Jim Devine writes: >This fits with an insight that Alan Freeman suggested as one part of a >longer paper he presented at the recent ASSA/URPE conference: when Marx (or >Freeman) talks about "objective conditions," he is not talking about "the >forces of production" (as the technological determinists do) or even "the >capitalist mode of production" as much as the left-overs, the hangovers, >from the past. Jim, I don't think this gets quite out of the woods. First, your notion is very much like Roy Bhaskar's argument for what he calls the transformative mode of social activity. Except for Roy, not only does the past haunt the present, it also allows social institutions to have emergent properties (their own causal efficacy) independent of any given individuals. Second, to say something is overdetermined does not necessarily mean everything determines everything else -- including the present determining the past. All it requires is multiple and contingent causes such that a given outcome is neither necessary nor sufficient evidence of any given cause. Here again I find Bhaskar much better than R&W. R&W seem to stop at overdetermination, whereas Bhaskar seems to start there. His critical realist theory has us identifying specific causes and their contingent interaction to explain why certain outcomes do or do not appear. If, for example, we do not see a growing reserve army of labor during a period of U.S. history, perhaps it's because gender relations interact with class relations to undermine a tendency that the latter, by itself, would foster. This is a far cry from overdetermination since it explains the "overdetermined" (contingent) outcome rather than hide it behind a 7-syllable word. Marsh Feldman Phone: 401/874-5953 Community Planning, 204 Rodman Hall FAX: 401/874-5511 The University of Rhode Island Internet: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Kingston, RI 02881-0815
