Greetings Economists,
Justin Schwartz (a.k.a. JKS) casually writes about Analytical Marxism (AM)
in a typically rationalist way,
JKS written 01 February 2002 03:05 UTC Pen-L,
making do not require reductionism of any sort. What remains of AM--and it
does survive in places like the journal Historical Materialism--is an
emphasis on clarity, precision, explicitness, and rigorous standardss of
argument, along with a totally unworshipful attitude towards traditional
formulations or classic texts. These are worth preserving.
Doyle
Rationalism is about separating subjectivity from rationality as the above
example amply demonstrates. And in general that subjectivity means religion
(though I don't want JKS's words to represent a serious effort to advance
rationalism here, but instead a convenient place to anchor a counter
argument), and that JKS clearly says certain kinds of Marxist have a
religion called Marxism, rather than a materialist attitude toward economics
issuing from Marx. What I will do below in examining this claim is first
of all reject the rationalist split above by referring to contemporary
science which suggests direct material explanation of religing (the verb
form of the brainwork process of the religious activity). Secondly to
examine the act of religing (the labor process of actively doing a work
called religion) in such a way as to tie the work into contemporary IT
(Information Technology). Importantly that tying together of religing to a
material labor process would then show the theory and practice of IT must
utilize what JKS says is a worshipful attitude towards traditional
formulations of classic texts. While this does not directly address LTV
(Labor Theory of Value) and other of Marx's economic theories this addresses
what is a wide spread and difficult rationalist knot aimed at disparaging
committed Marxist as religious.
As is typical of Marx himself, JKS draws attention to Christian cognitive
strategies i.e moralism, and asserts that AM as a movement following from
Marx himself ;
JKS
01 February 2002 16:02 UTC
Re: RE: Re: RE: Re: Re: query: Historical Materialism
Marx accepts, but not in the sense used by most of its adherents, who think
that the vulgar version implies taht workers are entitled, morally, to the
value that their labor is the source of. Marx was not interested in claims
of justice and would have regarded the labor theory of property underlying
this argument as so much ideology. The vulgar version is wrong in any case
because there is no reason to deny that there may be many factors, including
subjective ones (demand) that go into value.
...and
01 February 2002 16:32 UTC
value and morality
This confused. First of all, Marx adamantlt, savagely, and ruthlessly
rejects egalitarianism and any appeal to to principles of justice. He is not
an egalitarian. He also rejects justice as "shit." He mocks those who
proceed from moralism to economics. His use of the LTV derives from the fact
that it was the standard theory of his day, used by Smith, Ricardo, Mill,
etc.; he used ita s Roemer uses Walrasian economics, it was jsut the place
to start. It had no, zero, zip, moral implications. Neither has it any moral
basis, since brutal inegalitarians like Ricardo embraced it.
Doyle
However, JKS in the casual remarks above does not adequately describe to us
what makes the Christian cognitive emotional management regime known as
"morality" work. We are in fact in the dark about religing issues, because
Rationalism splits apart (and maintains silence about) religious
consciousness and brainwork from kinds of brainwork such as science. A
rationalist then maintains that Science removes subjectivity. Science for
the rationalist states the activity is demonstrably compromised by
subjective cognition and "fundamentalist" attitudes toward Marxism. If we
say Science is not in the business of using the emotional component of how
theory is created in human beings we in effect split off feelings from
brainwork however we might label religing as not acceptable. JKS writes
above to re-quote more narrowly;
JKS written 01 February 2002 03:05 UTC Pen-L (quoted above),
...an emphasis on clarity, precision, explicitness, and rigorous standardss
of
argument,
&
Leave fundamentalism to the religious. If there is a scientific
dimension to historical materialism, it will survive. But it requires a
skeptical temperment.
Doyle
In regard to religion there are three interlocking Scientific theories that
address what JKS means by religion but are not rationalist in the sense of
splitting off consciousness from rationality and therefore directly address
the issue of Marxist religing. Simply stated those theories are a "Theory
of Mind", that underlies producing language, that a human being may have a
Theory of Mind (ToM) or may not, and therefore can use language or can't use
language. A structure of "Joint Attention" (JA), between human beings that
connects human beings in language network, and which is not simply language
but the underlying cognitive architectures that human beings can share by
language exchange. And directly producing the act of religing itself, a
theory of "Explanation" ("Explanation and Cognition", Keil and Wilson, MIT
Press 2000) that shows how a "Theory of Mind" and "Joint Attention" produce
religing. And move away from a purely philosophical argument, show in IT
what the implications of religing actually might produce in IT. And
therefore to directly address the charge of religing Marxism.
