RE: [PEN-L:31029] Re: employment ----- Original Message ----- From: Devine, James
There's "Western rationality" and there's "Western rationality." The main -- hegemonic -- form is the capitalist "rationality" that wants to reduce everything -- and all people -- to things that can be manipulated to attain the predetermined goal (primarily, profit). =================== You mean there's only 2 types of "Western Rationality"? Isn't the binary you're proposing part of the pitfalls of at least one of the forms of "Western Rationality"? And if it's not a binary, then don't we have an incipient, proliferative pluralism that some groups obfuscate because they seek political advantage through an insistence in using the very reductionism they claim another group is using as a manner of interpreting/organizing the social system[s] they're immersed in? >> the counterhegemonic form includes that of Marx, which involves the struggle to liberate people from this nonsense (and from exploitation, domination, and alienation), or rather to help people liberate themselves. ================ Exploitation, domination and especially alienation are irreducibly contestable concepts in a pluralistic world and we have no evidence that getting rid of capitalism would get rid of them, no? >> I don't see why the use of statistics in any way leads to me agreeing with capitalist "rationality" (or encourages anyone to think that I agree with that so-called rationality). After all, Marx used them. ==================== Marx used lots of stuff that's turned out to be incorrect too..... Also, I don't see why the sins of "modernism" (a.k.a., capitalist "rationality") should encourage rejection of logic, scientific thinking, the use of evidence, etc. I doubt this is what you advocate. Jim ============= Why the sin metaphor? Indeed, lots of the problems of modernity are the uses to which logic, scientific thinking etc. have been put and those problems are not reducible to the problems created by capitalism. Ian
