>>> Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> 08/26/99 01:30PM >>>
Charles Brown wrote:
>Marxists don't disagree with Bobbie Burns that the best laid plans
>of mice and men often go astray. But a dialectical approach teaches
>that in any problem parts must be understood in relation to the
>whole, thus the concept of the whole or the total is a critical
>aspect any problem solving including human social economy. The
>critique of perfect knowledge does not refute this, because this
>dimension is already cognized in the Marxist dialectic of relative
>and absolute truth with respect to nature and society.
In other words, your kind of Marxism does claim a kind of perfect knowledge.
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Charles: I'll agree to that if you agree that it is an imperfect kind of perfect knowledge. It is a dialectic between relative and absolute truth. Your use of only the word "perfect" ignores the "relative" part of the formulation
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On this issue, I don't think it's very fruitful to talk at a high level of abstraction.
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Charles: This is the whole/part relation issue at another angle. It is only fruitful, from the Marxist standpoint, to talk about scientific problems from both an abstract and concrete point of view. In a sense the abstract point of view is the HOLISTIC aspect of the epistemology here. So, no I don't agree that it is not fruitful to think of social economy from an abstract point of view. In fact, Marx specifically says he proceeds from the abstract to the concrete.
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I think you've - not you, Charles, but anyone - got to talk about the body or bodies doing the planning, the space of such planning (nation? region? locality?), the degree of precision (x% of social resources devoted to health, or the precise mix of band-aids and MRI machines), etc.
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Charles: All of the details make up the whole. You do have to talk about specifics, but you are just as epistemologically obligated to talk about the totality as the parts. And the parts must be discussed in relation to ALL of the other parts, i.e. the whole.
Holism does not say only talk about the whole. It says talk about the whole and the parts. So, I agree with half of your statement, the half about talking about the planning bodies, the space of such planning, etc., but not the half about not discussing it abstractly and as a whole, such as the interrelation of all the specifics you list above. You know a matrix, how a relates to b, c, d, e. How b relates to c, d, e, etc.. How a relations to b makes a different than just a in isolation. etc., etc.
CB