE-MAIL: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Division of Social Science VOICE: (416) 736
, it is
because Ibsen can penetrate too deeply into regions which we prefer to keep
concealed even from ourselves." (CW XXVIII, p. 327)
Ted Winslow
--
Ted WinslowE-MAIL: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Division of Social Science VOICE: (416) 736-
Ken Hanly wrote:
Reason is not capable of really questioning
induction since reason is powerless against such a natural instinct.
How then is Hume able to question induction?
Ted
--
Ted WinslowE-MAIL: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Division of Social Science VOICE
Ken misspeaks, Reason can question, but the questioning does not disturb the
deeply rooted force of habit that makes us accept induction. Reason is pretty
weak, according to Hume, in the face of passion or habit. And was he wrong to
think so? --jks
If the answer to this question is no he
ide.edu.au/etext/m/m645r/repgov03.html
Ted Winslow
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Justin wrote:
Read the section On the Probable Futurity of the Laboring Classes in Part IV
of a later edition of Principlesof Political Economy. He clearly expects the
end of the wage relationship, thinks workers won't stand for it any more.
--jks
This is available on-line at:
is not open to self-determination or to
rational evaluation?
Ted Winslow
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Division of Social Science VOICE: (416) 736-5054
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CANADA
of psychotic
thinking than superficial scrutiny would admit." Bion, *Learning from
Experience*, in *Seven Servants*, p. 14
Ted Winslow
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Ted WinslowE-MAIL: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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of particular kinds of mathematical
reasoning to the material of the "moral sciences".
"Behavioral psychology" seems to be pretty much the only kind of psychology
to which economists are willing or able to pay attention.
Ted
--
Ted WinslowE-MAIL: [EMA
8 -0500
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: [PEN-L:20243] Psychology: Physics Envy or Lit-Crit Envy
Ted Winslow wrote:
[snip]
The wider conventional basis of the dominant approaches of . . .psychology
...economics is "physics envy". The profile identifies "ps
produced the specific narrow-mindedness of the last
centuries, the metaphysical mode of thought." Engels, Anti-Duhring, pp. 26-7
see also p. 132
Louis might consider the mention of Bacon in this context. ;-)
Ted Winslow
--
Ted WinslowE-MAIL: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
D
radle, and the grown man in middle age, are in
some senses identical and in other senses diverse. Is the train of argument
in its conclusions substantiated by the identity of vitiated by the diversity?
"We thus dismiss deductive logic as a major instrument for metaphysical
discussion. Such d
ach stage emerges from "negation" of the relations
defining the preceding stage. This "negation" is an aspect of an internal
relation of "sublation".
Ted
--
Ted WinslowE-MAIL: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Division of Social Science VOICE
eedom of the
press. He procured fire, which obediently to human purposes cooks and gives
warmth. In fact, freedom of action is a primary human need. In modern
thought, the expression of this truth has taken the form of 'the economic
interpretation of history'." Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas,
f partial truth, unguarded and uncoordinated
with the immensities of the Universe." Adventures of Ideas, pp. 73-8
Ted
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Ted WinslowE-MAIL: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Division of Social Science VOICE: (416) 736-5054
York UniversityFAX: (416) 73
Louis writes:
This sounds like Will and Ariel Durant.
This sounds like Louis Proyect.
Ted
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Ted WinslowE-MAIL: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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4700 Keele
he control of the general intellect and been transformed in accordance with
it. To what degree the powers of social production have been produced, not
only in the form of knowledge, but also as immediate organs of social
practice, of the real life process." Grundrisse pp. 705-6
, who possesses and
fights; 'history' is not, as it were, a person apart, using man as a means
to achieve its own aims; history is nothing but the activity of man pursuing
his aims." Marx and Engels, *The Holy Family*, Collected Writings, vol. 4,
p. 93
Ted
--
Ted Winslow
man essence, both in its theoretical and practical
aspects, is required to make man's *sense human*, as well as to create the
*human sense* corresponding to the entire wealth of human and natural
substance." Collected Works, vol. 3, pp. 301-2
Ted
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n
its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to
his ability, to each according to his needs!" Critique of the Gotha
Programme
Kant, Goethe and Hegel are sublated by Marx. My interpretive thesis is that
the ideas set out in the passages I quoted are positively
x's emphasis on class is not incompatible with
the interpretive thesis that he views the historical process as a process of
the development of "freedom" in the sense of Kant and Hegel.
