Since as far as I can tell, the "impasse" that Michael sees was attained
between Justin and myself, I guess that the attribution of motives and/or
emotions seen below is aimed at me. Since I try as hard as I can to avoid
attributing motives and/or emotions to Justin, so I don't appreciate this
effort. Even if this remark is not aimed at me, I think that this mode of
argumentation violates the rules of "analytical philosophy" as I understand
them. Attacking someone's motives as a way of furthering an argument is a
basic logical fallacy.
Justin wrote: >Well, the impasse was something we reached while ago. Much
of the shapre of it involves misunderstanding. There is a deep, underlying
aspect to--many socialists thinks that markets and competition areevil, and
would think they were evil even if they could do everything I say, and
plans couldn't. There is a deep ascetic ideal running among the support
many people who still support socialism have for the ideal: the basic
motivation is not that socialism will make us rich or happy or free, but
that it will transform us and make us good. In short, this is a sort of
Rousseauean socialism--something with a legitimate root in Marx,
who answered to some of Rousseau's call in various ways. On this worry,
the concrn with markets is that they do not ake us good, but set us against
one another. I think the Rousseauean impulse is attractive but quite
futile. As a liberal, I would be satisfied if socialism made us rich,
happy, and free, and I think market socialism can do that, but
planned socialism cannot.<
This "market socialism" vs. "planned socialism" dichotomy simply ignores
what I spent so much time writing over the weekend.
Justin also writes: > the Soviet Union is now 'former" and it failed on its
own terms for more or less the reasons Hayek said it would. So far, Hayek
1, Marx O--not that the fSU embodied Marx's ideals, but (as a number of
people here have said), nothing has so far. Hayek might suggest that there
is an explantion for that.<
I don't think the Hayekian theory of the collapse of the Soviet Union has
been proved. There are other theories of the fall of the old USSR that seem
more valid to me, including Marxian ones. People have already made this
argument -- following Dave Kotz's excellent work -- so I won't repeat it,
except to note that by jumping to the pro-Hayek conclusion, Justin is
simply ignoring the valid points that people made.
>Btw, someone carped at my reference to Marx's ideals of planning. Of
course Marx though that the socialist society would have a planned,
nonmarket economy. He says so repeatedly, for eaxmple, in the section on
the fetishim of commodities in Capital I, in the Critique of the Gotha
Program, and elsewhere. He does not explain how it would work, but he
sketches its outline and makes claims about it. And his reluctance to get
more specific is not one of his strong points.<
I think I was the one who "carped" about this. The key point that anyone
who reads Marx should know is that he was a student of capitalism, not of
socialism. Also, I don't think anyone on pen-l believes that any one person
-- including Marx -- should be seen as the Font of all Truth. Thus, we
shouldn't expect him to provide us with recipes for the cook-shops of the
future (especially since he explicitly eschewed that job). Why can't we
learn from Edward Bellamy, William Morris, Robin Hahnel & Michael Albert,
etc., etc.?
>... I do not understand how any rational person can seriously justify to
himself or others the claim that we need to overturn the whole structure of
society, but we have nothing better to say about what will replace it that
(a) it won't be markets, and beyond that (b) people will work it out
somehow. No wonder we have such a pathetic following.<
this is an overly simplistic explanation of why the left is so small.
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
