>> Jameson can see nothing wrong with (and no essential incompatibility with
>> Marx in) the "core" of Gary Becker's "admirably totalizing approach" i.e.
>> with Becker's claim that "the economic approach provides a valuable
>> framework for understanding all human behavior."
>
> Um. Fred is being heavily ironic. Later he goes on to say that radicals
> and neoliberals pretty much share the same world-view -- except for the
> essential thing, i.e. the neolibs laud the total system, while we denounce
> it; it's only the middle-of-the-road types who vehemently reject the idea
> that something like capitalism might actually exist. Adorno says
> somewhere, actually, that the truth lies in the mediation of extremes, not
> the bad compromise between the two...
I think it's just a mistake Dennis. If it's irony why would he go on to say that "radicals and neoliberals share pretty much the same world-view".
Jameson and others calling themselves "radical" may share essential aspects of the world-view embodied in the "economic approach". Marx doesn't.
As I've said before, the approach misidentifies reason with instrumental reason which it in turn misidentifies with deductive reasoning from fixed axioms. One expression of the latter error is the mistaken universality granted to formal reasoning that makes use of the "variable" e.g. algebra. Such reasoning assumes that, at least from the perspective of the purposes of a particular argument, the identities of the variables involved remain unchanged as the reasoning elaborates new relations.
This assumption will always be satisfied where relations are "external", meaning by this relations where the identities of the related things are independent of their relations. Where relations are "external" in this sense, the identities of variables will by definition remain unchanged in the face of changes in their relations.
Where, as Hegel, Marx and Whitehead assume is universally true, relations are "internal", i.e. where the identities of the related things are the outcome of their relations, "complete self-identity can never be preserved in any advance to novelty." Here the presuppositions required for reasoning that makes use of the variable may not be satisfied.
Internal relations do not rule out the use of formal reasoning that makes use of the variable. They limit its applicability. In Hegel and Marx this limiting is the result of dialectically sublating the "understanding" in what they (but not Becker and Jameson) mean by "reason".
Fred Engels points both to the possibility and the necessity of "abstracting" from internal relations and to the danger this creates of ignoring that relations are in fact internal.
"When we reflect on Nature, or the history of mankind, or our own intellectual activity, the first picture presented to us is of an endless maze of relations and interactions, in which nothing remains what, where and as it was, but everything moves, changes, comes into being and passes out of existence. This primitive, naïve, yet intrinsically correct conception of the world was that of ancient Greek philosophy, and was first clearly formulated by Heraclitus: everything is and also is not, for everything is in flux, is constantly changing, constantly coming into being and passing away. But this conception, correctly as it covers the general character of the picture of phenomena as a whole, is yet inadequate to explain the details of which this total picture is composed; and so long as we do not understand these, we also have no clear idea of the picture as a whole. In order to understand these details, we must detach them from their natural or historical connections, and examine each one separately, as to its nature, its special causes and effects, etc. ... But this method of investigation has also left us as a legacy the habit of observing natural objects and natural processes in their isolation, detached from the whole vast interconnection of things; and therefore not in their motion, but in their repose; not as essentially changing, but as fixed constants; not in their life, but in their death. And when, as was the case with Bacon and Locke, this way of looking at things was transferred from natural science to philosophy, it produced the specific narrow-mindedness of the last centuries, the metaphysical mode of thought." Anti-Duhring, pp. 26-7 see also p. 132
The idea of social relations as internal relations is embodied in the passages from Marx I quoted. The transformation of capitalist into communist relations, i.e. into relations of "mutual recognition", transforms the members of the community into "different subjects" each of whom, among other things, then enters "the direct production process as this different subject".
"It is self-evident that if time of labour is reduced to a normal length and, furthermore, labour is no longer performed for someone else, but for myself, and, at the same time, the social contradictions between master and men, etc., being abolished, it acquires a quite different, a free character, it becomes real social labour, and finally the basis of disposable time - the time of labour of a man who has also disposable time, must be of a much higher quality than that of the beast of burden." Theories of Surplus Value pp. 301-2 Collected Works, vol. 32
"Real economy -- saving -- consists of the saving of labour time (minimum (and minimization) of production costs); but this saving identical with development of the productive force. Hence in no way abstinence from consumption, but rather the development of power, of capabilities of production, and hence both of the capabilities as well as the means of consumption. The capability to consume is a condition of consumption, hence its primary means, and this capability is the development of an individual potential, a force of production. The saving of labour time [is] equal to an increase of free time, i.e. time for the full development of the individual, which in turn reacts back upon the productive power of labour as itself the greatest productive power. From the standpoint of the direct production process it can be regarded as the production of fixed capital, this fixed capital being man himself. It goes without saying, by the way, that direct labour time itself cannot remain in the abstract antithesis to free time in which it appears from the perspective of bourgeois economy. Labour cannot become play, as Fourier would like, although it remains his great contribution to have expressed the suspension not of distribution, but of the mode of production itself, in a higher form, as the ultimate object. Free time -- which is both idle time and time for higher activity -- has naturally transformed its possessor into a different subject, and he then enters into the direct production process as this different subject. This process is then both discipline, as regards the human being in the process of becoming; and, at the same time, practice [Ausübung], experimental science, materially creative and objectifying science, as regards the human being who has become, in whose head exists the accumulated knowledge of society. For both, in so far as labour requires practical use of the hands and free bodily movement, as in agriculture, at the same time exercise.