>From "Explanation and Cognition", chapter three written by Robert N.
McCauley, chapter title; "The Naturalness of Religion, and the Unnaturalness
of Science, page 61,
"Intellectualists in developmental psychology (e.g., Gopnik and Meltzoff
1997) maintain that young children's conceptual structures, like those of
scientists, are theories and that their conceptual development--like the
development of science--is a process of theory formation and change. They
speculate that our explanatory preoccupations result, at least in part, from
a natural drive to develop theories. Intellectualists in the anthropology
of religion (e.g., Horton 1970, 1993) hold that, although it may do many
other things as well, religion is primarily concerned with providing
explanatory theories. They maintain that religion and science have the
same explanatory goals: on the idioms of their explanations differ."
...
page 63,
"Some cognitive capacities seem to turn neither on any particular cultural
input nor, as in the case of face recognition, on any peculiarly cultural
input at all. Children's proclivity to acquire language and nearly all
human beings' appreciation of some of the basic physics of solid objects,
their assumptions about the mutual exclusivity of taxonomic classes in
biology, and their abilities to detect and read agents' minds are just some
of the proposed candidates for human cognitive capacities that arise
independently of any particular cultural input."
These capacities seem in place comparatively early in human development, and
their functioning usually seems both automatic and fast. Their operations
occasion no conscious searches for evidence, and even if they did, the
associated inferences seem woefully underdetermined by whatever evidence
might be available. Why, for example, should shifting his weight to his
other side and momentarily raising an eyebrow make us so confident that our
interlocutor is skeptical of our claim?"
Whether such considerations (together with the noncultural status of the
underlying cognitive processes and representations) require that these
capacities also be innate has been a point of considerable debate over the
past thirty years (see, for example, Spelke 1994). The more interesting
question, though, is what being "innate" might amount to (see, for example,
Karmiloff-Smith 1992). As Jeffrey Elman and his colleagues (e.g., 1996,
369) have noted, some of the representations and processes in question are,
quite possibly, the nearly inevitable outcomes of comparatively minor
variations on familiar principles guiding learning in neural networks."
Doyle,
In other words that explanation which yield religing may arise from the need
to know what others think, and to quickly early on in childhood apply that
to all things. To anthropomorphize in an animist religing sense then is
merely to extend the need to have a ToM demonstrating that a tree cloud,
wind god is a plastic explanation fitting a ToM into a JA and arising from
the need to know that which we don't understand by applying ToM to an
unknown. That we can then share that with others in explaining the
unexplainable by means of JA.
To apply this to IT we might understand that in order to theorize a theory
of mind (ToM) where needed one must not only write the words but create an
agent (a visual image of the face and gestures), that networks via JA
communicative structures if we are to go past the body labor of doing the
explanation ourselves. We add a visual depiction of the face to facilitate
the clear association of feeling to words otherwise the ambiguity of writing
cannot adequately convey the necessary component of feeling to words. To
relige Marxism means not fundamentalism as JKS implies, but to produce a
kind of labor that suggests where needed a networked ToM explaining what
needs explaining. Where for example an image of Mao, or Stalin appears this
is a visual agent of a ToM which is a necessary outcome of the performing
processes of neural networks. The sense of "worship" is about the driving
mechanism in emotions to connect socially to JA through ToM. One could
extend this practice and say that a software agent which is a generic image
needs to be associated in all cases where religing might arise to facilitate
a JA that shares a social network. In other words religing is a socially
necessary labor with certain characteristics that include ToM, and JA. This
seems to be precisely where Microsoft and Web Services appeared aimed in
terms of commercial internet connectivity. And those labor processes then
would produce more than what is currently done in normal religing in our
culture, thus suggesting that religing itself is about to be transformed in
IT.
For example, in the world one might encounter a power generation plant, a
software agent appears on demand, in which one theorizes or religes an
explanation that represents the stable networked communication of the
material meaning of that plant. Including the quasi moral rules about not
destroying the power plant in order to serve the best interests of society.
We do those things already with warning signs posted around important
resources, but we don't understand that an agent with ToM, in JA structure
is needed in those circumstance where explanation arises otherwise we
wouldn't pejoratively say Marxist relige to denigrate particular Marxist.
Or more precisely we don't understand how producing the ToM and JA can be
accomplished in such a way that performs the socially necessary work a
worker must do to relige a social connection to explanations of unknown
material phenomenon.
cheers,
Doyle Saylor
