Ajit Sinha says > One could seriously make the claim that Marx does stand on the boderline of > Modernity and Post-modernity. If you look at the structure of his critique, > it is quite post-modernist in its spirit. For example, look at his critique > of Smith, Malthus, and Ricardo. Now all these stalwards of political economy > and modernity rooted their theory in nature or human nature: man's desire to > better his condition, man's high propensity to procreate, nature's > increasing stinginess regarding its fertility, etc. Their theories always > had to fall back on these naturalistic propositions. Marx systematically > rejected them all. Exploitation and accumulation is not a result of man's > inherent greed or desire to better his condition, but because of the forces > of competition that reduces the capitalists to a cog in the system; Poverty > is not a result of fraility of man's nature, but the requirement of the > system to create and maintain a "reserve army of labor"; rate of profit does > not fall because of the declining fertility of land, but because of a > particular kind of technical change that the system endogenously engenders. > This cutting the theory lose from nature and human nature is highly > post-modern in spirit. I don't see why this must be connected with post-modernism. I would say that it is much more clearly and straightforwardly described by the language and concepts of systems theory, where outside forces play the role of only influencing what is really endogeneously given dynamics which stem from the interaction between the agents of the (capitalist) system. We have a system that is strongly interconnected with criss-crossing non-linear feedback loops, positive and negative. This explains the endogenous dynamics, and I therefore question why we need PoMo concepts for this purpose. If someone suggests Marx had a foot in the PoMO camp, I insist that he instead was a pioneer (non-mathematical) systems theorist!! :-) Trond Andresen PS An error from me on Chomsky: The criticism I refferred to was of Lacan and Derrida, not Lacan and Foucault. Sorry.