"As the system of bourgeois economy has developed for us only by degrees, so too its negation, which is its ultimate result. We are still concerned now with the direct production process. When we consider bourgeois society in the long view and as a whole, then the final result of the process of social production always appears as the society itself, i.e. the human being itself in its social relations. Everything that has a fixed form, such as the product etc., appears as merely a moment, a vanishing moment, in this movement. The direct production process itself here appears only as a moment. The conditions and objectifications of the process are themselves equally moments of it, and its only subjects are the individuals, but individuals in mutual relationships, which they equally reproduce and produce anew. The constant process of their own movement, in which they renew themselves even as they renew the world of wealth they create." Grundrisse pp. 711-2
The "universally developed individual" is "reason" realized. The concept sublates e.g. Book VI of Nicomachean Ethics, Kant's idea of "art" as "production through freedom" in the Critique of Judgment p. 145, Hegel's idea of "educated men" in the Philosophy of Right p. 268.
In Marx such individuals are the outcome of internal relations, including in this the internally related stages that for Marx as for Hegel constitute history as a process of "bildung" through which mind develops to rationality. Prior to the full realization of reason the dominant mentality is to some degree irrational, a fact expressed in Hegel and Marx's notion of the motives dominating each stage as "passions". (This is one of many reasons why "marriage" of any kind, let alone the ideal kind, can't be comprehended with Becker's concepts.)
In contrast, the "economic approach" endorsed by Jameson treats individuals as everywhere and always "rational".
It seems to me, by the way, that a related misunderstanding of "reason" and "rationality" is found in Marcuse. In Eros and Civilization he says of the "realm of necessity":
"Possession and procurement of the necessities of life are the prerequisite, rather than the content, of a free society. The realm of necessity, of labor, is one of unfreedom because the human existence in this realm is determined by objectives and functions that are not its own and that do not allow the free play of human faculties and desires. The optimum in this realm is therefore to be defined by standards of rationality rather than freedom - namely, to organize production and distribution in such a manner that the least time is spent for making all necessities available to all members of society. Necessary labor is a system of essentially inhuman, mechanical, and routine activities; in such a system, individuality cannot be a value and end in itself. Reasonably, the system of societal labor would be organized rather with a view to saving time and space for the development of individuality outside the inevitably repressive work-world. Play and display, as principles of civilization, imply not the transformation of labor but its complete subordination to the freely evolving potentialities of man and nature. The ideas of play and display now reveal their full distance from the values of productiveness and performance: play is unproductive and useless precisely because it cancels the repressive and exploitive traits of labor and leisure; it 'just plays' with the reality. But it also cancels their sublime traits - the 'higher values.' The desublimation of reason is just as essential a process in the emergence of a free culture as in the self-sublimation of sensuousness." pp. 195-6
Some of this - labour in the realm of necessity as instrumental labour requiring to be minimized - is consistent with Marx. Reason in Marx's sense, however, is essential rather than antithetical to freedom; it isn't merely instrumental reason. (This is why even "production through freedom" can't be "play" in Fourier's sense Grundrisse p. 611 - another point taken from Kant Critique of Judgment p. 147). In addition, as embodied in the realm of necessity by universally developed individuals, reason does not create an "inevitably repressive work-world", "a system of essentially inhuman, mechanical, and routine activities" in which "individuality cannot be a value and end in itself". As the passages I've quoted indicate, it creates ""conditions most worthy and appropriate for their ['the associated producers'] human nature". (Capital, vol. 3, p. 959)
Ted -- Ted Winslow E-MAIL: WINSLOW at YORKU.CA Division of Social Science VOICE: (416) 736-5054 York University FAX: (416) 736-5615 4700 Keele St. Toronto, Ontario CANADA M3J 1P3