On Nov 11, 2010, at 9:12 AM, Louis Proyect wrote:
Richard Seymour wrote: "In chapter three of The Constitution of
Liberty, Hayek lays out of the neoliberal conception of 'progress'. In
this, he was consistent with previous rightist thought by conceiving
of 'progress' not as a movement toward a desired end, but as the
constant, rapid accumulation of capital in its various forms, with no
agreed end "
There is nothing "neoliberal" about that--it is simply Marx's theory
of the driving force of capitalism, "accumulate, accumulate--that is
Moses and The Prophets"--and his justification of this progress (and
it is progress in the sense of Marx's definition of historical
progress as the increase in the productive power of social labor) is
nothing but Hegel's profound conception of the "List des Vernunfts"
whereby History produces progress through the unconscious operations
of human stupidity and destructiveness. What he and all capitalist
apologists miss is the Hegelian/Marxist concept of the *higher
rationality of History* whereby human struggle is to produce, out of
the charnel house of history, the collective self-consciousness of a
human race no longer a biological species *an sich* but the active
(*an und für sich*) species-being called on to direct (in the next
historical phase) the ongoing growth of planetary consciousness.
Hayek is orthogonal to Hegel and Marx. In Hayek the world is neither
standing on its head not on its feet--it lies prone in the mud._______________________________________________
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