Greetings Economists, On Nov 16, 2007, at 12:45 PM, raghu wrote:
Hey that's because you are from the "reality-based community." In the action-based community you create your own reality.
Doyle, The familiar echoes of long ago left arguments about idealism versus practice. Well the catastrophe that I learned was an echo of the WWI that shaped the experience of millions in the trenches and especially Russia. I was born after WWII and no big catastrophe (world war or depression) has occurred since. That's the reality which negates my sense (I do feel in my guts as a worker that things are unstable and I am at the mercy of employers) of chaos on a mass scale that never happens in my real life. Like Charles, I interpreted events through a lens of war that made sense to those generations who really experienced them. A catastrophe still happens to spots. The spots can be rather large like Argentina, Thailand. The wars are pretty bad too, but they happen elsewhere outside of my world. Action then, making my own world, rests upon how to shape what is happening in this bubble between catastrophes of the WWI sort. I can't argue with some young person living concurrent with that this issue is life and death in the U.S. as if catastrophe is around the corner They don't live in Iraq. The building and organizing I saw during the sixties was made mainly by African Americans, in relation to support from the left and progressives. That was systemic in the sense of racism is systemic, but not in the sense of global unity felt by those who lived through WWI. I think action now is created by community knowledge production. War is moving toward robots fighting robots, and robots destroying communities to subdue rebellion. The sort of war that WWI represents of massed armies facing each other cannot happen, and the schooling of mass knowledge that produces such experiences in the minds of millions of soldiers is gone. When I look at Marx discussing Hegel, and the two sidedness of the economy, the surface and the processes below, I see how Marx is trying to produce knowledge given his tools of expression that are realistic. But I don't especially feel comfortable talking about the knowledge that arises from a partly metaphysical description of knowledge production. Is knowledge visual? Does making making a vast U.S. cultural industry shape how we build community? Then how do I use a movie to express the depths of the processes in the way Marx meant? What does knowledge production do to build organize and sustain community? Starting with current knowledge of the brain, the eyes project image information back into the brain to patches of the occipital lobe. These patches connect to other patches. These 'layers' of knowledge production areas in the brain are what we build community from. For example, it is thought now that seeing a face is a different patch and stream from seeing apples and oranges. The face is about community, and oranges or objects unrelated to holding hands with family is work processes like making cars. For Marx, this knowledge production might seem a far cry from idealist conceits. We do work to form community, and that work is of a specific type. We use language to connect. We use faces to produce language. And so on. So to me community is properly - using an email distribution list to create community, where properly means we can peacefully work together to build knowledge that leads to action against capitalism. Sharing Marx's view that equality of society, a general class of workers means equalizing all humans except to exclude those who do not act equally with the value of work. This work, or action, is knowledge production of community. And what does that mean, well? It means a realistic understanding of what knowledge is, how it is produced, and therefore making realistic action clear and salient. thanks, Doyle Saylor
