Patrick Bond wrote:
Ted Winslow wrote:
The methods of accumulation characteristic of capitalism in its
infancy - the methods of primitive accumulation - are internally
related to the particular form of capitalist subjectivity then
dominant. They can't recur in that form after the internal
Doug Henwood wrote:
I gotta say, as much as I admire Harvey, I find accumulation by
dispossession to be a grand-sounding but fairly empty concept. When
has capitalism not stolen things - resources, land, urban
neighborhoods, communal property, you name it? It's just standard
operating
Michael Perelman wrote:
Jim's question was tongue in cheek. Dean Baker got a Ph.D in a
conventional
program. So did Jim. I suspect both were not conventional
thinkers when they
began. During Vietnam a number of economics grad students became
radicalized. In
Michigan, where URPE began,
Julio Huato wrote:
The fact is quant models provide dependable (and increasingly so)
information for big money to make decisions. In normal times (most
of the time), there are no better ways to price assets than quant
models. The role of quant models in finance is not going to fade any
time
Doug Henwood wrote:
But, looking at history, the odds are that it’s not 1929 all over
again. To claim it is, Strahl should really try to put together
some evidence into a coherent argument instead of mocking people
who lack his vision. He, like many others, seems almost to *want* a
Doug Henwood wrote:
On Aug 10, 2007, at 11:19 AM, ravi wrote:
At what point does the expert stop being an expert
When s/he stops serving the status quo!
Doug
Doesn't this attribute an impossible degree of instrumental
rationality to sadistic greed? If the end is to some significant
Gil Skillman wrote:
all of applied (at least micro) mainstream economics,which is pretty
much entirely based on methodological individualism, and which
routinely
and massively yields testable predictions that are then brought to the
data via more or less rigorous econometric tests. Of course
On 4-Aug-07, at 10:27 AM, Doyle Saylor wrote:
Greetings Economists,
On Aug 4, 2007, at 6:08 AM, Ted Winslow wrote:
How can econometric methods be used to test whether this treatment of
capitalist individuality and its historical development is realistic?
Doyle;
Well graph theory (see Erdos
Doug Henwood wrote:
It seems to me that the mathematics of pensions and insurance is a
lot more grounded in reality than the econometrics of predicting GDP
four quarters or four decades hence, or of trying to prove financial
markets rational or not. Just in what sense does econometrics
work?
Julio Huato wrote:
Marxism aspires to being the living, breathing, kicking worldview of a
revolutionary class. So Marxism (as any other doctrine with such high
aspirations), just to survive, needs to subject itself to relentless
self-criticism, pretty much to experience a continuous or
Julio Huato wrote:
At this stage, without serious research on the matter, it will be your
opinion against mine. But my personal impression of professional fads
(AEA), top grad school tendencies (curricula, courses, teaching), and
broader hiring practices in academia is that the so-called
Julio Huato wrote:
Nobody is going to give space to anything to bloom. That's not how
things work.
Hitherto, written history is the history of class struggle, conflict,
competition, etc. That means that if a good doctrine or a good idea
is to become a material force, inform life, etc., then
Julio Huato wrote:
Go ahead. Try and psychoanalyze the economists without their consent.
As far as I'm concerned (given my job), I am mostly concerned with the
newer generations, students of economics, colleagues, etc. But,
whatever, I am not saying that economists (or humans beings, in
michael a. lebowitz wrote:
Marx's definition of capitalism has to do with the sale of labour-
power to a capitalist. Wood, however, talks about 'agrarian
capitalism' without initially talking about wage-labour. So, what
does that leave of capitalism? She writes: 'But it is important to
Louis Proyect wrote:
Actually, Marx does not talk about mercantile capitalism. He talks
about
mercantile capital.
Engels and Marx associate both the monetary system and the
mercantile system - by which they mean the first forms of
capitalist political economy - with the early more
sartesian wrote:
Marx accomplishes much more than just a simple corresponding
transliteration of Hegel-- tool for mind, instrument of labor for
cunning of reason. Marx finds in fact that the difference between
human
weaving and spider weaving is that the former goes on under specific
s.artesian wrote:
I think Ted is correct in identifying what is missing from Brenner's
account, but I don't think that puts him at odds with Marx at all,
although
it certainly puts him at odds with Adam Smith.
