On Mon, 15 Feb 1999, Louis Proyect wrote: > It is not a great mystery why people act against their own material > self-interest. Oh yes it is. For one thing, the fact that this happens over and over again totally negates one of the fundamental tenets of neoclassical economics: that we're all just little commodity-traders, maximizing our input-output schemas via rational means. Or, to be Adornic, you could say that individual rationality, taken to its competitive limit, rebounds into systemic irrationality. One of the most important tasks facing any progressive economic vision is getting across the idea that the economic field is not governed by a set of iron laws, it's a social construct which can be changed by collective action (a la Max's email appeal for folks to protest the increasingly hideous contours of the Clinton budget). -- Dennis
