> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Tom Walker) > Subject: [PEN-L:8633] Re: market socialism, planned socialism > Max B. Sawicky wrote: > > >... If we all began the > >quest for income from the same starting > >point . . . > Why is it that after reading just a few classics of sociology and > anthropology in my wild youth (not to mention a smattering of literature), I > feel like a visitor from outer space when I read Max's words or some of the > other contributions to this thread. THE QUEST FOR INCOME . . . God, I hope > they don't make it into a movie. (I can almost hear the sound track, now: > dum-dum DUM dum, dum-dum DUM dum...;-)) Perhaps because your erudition shields you from the ordinary concerns, values, and habits of most people? Maybe you need to phone home. I defy anybody to suggest that the idea of a quest for income would strike more than one out of twenty people randomly selected as odd, allowing for the slightly inflated connotation of the word 'quest.' > Forget about luck, innate abilities and industriousness on the one hand and > equality on the other hand. What about the idea that the cash nexus is a > new-fangled will-o'-the-wisp, anyway? I couldn't resist dipping into a Is this just fancy terminology for acquisitiveness and the joys of consumption? And what's your time horizon for "new-fangled"? Since the death of Christ? > little Marcel Mauss (The Gift) before writing this to reassure myself that I > hadn't dreamed it. Yes, there were (are?) people living in (shall we say) > "non-capitalist" arrangements. We even may be some of them, ourselves -- > simply not keeping as diligent records of our non-market exchanges as of our > market exchanges. Non-capitalist clearly does not rule out a plethora of competitive and consumptive impulses. Are we talking rice-and-bean communes here? Is that the plan for economic renewal? > What about the suggestion that even much of what *passes* for market > exchanges are ritual activities that are then given the respectible cover of > market exchanges? What, then, does luck (innate abilities, industriousness, > equality of opportunity or equality of outcome) have to do with it? And how > much is just totem and taboo wearing a bowler hat? Then we should all renounce economics and take up anthropology. Maybe the world would be a better place. > How come this thread doesn't address the question of "potlatch capitalism" > or some other hybrid variety, instead of insisting on a false dichotomy > between two versions of idealistic rationalism, market exchange and central > planning? Ask the question a little more explicitly and some answers might be forthcoming. > Or did the anthropologists and sociologists just make it all up and we're > all really descended from Robinson Crusoe? What would it matter if we weren't? Cheers, MBS