Brenner discounts the independent passions of the lord,
the merchant, finding
sartesian quoted Marx:
The analysis of capital, within the bourgeois horizon is essentially
the work of the Physiocrats. It is this service that makes them the
true fathers of the modern political economy.It is not a
reproach to
the Physiocrats that, like all their succesors, they
Michael Perelman wrote:
Smith, like Keynes, realizes that passions do not disappear with
the rise of
capitalism, but rather markets sublimate the passions into positive
purposes.
Smith, Marx and Keynes all contrast the passions specific to
capitalism - the essential characteristic of
Michael Perelman wrote:
All this revolves around Smith's four stages -- hunting and
gathering, herding,
agriculture, and then commerce. In the earlier stages, passions
play a big role.
Even in agriculture, the role of passions is diminished.
The aristocracy personify passions, but they don't
s.artesian wrote:
The passions are products of market dependence, with the markets
themselves transformed from simply arenas of consumption to the
circuits essential for the realizaton and reproduction of exchange
value.
The industrious innovative efficient yeoman, land leaser,
merchant
is
s.artesian wrote:
I understand that, but Smith is wrong, particularly where he
states: He makes this change in the passions dominant in
agriculture a significant contributor to the improvement and
cultivation of the country. That change in passions requires
is a change in class; and the
Jim Devine wrote:
Perelman, Michael wrote:
Money from the East India Company was used to buy estates, which did
help to revolutionize the countryside.
How is buying land revolutionary? don't capitalist-type property
relations have to be in place before land can be bought?
the wealth
Louis Proyect wrote:
Sartesian wrote:
That is simply not accurate. Marx devoted much time and effort in
distinguishing the specifics of labor organization defined by the
different property relations preceding, existing, co-existing, and
maintained by modern capitalism.
Really? I could
Louis Proyect pointed to the following review of Michael's Build it
Now:
http://radicalnotes.com/content/view/44/39/
This contains the following:
“Lebowitz comes back to the serious challenge posed by the There is
No Alternative ideology that pervades contemporary societies. This
Sandwichman wrote:
Who knew that a star pupil of Alfred Marshall, theorizing in the
marginalist tradition, confirmed the analysis of Karl Marx regarding
the interaction between the intensive and extensive dimensions of the
working day and the role of human capacities in defining absolute
Jim Devine wrote:
Philosophy in the sense of ontology is necessarily an feature of
every explanation, i.e. every explanation involves explicit or
implicit claims about the ultimate nature of reality...
sure, the ultimate nature of reality is crucial. It's a major
matter. It distinguishes,
Doug Henwood wrote:
the quote I was looking for is There were moments when we had some
trouble in getting Maynard to see what the point of his revolution
really was. In Essays on John Maynard Keynes. ed by Milo Keynes.
Maybe he was afraid it'd undermine bourgeois rule, which he was all
for.
Michael Lebowitz wrote:
My point was not at all Ted's. Ie., I'm not all ruling out
self-oriented folks in continuing games coming to the decision to be
generous, not to defect, etc.
My point wasn't internal to game theory. It was that Marx's
foundational ideas, including his idea of
Julio Huato wrote:
If my memory serves, Ted's comment (as translated in my head) was that
the proper way to derive cooperation in an economic theory was *not*
as I set out to do it in my model, but by programming people at the
outset to be friends. Moreover, friends in the Aristotelian sense
Marx didn't regard slavery, feudalism and capitalism as equally
rational means of exploitation, the difference between them lying in
the different objective conditions in which the exploitation takes
place. He explicitly treats them as systems dominated by differing
passions, the
Jayson Funke wrote:
I think it important to understand
monetary practices as hegemonic systems of control, because at
their core
they are predicated on trust and the ability of social institutions
to lend
credibility to money by guaranteeing that money (in whatever form)
can be
exchanged
Louis Proyect quoted Engels:
To what extent feudalism was already undermined and inwardly torn
by money in the late fifteenth century, is mirrored strikingly in
the thirst for gold that reigned at the time in Western Europe. The
Portuguese sought gold along the African coast, in India, and
Jim Devine wrote:
Ted Winslow wrote:
This and the rest of the text confirm the interpretive hypothesis
that Marx's [sic -- the passage is not from Marx] account of
historical development appropriates Hegel's idea of the
passions. Marx makes the passion invoked here - avarice
Jim Devine wrote:
The fact that Julio's model produced non-intuitive
results is a major blow against Ted's critique, which is totally on
the methodological philosophical level as far as I can tell.
