Re: (2)expand/steady-state mkt. economy
I said:As a performing artist I am required to recreate the reality of people inthe past as completely as possible. Their theories are usually much more complicated when viewed in terms of their life.That is why one can do math on the computer but cannot create, with today's technology, a translator for languages that is anymore sophisticated than a child. However science is very good at talking accross languages, and if there will be more artists interested in translation, we'll be better at that, too. I prefer Shakespeare in Hungarian, translated in the 19th century into modern Hungarian by the best poets. And still: the validity of what one is saying is more important that who is saying it. The political and philosophical "language" that you venerate is much more complicated than simple theory. Making a society from it is like trying to predict the weather from current chaos theories. It's still an issue of relative predictability. Marx was tied to the Industrial era and its machine models.They were just one period in the history of humanity and will be consigned to the same honored place of all of the other "great writings." Venerated and read only by experts and artists. There are theories and art that remain fresh and relevant all through history, you should know that best. We are looking at it from a different eye and a wider framework, but the validity remains, as we still have the (human and physical) reality that has been so aptly described. Marx only added a litle bit extra universal look to the tonns of science/philosophy and literature he used in making up his theory, like all such effort it was just another widening of our horizon. We still have that industrial era, we still have exploiters and exploited, the wealth and power is concentrating in less hands, the differentials are growing, globalisation happens - these are all relevant and these are the issues Marx was talking about. Not to mention, that his is a dynamic, not a static theory, that is, basically a method to look at history, and find the pattern than make up the options for the future. So nothing stops us to the the same with this century, that what he did with the previous ones. Even if we know absolutely nothing about Wagner, Mozart and x number of scientists and poets, if their work somehow touches the human condition (they are lucky enough to develop their potential instead of dying of malnutrition aged 3 or sitting in prison after a deliquent youth), it will be in the public domain forever. I say;How many poems do you know by Nezhualcoytl?Malnutrition is anissue of human alienation. They are "objectified" and therefore separate and we can therefore be untouched by it. That is a problem with both their family and our heart. ??? You lost me again. No idea what you are talking about, sorry. There was no malnutrition in the Cherokee nation until the Europeans began to muck around in it. We had universal education and health care and no poverty. And we didn't have prisons until you guys insisted upon it. But they were places very different from any of the prisons across the Western world. Too big of a story for here. Fascinating stuff - however, I lost the thread where this links with our debate. If you say all billions of us should live the way the Cherokees used to live, I think there are practical problems. (My husband is very impressed, he always wanted to meet a Cherokee!) Eva ... REH [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: expand/steady-state mkt. economy
Hi Eva, You and I agree on one subject ( maybe a few others)! We're both atheists. Steve
Re: expand/steady-state mkt. economy
Thanks for the reply Eva Durant wrote: Religious people believe in a god, whether it is a literal one with beard or an abstract one that supposed to be symbolising some sort of human feeling/thinking/valuing. There is nothing abstract about Ultimate Concern withthat which is Ultimate in the person's life. It could be an automobile, a book or even another person or pet. We put it a different way, we said: "When we die, so do our Gods." You said: Well, I am thankfully free of all this, so I don't know what sort of opinions you have alotted as mine. I say:Put yourself in my place. That is what, as an actor, I do with you.Then I have a conversation knowing that the dialogue is with myself on an inadaquate machine. I can only stir the things you already know within yourself and you within me. Neither one of us is Mime or Wotan and so we don't have to worry about only asking that which we already know. That is all there is anyway.That is also what I was trying to say to you about translation but you have a different thought attached to me on that one. You said: Yes, there is an underlying human concern with finding our place, finding our role in life, but as there is no evidence for anything "ultimate". I say:Glad to know that you don't believe in a hierarchy of needs. You said: I have no reason to think any of it has anything to do with a fair description of our reality. I say:See the Gardner article or see the earlier post I wrote on Arts and Crafts. You said: There is enough wonder around in the form of all that ended up existing temporarily as a result of chains of random coincidences to fill our lives, especially if we also have an ambition to make the best of the short period of consciousness we have for ourselves therefore for everybody else. I say:1. I'm all for "wonder".2. There is no more proof that it is random than that it is not. One might compare it to the randomness of the Internet except there are all of those links. I tend to believe more in the interconnectedness of all reality and that it is a conscious as I am but different. 