Jim writes: > (1) Capitalism is fundamentally unpredictable, > but I would say that there's some predictability > to it nonetheless. It's like with the law of large > numbers: even though individual actions are almost > impossible to predict,the average can be predictable.
I think it is more than the average Jim. The average is just the first moment of a probability distribution and I think we can do better than that. Let me say this first: what is fundamentally unpredictable is not capitalism but the future. That we are experiencing capitalism "almost everywhere" (possibly mathematical political economists know what this means better) at this point in time is another issue. So, let us focus on the future and fix a point in space, say, my city or yours. In this particular location, the future will be just a path from an uncertain distribution of paths, which is a continuum, and as such whatever the actual realization of this path will be, it has zero probability of occurring at the current time and our current information. But this does not mean we cannot know about the probability distribution. This is why I don't agree with most post-modernists. As for this, my heart is with you: "A fully socialist revolution would get rid of all of these structural tensions, replacing anarchy, competition, and class with democracy." Sabri