Methodology and philosophy can guide us in our thinking, but if simple
social science produces
Julio Huato wrote:
Ted Winslow wrote:
So mathematical abstractions are limited
in their applicability by internal
relations, the degree of limitation
depending on the degree to which internal
relations are relevant,.
Can you then exactly pinpoint your disagreement with using game theory
Julio Huato wrote:
As I said, this conception of preferences
assumes that, to the extent required by the
argument, the identities of the related
entities (the variables) remain unchanged
with changes in their relations. This is
explained in the Whitehead passage. Where
this isn't true, i.e.
Julio Huato wrote:
What ensures the existence of such perfect system of economic signals?
And what ensures that the signals are not distorted? Economists used
to say no or -- more precisely -- perfect government. But what
ensures perfect government or, in other words, what ensures the
Ted Winslow wrote:
When you teach it in his way,
That should have been:
When you teach it in this way,
Ted
Julio Huato wrote:
Economic theory, as it's evolved in the last few decades, with the
limitations inherent to this, is *a branch of applied math*. Simple
as that. It's a set of statements of the if X, then Y type. That
determines both its power and its limitations. But those limitations
are
Shane Mage wrote:
mathematically internal
relations means that each of the variables making up u(.) is a
function of all the others
This isn't what's meant by internal relations in the sense I'm
using it (which is why I usually put it in quotes). This sense makes
the identities of the
michael a. lebowitz wrote:
How much of the bad connotation of 'populism' comes from
intellectuals--- e.g., Hofstadter writing about Nativism in the US
(in the context of McCarthyism) or Lipset about Canada; indeed, how
much comes from social democrats?
How much comes from any rational person
Julio Huato wrote:
Of course I can get cooperation as the outcome of an economy populated
by individuals who are predisposed to cooperate. If they are trying
to maximize their individual wellbeing and their individual wellbeing
is assume to depend on own consumption as much as on the
Julio Huato wrote:
In this simple economy, the agents can be initially endowed with
different amounts of wealth. Then they decide at each instant whether
to use the wealth for current consumption (which yields immediate
gratification) or fund current appropriation actions (e.g. lobbying to
michael a. lebowitz wrote:
Speaking of neoliberalism, I'm coming around to thinking there
should be a moratorium on that word. It's really squishy, kind like
globalization. What is it being counterposed against? Import
substitution? Petty commodity production? Soviet-style socialism? Is
any of
Doug Henwood wrote:
No, that's not the one I was thinking of - it was short punchy,
like an aphorism.
There's one that's focused on Hayek's theory of money, but It's not
short and pithy. It does, however, appropriate Ibsen in an
insightful way.
it is the attempt to build a bridge on
Jim Devine wrote:
Marx's CAPITAL = the Torah
BEYOND CAPITAL = the Talmud
BUILD IT NOW = the Kabbalah.
Marx, though, claimed to have substituted science for mystical
apocalyptic messianism.
As a science of capitalism, this was an account of how capitalist
conditions worked to create a subject
Jim Devine wrote:
Ted, look up the word joke in the dictionary.
Jim, look up Freud's Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious.
Ted
David B. Shemano wrote:
The logic of interest ultimately goes back to the principle that
human beings would rather consume today then consume tomorrow (i.e.
they value the present more highly than the future). If I offered
you a dollar now, or offered you a dollar next year, would you
Daniel Davies wrote:
I don't think liquidity shows up all that much as
being a particularly important thing in Marx; in Keynes it's
fundamental.