Ted
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busy, teeming throngs I long to see,
Standing on freedom's soil, a people free.
Then to the moment could I say:
Linger you now, you are so fair!
Now records of my earthly day
No flight of aeons can impair -
Foreknowledge comes, and fills me with such bliss,
I take my joy, my hig
quot; (Hegel, The Philosophy of History, pp. 40-41)
Social contexts can be more or less supportive of such development.
According to Marx, the most supportive such context would be a community of
"associated producers", "an association in which the free dev
as individual calculating machines integrated through
markets is not a debate about the practicability of the ideal republic of
either Marx or Keynes.
Ted Winslow
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but universally applicable?
"Ambitious men and women with large egos" usually have very weak egos.
Their "ambition" and "large egos" are in fact signs of clinical narcissism.
This blinds them to obvious facts including the fact of their own ignorance.
Ted Wins
the best of all possible worlds no?
Ted
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d ascribe to them happiness and misery, desires,
interests and passions, nothing really exists or feels but individuals' "My
Early Beliefs", vol. X, p. 449) is mistakenly identified with possessive
individualism and atomism.
Ted
--
Ted WinslowE-MAIL: [EMAIL PROTECTE
osite of those found in what I wrote.
To avoid this problem you will have to do something about the feeling
expressed in your first sentence and about your certainty that
psychoanalysis is and can be nothing more than a tool of the capitalist
devil (albeit not a very useful one since, am
not
intelligent, it is not beautiful, it is not just, it is not virtuous - and
it doesn't deliver the goods. In short, we dislike it and we are beginning
to despise it." (Collected Writings, vol. XIX, p. 239)
He did, however, uncritically assume, in sharp contrast to Marx, that most
people a
the vice (the part
derived, of course, directly from Ricardo). It also explains the
contemptuously witty way in which some who are of this view dismiss the rest
of Marx e.g. those aspects that derive from German philosophy. For reasons
pointed to by Klein herself, the mentality in question frequentl
Louis asks:
Wouldn't Prozac help?
It might. According to the theory, it certainly "helped" the minds that
invented it. And from the perspective of the persons treated, it's
obviously much better than a lobotomy.
Ted
--
Ted WinslowE-MAIL: [EMAIL
Charles Brown asks:
CB: Or vigorous dancing or sports and wine ?
Yes. Much better to have neo-Nazis channeling their energies into drink,
soccer games and dance than into murdering members of visible minorities.
Ted
--
Ted WinslowE-MAIL: [EMAIL PROTECTED
the underlying motivation is more likely to find direct conscious
expression in thought and action when the individuals in question form
themselves into a "mob" having the character of what Freud called a
"psychological group", as in "lynch mobs".
Ted
--
Ted Winslow
Charles Brown wrote:
CB: This is an interesting thesis you put forth, but a question that arises
for me is that humans have tools and relations of production before they have
class exploitative relations of production ( master/slave relationship). So
the development of the forces of
understand how
the later emerged from it, it's necessary to start from the later; to fully
understand feudalism it's necessary to understand capitalism since
capitalism existed in it as a "potential". This is one of the reasons "the
owl of Minerva only takes flight at dusk".
but as fixed constants; not in their
life, but in their death. And when, as was the case with Bacon and Locke,
this way of looking at things was transferred from natural science to
philosophy, it produced the specific narrow-mindedness of the last
centuries, the metaphysical mode of thought.
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