> Jameson and others calling themselves "radical" may share essential aspects
> of the world-view embodied in the "economic approach". Marx doesn't.
Eh? Jameson is pointing out that Becker's model of rationality, that people do things to satisfy their self-interest in survival, is historically true, in the sense that this is what has dominated and continues to dominate. Nowhere does he limit reason to some delimited instrumentality; there's aesthetics, play, pleasure, and much much else besides. His point is, this survivalism isn't something to be denounced morally, but to be analyzed historically -- and thereby changed.
> 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.
Not quite. Reason for Marx is class praxis -- but the emancipated society, whatever else it may be, would not have classes or class divisions, ergo its praxis would be unimaginably different from anything we denizens of prehistory suffer through. Adorno pointed out that freedom and necessity are Kantian concepts, bounded by the limit-point of 18th century causality; push freedom to its limit, and you get necessity; push the concept of necessity to its limit, and you run into freedom. This is why Marx himself pushed beyond the realm of causality altogether, into the realm of social vs. natural history; and politically, from the notion of the instantaneous revolution in the "Manifesto" to the carefully delineated class struggles of "Capital".
-- Dennis