Marx does have a theory of monetary crisis based like Keynes's on
the psychological idea of auri sacra fames. It's this
psychological element that
Sandwichman wrote:
That's an externality that the happiness literature is big on. While
envy may contribute to unhappiness, I doubt it's decisive. I mean,
somebody has to be predisposed to enviousness, for someone else's
consumption to make them unhappy. If I'm a zen buddhist, your luxury
Daniel Davies wrote:
IIRC they also said that they would rather shovel shit if it paid
the same.
I have actually shovelled animal excrement, as a young man, and I
personally
believe that equities analysis is more fun. I never know quite
what to make
of Portnoy, but my own experience of the
Charles asks:
How do you integrate Marx's concept of necessity into your
analysis ?
Two ontological ideas, internal relations and an objective and
knowable good, generate an idea of necessity that makes it
consistent with fully free self-determination.
The second idea, the idea of an
Michael wrote:
This misinterprets Marx. Forces and relations of production are
subjective. They express the degree of development of human
subjectivity, the degree of development of the human mind.
accumulation is nothing but the amassing of the productive powers of
social labour, so that
The url for the second passage (what is wealth etc.) is mistaken.
It should be:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch09.htm
As the 1881 draft of the letter to Vera Zasulich (http://
www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1881/03/zasulich1.htm)
demonstrates, Marx
That should have been
For instance, Christian beliefs that make the eternal suffering of
one's enemies at the hands of a vengeful sadistic god a source of
rapturous joy indicate a degree of development lower than that
required for the creation of the penultimate social form. This is
confirmed
Louis Proyect pointed to Zizek on Mao:
http://www.lacan.com/zizmaozedong.htm
There we find the following:
The further key point concerns the principal ASPECT of a
contradiction; for example, with regard to the contradiction
between the productive forces and the relations of production,
Charles Brown wrote:
Marxist psychology, as Marxism must see
individual consciousness as made in caring and reproductive labor,
which is
done predominantly by women.
Kleinian psychoanalysis provides an account of the kind of caring
required to develop a strong integrated ego capable of
paul phillips wrote:
Everything they say could be applied to economics modelling,
particularly neoclassical models -- erroneous assumptions, fudge
factors and the reluctance to check predictions against unruly natural
outcomes produce models with,as the authors put it, .no demonstrable
basis
Jim Devine wrote:
1) there are _no_ limits to modeling as a strategy for understanding,
explaining, and/or predicting phenomena in the real world.
2) there are _a lot of_ limits to this strategy, but it might have
some positive effects in clarifying our understanding of the real
world.
I
Jim Devine wrote:
Ted Winslow wrote:
As I explicitly said, the use of deductive axiomatic reasoning I was
criticizing was the one that ignores the limits internal relations
place on the applicability of such reasoning It's
not true that everyone understands and accepts this argument
Charles Brown wrote:
All for one, and one for all !
As Plato has Phaedrus say at the end of the dialogue:
friends should have all things in common.
http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/p/plato/p71phs/phaedrus.html
Ted
Carrol Cox wrote:
friends should have all things in common.
http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/p/plato/p71phs/phaedrus.html
The way I construe that is Only guardians are capable of friendship:
Screw the rest of the featherless bipeds.
Marx didn't appropriate this aspect. His
Charles Brown wrote:
Perhaps the individuals of individualistic capitalism are the historic
product of the contradictions of class divided society.
But individuals are also the made in intimacy , not only in that
babies are
born of intimacy, but essential character of the intimates
Jim Devine wrote in dialogue with David Shemano::
Now, you say that Marx was not a philosopher who spent a lot of
time on ethical questions, but I view him as a philosopher
concerned with the best life, and the best life is the one
outlined in the German Ideology: Whereas in communist
Michael Perelman wrote:
David is correct that the early Marx wrote of an individualistic type
of happiness. Elsewhere his version of human growth and happiness was
more social in nature.
This isn't true. For the early as well as the late Marx, the
greatest wealth - the greatest happiness
In Marx, crisis is but one of the conditions required for the
emergence of the degree of free individuality possessed of the
capability and will required to transform capitalism into the
penultimate social form. Revolutionary praxis itself is made
necessary to the development of this
Angelus Novus wrote:
in discussing the
Hegelian influence on Marx, usually too much emphasis
is put on dubious concepts like dialectical
materialism and crude stagist conceptions of history.
