I know that there's no way I can force people to read my all-too-abundant contributions to pen-l, but the content of those missives should tell people that I am not now and have never been an "inevitabilist." I don't know how anyone could get the impression that I belonged to that species.
> Here are some words in your text which _suggest_ [emphasis added] the idea of > "inevitability": > > 'but more importantly it's an aspect of the > normal workings (the "laws of motion") of capitalism' I responded in my previous missive to the idea that the existence of "laws of motion" implies inevitable results. I don't have to repeat that. Notice however, that the idea of "normal workings" (rather than "universal" or "invariable" workings) implies the idea that sometimes we see "abnormal workings." In my example, that would involve the conscious effort by the power elite -- pushed by organized labor -- to counteract the normal workings. That didn't happen. (In the abstract world of the mind, we could imagine the capitalist class as a monolithic force or a conspiratorial cabal that could decide to stop the "laws of motion" from operating. But that's not the real world.) [*] > 'Eventually, this mix had to go' > > If you don't want people to think that you believe X, a reasonable > approach would be to not use words that suggest that you believe X. As usual, it's useful to put the "eventually" into context: as described, there was a "spontaneous" move by individual capitalists to "free ride" on the high wage/high demand regime. In the absence of an active movement to stop the results of this behavior -- something that did NOT exist at the time -- the old system had to go. Instead, organized labor stood by and watched history happen while the power elite increasingly encouraged the end of the old regime. One factor that encouraged this "change of heart" was the fall in the US profit rate starting in the late 1960s. Perhaps I could have been clearer, by saying "all else equal, this mix had to go." But in any event, in context my phrase did not imply inevitability. If I remember correctly, Isaac Deutscher made a useful comment: when writing history after the fact (as I was doing here, on a very small scale), it often seems to the reader that what actually happened must have been inevitable because one can't describe all of the possible branching points in the historical process where things could have gone differently. BTW, I doubt that the power elite was ever truly committed to the high wage/high demand regime of the 1950s & 60s. Having incomplete information about a very complex system and being uncertain about the future, it's more a matter of "muddling through" and working with what they had rather than having a "big picture" view of the political economy. The members of the elite are subject to the same pushes and pulls as the political economy itself (e.g., between what's good for the capitalist class as a whole and what's good for individual capitalists). Elites often end up being like the stereotyped French generals, always fighting the last war. -- Jim Devine / If you're going to support the lesser of two evils, at least you should know the nature of that evil. [*] BTW, in the 1867 preface to the German edition of CAPITAL, Marx makes one of his "inevitable" statements: >Intrinsically, it is not a question of the higher or lower degree of development of the social antagonisms that result from the natural laws of capitalist production. It is a question of these laws themselves, of these tendencies working with iron necessity towards inevitable results. The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future. < 1) note that what's "inevitable" here is the development of "social antagonisms," not specific results (e.g., a socialist revolution). 2) elsewhere Marx explains the idea of "natural laws." His view is that capitalism acts like a "second nature," having dynamics that work despite any conscious efforts by individuals. That does not say that we never see other forces that can block or at least slow the "natural laws." Marx didn't emphasize the latter, but we've learned a lot since then. (We don't have to take everything Marx said as TRUE, just as we shouldn't automatically reject everything he wrote.) _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