3. I to wish to make the best for my short period of life in this place but I have no idea about before or after and I must find a balance between enlightened self-interest and the rest of the world. Are you saying, along with Ayn Rand, that if you are truly selfish with your brief period that it will be good for everyone else as well? You say: If you think that all of it is here to please you or your god, you are wrong, I say:Actually that is a paper tiger but how do you know that it is wrong. I thinkthat is as much an area of "belief" as the "faith" of the people you deride. I'm not speaking of faith as "ultimate concern" but as "belief in that which cannot be proven." You say: but you should let me criticise peacefully yours ... it is just an other aspect of life one has to puzzle about... I say;I agree and you can. You said: As for languages and people - they exist to pass on meanings. If there is no content, there is no point in language or communication. I said;Every word in every language can contain at least seven meanings.Meaninglessness is the concept of the Barbarian gibberish that the Greeks claimed everyone else spoke but them.They meant that foreign languages were gibberish. I find it quaint that you seem to be asserting that in the 20th century.But it feels like something else. It feels like you are using it for a purpose other than the Greeks ethnocentricity.But I don't know.This is still a one dimensional machine. But: It feels like you are using my words to allow you an opportunity to pass judgment on my being and intent. Is that true? If so, Why? I have attempted to convey respect about your first language, including going to the trouble to check my translations and your couplet even after I said that I didn't speak your language. But I have studied it enough to make those beautiful songs available to our audiences here. But next to a native speaker I am no more than a tourist. But that being said: I have made my living on the International Arts scene in New York City for the last thirty years both with myself, my professional students and my company. During that time we have placed our expertise and artistry on the line before world critics and in venues including the Metropolitan Opera, Covent Garden, La Scala and others as well as on premiere recordings.So I find your judgments interesting in that no one is perfect or above learning. At the same time I find that carefully worded sections and passages rethought to mean exactly what I am thinking in the moment are just "put down" ignored or skipped. The key to what a professional singer does is words and words are almost God in that we are very nearly ultimately concerned with them. I like a great deal of what you say and I am delighted to read a genuine Marxist rather than the
Re: expand/steady-state mkt. economy
Great to see you pulled back into the fray, Steve. I second your suggestion re reading Lewontin's 'Biology as Ideology'. It is important to mention that he is a very prominent biologist, not a mystic/ magic hocus/pocus kind of guy like Newton.(and he doesn't babble). Hocus/pocus has interesting roots by the way. I clipped a bit of your note to add a brief comment: "FOR EXAMPLE, I think that underneath the discussion, disagreement, and (occassional) incomprehension between Jay, Eva, and Ray, what is at issue is a view of human nature (gasp!) and what is possible for humans. Jay's view seems to hinge importantly on biological necessity -- our evolutionary legacy -- which he sees, I think, as fundamentally unalterable. With some justification, Eva sees these assumptions as essentially false (because too reductive) and distressingly self-fulfilling -- if we BELIEVE that we have no choice but to be agressively self-aggrandizing, then we have been given permission, as it were, to BE that way." Almost seems like a "tower of Babel" at times doesn't it? Might different language games be at play here? Or in the case of Ray, different forms of life? A student of Wittgenstein, Maurice Drury, wrote a book _The Danger of Words_. It explores much of what you comment on here. ** * Brian McAndrews, Practicum Coordinator* * Faculty of Education, Queen's University * * Kingston, Ontario K7L 3N6 * * FAX:(613) 533-6307 Phone (613) 533-6000x74937* * e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]* * "The limits of our language means the limits * * of our world"Wittgenstein* ** ** **
Re: expand/steady-state mkt. economy
I think I agree with the gist of what you are saying, except that Marx's main point was not that capitalism is morally wrong, but it is an economical mechanism with a built-in contradiction, that makes it come to a periodic and then a fatal halt. Same with keynesism - built on capitalist economics, still, thus the state intervention stops the dynamics of the capitalist market and profits - the basis for capitalist development - causing decline. So all the moralising is secondary - the problem is, that capitalism cannot deliver, any system built on capitalism, just cannot deliver, the numbers who benefit are declining the same time as incredible wealth-centralization and globalisation taking place, just as Marx predicted - not to mention the demands of the environmental and population issues, the cut in resources for science and research when we are running out of time. I've just read and interesting article in a little hungarian magazine, saying that Marx suffered of far-sightedness, he predicted all the symptoms of the death-throws of capitalism, but a century or more too early. Eva This post began as a simple re-telling of (what I think is) Solow's answer to this question. But it grew beneath my fingers into a more extended train of thought ... and I am loath to dump it all and just leave the simple reply. If you have little interest or no patience, just see what Solow had to say (if I'm right ... sorry, no citations available; I heard this tale from a visiting speaker) and skip the rest. The answer which I have heard -- devised I believe by Robert Solow (sp?) also of MIT -- is interesting in itself AND has a bearing on our deliberations about economic theorizing and the future of of history and work in general. Solow's idea is, basically, that Keynesian state intervention was thought up and introduced in a general context of NO significant monetary intervention by the state. In this context, both capital and labour tended (consciously or unconsciously) to be relatively moderate in their