But the real Hegelian aspect of Marx is the method of
depiction in the three volumes of Capital, the
I just inadvertently sent a draft e-mail I'd written some days ago.
Apologies.
Ted
Jim Devine wrote:
There are some utopian tinges to CAPITAL, but they aren't really about
what social will or should be. Marx saw socialism as arising from the
actual, concrete, process of history. Specifically, that meant from
the laws of motion of capitalism (which was, and is, conquering the
Angelus Novus pointed to the following url:
http://negativepotential.blogsport.de/2006/12/03/exit-marxism-enter-
emancipation/
This contains an endorsement of a passage from Goff.
But in fact, much of his subsequent reasoning is impeccable, and he
makes conclusions that other perceptive
On Dec 3, 2006, at 10:53 AM, Leigh Meyers wrote:
No he didn't, the mistake is to interpret what he's saying as relevant
to any society other than industrial societies, which by their very
nature are *Never* going to be an ideal social systems.
As the context makes clear, he's explicitly
Angelus Novus quoted from http://www.autodidactproject.org/other/
howtothink.html:
According to Marx, the social contradiction which can
only be resolved by revolution is that between the
forces of production and the relations of production.
The most common Marxist interpretation of this
Jim Devine wrote:
labor in the ideal community isn't completely (is that what
essentially means?) different from all prior forms or from labor
under capitalism. It's definitely different, but there are some shared
characterists. There is a tranhistorical essence to labor, as in
Marx's CAPITAL,
Jim Devine wrote:
The word essence, unfortunately, has idealist connotations. On the
other hand, shared characteristics focuses on the real-world,
empirical, phenomena without seeing them as mere reflections on
Plato's cave wall. There is something in the real world that is shared
by these
Jim Devine wrote:
It's hard to say using any kind of brevity. One shared characteristic
would having zero surplus-value.
Does surplus-value in the sense applicable to capitalism have
meaning in an ideal community? Production in the realms both of
necessity and freedom of an ideal
Yoshie Furuhashi quoted Dharmachari Jñanavira:
Writing in 1571, he [Portuguese traveller Gaspar Vilela] complains
of the addiction of the monks of Mt. Hiei to 'sodomy', and attributes
its introduction to Japan to Kuukai, the founder of Koyasan, the
Shingon headquarters[6]. Jesuit records of
Doug Henwood wrote:
Keynes
and the Keynesians never asked what investment was for (i.e., it was
just about raising the quantity, but not about what was being
created).
This isn't so in the case of Keynes whose conception of the purpose
of economic activity in the best of all imaginable
paul phillips wrote:
Jim D: Marx was right, under the gold standard (which prevailed at
the
time), which prevents any price inflation. Nowadays, prices may or
may not
rise with money wages, but capitalists have much more control over
prices
than under the gold standard. Currently, it's
Michael Perelman wrote:
I was thinking about the role of subjectivity in economic theory.
does this make sense: With Keynes and Marx, subjective considerations
(expectations) drive real investment. With Hayek, subjective
considerations determine values in the product market, while objective
Doug Henwood wrote:
I don't see how this is evidence for money being subordinate: if
value can't be monetized, the economy goes into crisis, or at least
recession. If you can't sell the goods, the value embedded in them
becomes largely notional.
Capitalism is M-C-M'. That this is a claim
David B. Shemano wrote:
Can you guys help me to understand the thinking here? If I am
ugly, isn't it a good thing that money exists so I can have a shot
at beautiful women? Is Marx really saying that it is unjust for an
ugly person to attract a beautiful woman? That an ugly person
Daniel Davies wrote:
non-satiation is one of the von Neumann/ Morgenstern axioms. You
need it in
order to derive most of the fixed-point theorems that underpin utility
theory, which matters more to people who think (unlike me but like
a lot of
college professors) that utility theory is really
Sandwichman wrote:
Monbiot certainly presumes a lot of background knowledge on the part
of his reader. I know who Robbins was and what he thought but who the
heck is John Watson and what did he think?
