From: Carrol Cox
I have no underestanding at all of economics. Hence the following is a series of free associations from the 'outside' as it were. Capitalism (in its developed forms) has a very short history, of around two centuries. As a result, historical understanding of how capitalism operates in practice is very slight. I am assuming the correctness of Postone's argument that Marx created a Critique of Polical Economy (of capitalism at its most abstract level) and NOT Critical Political Economy (of capitalism as it operates concretely in givenhistorical conditons. That is there is no economic science of any sort, only various empirical descriptions of this, that or the other temporary capitalist operations. Capitalism at this concrete level changes continuously, and at certain points in its history the empirical understanding of an earlier condition becomes irrelevant to the new conditons. Historical materialism (or reading history backwards) gave us an understasnding of those fetures of capitalism that make it capitalisdm under all historical condtions, but it gives us no particular understanding of the operations of capitalism at a particular time. Hence "economists" (historians pretending to be scientists) will only begin to understand each 'new' form of capitalism after it has existed for some time, and it seems that capitalism changes fast enough for such understanding of a given fomr to begin to develop only as that form is dying. We are in the midst of such a radical change in the operations of capitalism, and so everyone is operating pretty much in the dark. ^^^^^ CB: This reminds of the HIV virus which mutates, I think, but still does its basic damage to the immune system in all of its different mutations. ^^^^ Mere thinking out loud. Probably nonsense. But economists should at least consider the possibility that their knowledge is anachronistic. Consider a military historian whose knowledge stopped with the Civil War trying to explain World War I. Carrol ^^^^^^^ CB: A materialist historian might demonstrate that both the US Civil War and World War I were struggles over profits between capitalists. War is politics by other means, other violent means. Economists have interpreted, explained and understood all the different capitalisms in a number of ways; the thing is to get rid of all of them capitalisms. How do economic explanations of capitalisms help to overthrow them ? We know that the current mutation of capitalism has extreme concentration or centralization of wealth in the finance capitalist sector. Cannot this be inferred from the finance economists' claim/confession that so many finance corporations were too big to fail or that their failure would bring down the whole system, the world capitalist system ? If so, what strategy and tactics for the gravediggers of capitalisms (ha) derive from this fact ? _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