demands (or "self-monitoring") since they knew that excess could lead to economic distress and there was no power to alleviate the damage. In this context of relative self-restraint, Keynesianism *worked*. But as Keysian intervention continued to be practiced, the context (the reality) changed, for capital and labour could both say, essentially, what the hell, we'll go for it, because the state can always intervene and restore stability. In this NEW context -- reality had changed -- Keynesian intervention did not work as well (or at all), and you got stagflation. The GENERAL point, of course, is that economic theory, like all social science theories, is reflexive -- it's both BY us and ABOUT us -- and strange things can happen. In this case, if the story is right, Keynesian theory started out being TRUE. But as a consequence of being believed (after all, it worked), it became FALSE! I take it that this problem of self-referral is unavoidable in the social sciences and the general picture of the status of our self-understanding has some bearing on our deliberations about WHAT IS POSSIBLE in the future. At the very least, this is what makes it all so unclear and so contentious. FOR EXAMPLE, I think that underneath the discussion, disagreement, and (occassional) incomprehension between Jay, Eva, and Ray, what is at issue is a view of human nature (gasp!) and what is possible for humans. Jay's view seems to hinge importantly on biological necessity -- our evolutionary legacy -- which he sees, I think, as fundamentally unalterable. With some justification, Eva sees these assumptions as essentially false (because too reductive) and distressingly self-fulfilling -- if we BELIEVE that we have no choice but to be agressively self-aggrandizing, then we have been given permission, as it were, to BE that way. Thus also Eva's impatience with repeated assertions from here, there, and everywhere that Marxism has been tried and failed. As I read it, a crucial part of Marx's theory is a historically driven transformation in human consciousness of itself, without which one gets tragedy and farce. Without what Marx sees as an essentially *correct* (non-Darwinian) understanding of ourselves as essentially social products and producers -- a view which both looks ahead to a bright future and belies his own debt to a tradition of political thought from Aristotle to Hegel (AND ALSO sounds alot like the political theory of indigenous people all over the place, if I have understood Ray at all correctly) -- without this crucially transformed human consciousness of itself, any socialist revolution will be premature, so to speak, and just get it wrong, producing, for example, not socialism or communism but a grotesque kind of state capitalism (which I think is something like the right reading of what happened in "eastern Europe").
Re: expand/steady-state mkt. economy
Durant wrote: I think I agree with the gist of what you are saying, except that Marx's main point was not that capitalism is morally wrong, but it is an economical mechanism with a built-in contradiction, that makes it come to a periodic and then a fatal halt. Same with keynesism - ... Yes, perhaps this is right. I meant to suggest that Marx's critique of capital is detailed, ultimately sound, *and* that nowadays almost everyone agrees about Marx's identification of the moral defects of capital. Now I find myself wondering just how best to describe the built-in contradiction to which you refer. Does it not crucially involve the political institution of "private appropriation" and thus necessarily link its attempted workability to a particular regime of political economy (and thus, in some sense, to the moral issue)? Still, I suppose "it just can't work" really does trump "it's immoral". BUT, would we care if it weren't about US (but instead about how earthworms stay alive) and its attempt to do the job also did not necessarily involve injustice? Well, we might, if, for example, it were a proposal to increase agricultural productivity that (because of its failure to understand what earthworms do) just couldn't work. But I'm beginning to blather and think out loud... On "farsightedness" -- yes, there is the important matter of timing. Marx seems to have thought that the proletariat in advanced industrial economies already formed a distinct "class" and were ready for revolution in the mid-19th Century. (On the other hand, despite the *Manifesto*, it's not clear how, without near-sightedness, Marx could see "workers of the *world*" by that date, far less that they were somehow ready to respond to a global call for unity!) Jay -- How come you're not as sceptical about sociobiology and evolutionary explanations of human nature as you are about the economic theories you critique (along with Polanyi and others)? The two (market economics "natural selection") are quite intimately related, at least in their origins. (Again, see Lewontin, a real scientist, indeed, an evolutionary biologist, as Brian points out.) Stephen Straker [EMAIL PROTECTED] Vancouver, B.C.
expand/steady-state mkt. economy
Durant wrote: (REH) Somewhere I read that the market must expand for it to work as a system. Could some of the economists fill me in on that one? (ED) Isn't it obvious, that a profit based system needs the profits to grow thus needs the markets to grow, so it is doomed when those markets are the shrinking/sliding global middle classes? I'm not an economist. What is obvious to me: Debt-based money creation requires more money in the future due to interest charged. See:http://www.transaction.net/money/index.html for good overview. Combine this *need* to extract produce more stuff and to perform more services with a growing population, and it is easy to see that shrinkage or steady state economy(Herman Daly) is not tenable. Ray's "must" is an imperative for the power elite money lenders/creators, and it becomes one for the borrowers...nearly everyone else! It is theoretically possible to have a steady state market economy. "Market" meaning the setting of prices (or barter values) by supply demand. Steve