The Sandwichman
Autoplectic quoted Monbiot::We have been led, by the thinking of
people
Patrick Bond wrote:
From: Doyle Saylor
I sincerely wish that if people want to use autism as a metaphor they
spend a little time in the disabled community to find out what happens
to people with cognitive disabilities. Because stereotyping cognitive
disabilities is serious to us.
Full
Brian McKenna wrote:
PEN-Lers,
I'm writing an article about Poletown, Michigan to commemorate the
25th anniversary of its destruction to build a GM Cadillac plant. For
more background, read Corsetti's piece written last year in
COunterPunch (after the MI Supreme Ct. ruled in against
Julio Huato wrote:
Ted's summary of Keynes' views on capitalism is excellent. May I
just add that, in the Keynesian long run, the economic problem will be
solved, detestable money making will be superseded, but also -- why
bother -- we will all be dead.
Keynes's point, in the context where
Julio Huato wrote:
Based on Keynes' own statements, he aimed to reforming capitalism --
managing it in order to protect it from itself and its enemies.
Early on, he said that wisely managed capitalism was economically
superior to any other conceivable system. As far as I know, he
maintained
Michael Lebowitz wrote:
They may have said it on other occasions; however, if I recall
correctly, we had a bit of exchange. I wrote a note, 'Only capitalist
laws of motion?' in the November 1986 MR, which may have been in
response to something they wrote earlier and they responded in the
same
Michael Lebowitz wrote:
Let's begin by teaching him (and others who may have remembered
assorted quotes but forgotten the point) Marxian economics. Ie.,
let's imagine that he learns that capital is the result of the
exploitation of workers and that the income he received and now lives
off is a
Michael Perelman wrote:
I have mentioned before how Marx regards the capitalists as
representing the
charactermasks of capital. The German reads (without the umlauts):
Wie man daher immer die Charaktermasken beurteilen mag, worin sich
die Menschen hier
gegen ubertreten, die
Jim Devine wrote:
you seemed to be talking to me, responding to what I said. I'm sorry
that I made the mistake to make that assumption.
I was responding to what you said, specifically to this:
On 12/2/05, Ted Winslow [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Capital is our creation; we (including
On Dec 1, 2005, at 6:52 PM, Michael Perelman wrote:
Following Jim's well-reasoned post, recall that Marx's method
(although he did not follow
it himself always) was to approach matters scientifically. He
referred to capitalists as
the character masks of capital -- meaning that they just
Jim Devine wrote:
On 12/2/05, Ted Winslow [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Capital is our creation; we (including capitalists) are not its
creation.
this is a false dichotomy. Capitalism is both our creation and a
creator of our consciousness. To Marx, people create history, though
not exactly
Jim Devine wrote:
I wasn't saying that capitalism (and patriarchy, racial domination,
etc.) was a conscious subject. (It's not.) Rather, there are
unplanned results arising from the consciousness and actions of large
numbers of people who respond to the incentives and constraints that
make up
Jim Devine quoted Ollman:
Bertell Ollman writes: by taking up the space allotted to the future
in
our thinking, utopian visions undermine the possibility of making a
dialectical analysis of the present as a temporal dimension in which
the
future already appears as a potential;
Charles Brown wrote:
CB: If I understand here, internal relations are anti-Robinsonade
logic
,so to speak ?
Relations are internal where the essence of the individual is the
outcome of its relations. Robinsonades are those who implicitly
treat the essence of the individual as
Daniel Davies wrote:
I think that the only way you can square the circle is with something
like
Keynes' views on liquidity and animal spirits (ie the bits of Keynes'
investment theory left out of Tobin's Q). It's like there is some
intermediate values of Q in which it costs less to buy an oil
Julio Huato wrote:
This ratio between the market valuation of a
company's equity and the replacement value of its capital is the
argument in the Keynesian investment function as stipulated by Tobin
in his A General Equilibrium Approach to Monetary Theory. (Journal
of Money, Credit and Banking,
Michael Perelman wrote:
Ted is correct that Keynes's animal spirits are an important element
of his investment
theory, but he is not consistent in that respect. Keynes does propose
a q-theory of
investment, also animal spirits would enter into the stock markets
side. As a result, a
surge of
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