Since I haven't read the book reviewed, perhaps I should refrain from making a comment, but allow me to proceed anyway.
>Where the Radical Chains project is concerned with the
>understanding of a system or totality of interlocking social
>relations, Bhaskar and company see instead a mere aggregation or
>collection of relations that are subject to an open set of
>permutations. This can be seen in Bhaskar's description of the
>socialised market: 'It involves public ownership and worker-managed
>enterprises with a basic wage guaranteed irrespective of work, in
>exchange for domestic or caring labour, with labour, producer goods
>and consumer goods markets, subject to over-all planning norms and
>with market-making undertaken by publicly funded bodies and backed up
>by buyer-seller information networks' (p.28-29).
>
>The Socialist Movement wants to abolish the market in capital but
>retain the market in labour.
I don't know if the quoted passage refers to what the Socialist Movement holds as the end point of social transformation or a step on the way to communism. In any case, though, I agree with the reviewer to the extent that I am not in favor of market socialism. If only the reviewer expressed his belief in a less turgid language! (What is this group called "Radical Chains" anyway? Can anyone enlighten me?) For those who are interested in a more persuasive critique of market socialism, read David McNally's _Against the Market: Political Economy, Market Socialism and the Marxist Critique_ (Verso, 1993).
>This is a lot of '-ists' and '-eans' to be crammed into less than two
>pages of text. It is not, however, the result of trying to distil the
>essence of his longer works into a small space. Readers of Bhaskar's
>weightier tomes, - The Possibility of Naturalism, for example - will
>have noticed the same tendency at work there. The suspicion is that
>the adjectives - 'positivist', 'Nietzschean', 'superidealist', and so
>on - are doing all the work. They are surrogates for real argument.
>What exactly is a 'dualist overly anti-naturalist hue'? How would you
>recognise a 'superidealist epistemology' if you encountered one?
>Bhaskar would seem to presuppose more knowledge on the part of the
>reader than could be deemed to be reasonable. Perhaps he could have
>provided a glossary, or better, an index of -isms.
The above merely demonstrates the reviewer's incompetence, however. The nature of positivism, idealism, etc. are very closely and painstakingly argued in Bhaskar's work. "Radical Chains" should have chosen a better informed reviewer. That said, I do think that Bhaskar's writing is not elegant. Along with Judith Butler, Fred Jameson, etc., Bhaskar, too, won a Bad Writing contest! And I dare say he may have deserved it.
Yoshie