Hi again, Ajit, You write: >So at the epistemological level, what good is will for? Well, whilst historical and contemporary relations do enable and constrain, I do believe there is an extra-structural category. That'd be 'that which is enabled and constrained by historical and contemporary relations'. Otherwise, none of us bears responsibility for our actions, our fate has been sealed since the big bang (the physical moment of which determined that I'd be here typing exactly these words to you 14 billion years down the track?), and a sound natural-scientific methodology (for whither the dialectic without 'man making his history'?) would need only correctly-weighted variables to predict all that will be. >Its existence or non-existence has no meaning. Would it be useful, d'ya think, to characterise this determinism (by said relations) as 'soft', rather than 'hard'? That way, we could keep the human basis of the dialectic (and 'will' is useful here, no?) whilst affording that basis something with which to be in 'contradictory unity'. That way, we could speak of our will having a scope within which it could manifest itself. It's either that, or we need but sit back and let it all wash over us (and Marx would have been better off down the pub, rather than in that dingy round room). >We are not denying that people are different. At the sharp end of, say, a socialist insurrection, you'd have to assume people who'd wait and see, lest they take personal risks in a failed venture, and people who'd kiss their loved ones a poignant farewell and put their shoulders straight to it. I'm not sure which category would claim me, but what would it be that would move me to put an as-yet unproven idea before my empirically tenable self and loved ones? Whatever that something is, without it, Lenin would have gone down in history as little more than an interesting drinking partner in Swiss cafes. Quantum leap alert ... Ever hear of a Canadian pilot in WW1 called Edward (Mike) Mannock? He was a shy, one-eyed, violin-playing, officer-hating socialist, whose IWW comrades had stayed at home, who had always lived in terror of fire, funked it every time a German shot at him (for months he had but one balloon to his account), and so loudly cried himself to sleep at night when a comrade was killed that he would keep a whole embarrassed squadron awake. His disappointed C/O eventually asked him if he wanted a transfer out. Mannock asked for a little more time to wrestle with his demons, and went on (a) to become the allies' greatest ace (he killed 75 German lads), and (b) to die in the flames that had so terrified him. Sure, conetemporary relations were such as to produce several million such corpses, but how do we explain Mannock's own 'development' (in the first instance, Mannock's 'Wobbly' mates had chosen not to go at all, and in the second, his C/O had given him a choice taken by many less apparently troubled than he), or guess at the role that some of his victims might have played in history (did he kill, for fanciful instance, a young socialist who would have gone on to unify German socialists sufficiently in 1929/30 to defeat the foetal Nazi Party? After all, it seems to me that the social structure in Germany at that time was such that it could have gone either way - however silly the comintern were being about it) Sure, hard determinism can explain it all, indeed it explains everything (and with no more effort than an appealing Gallic shrug, too - that's its beauty) - but only after it's happened - when just about everybody else seems to be able to explain it, too - and in a million different ways! Hard structuralism's predictive powers might exceed those of the mainstream economics profession, but they don't hitherto seem to have matched those afforded by a few tosses of a coin. And, while it has the power to stop people doing things they might otherwise have done , it doesn't seem to have the power to move them to do anything they might otherwise not have done. If every word of the future is written by its antecedent subjects, let it be other subjects who trouble to write today's instalment, eh? Mannock's individual little surprises (the ones I ascribe to 'will') ended up having quite an effect on what was to follow (different people would have survived the war than actually did, with nobody-knows-what consequences - and I wouldn't be writing about him now, either). No social analysis could have predicted it and none can tell us what would have happened but for the Mannock we got (real people are dead and alive because of that Mannock, though), so the next question is, what can social analysis do, such that it is worth doing? Just maybe it's to afford us an understanding of our options and constraints in the present, such that we might exert our will accordingly - and consequently surprise the very structuralists who will shortly be explaining to a breathless world why we were always going to do what we just did. Yours recalcitrantly humanistically (even if a little more long-windedly so than might have been warranted, but hell, Mannock was an interesting bloke), Rob.
