>----- Original Message -----
>From: "Chris Burford" <cburford at gn.apc.org>
>To: <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com>
>Sent: Sunday, November 11, 2001 12:33 PM
>Subject: Re: LBO web updates
>
>
> > Yet in the
> > final analysis the grounds for being optimistic for any of us are if we
> > believe the human tendencies towards cooperation are greater than those
> > towards conflict.
> >
> > And they are.
>
>Who resolved this vexing empirical question for us? How did they do it?
>
>-- Luke
>
> >
> > Chris Burford
> >
> > London
I did not see it as an empirical question. I gave an essentialist, a realist, answer.
Our species is a collective one. Without cooperation we cannot reproduce. Much of the competition and conflict between individuals, is about how we position ourselves in relation to the collective. eg this courteous but perhaps important little skirmish. Had Luke written nothing perhaps my remark would have fallen even deader than it did. By this competition we also cooperate in making something perhaps more relevant to others. Competition and cooperation are more closely linked than at first appears.
In terms of marxist economic theory the competitive oscillation of prices is the process whereby in broad terms the average prices of products equilibrate with their exchange value according to prevailing methods of production.
In the most abstract marxist terms, capitalist activity is a social activity, but the means of production are privately owned. The commodity embodies that in a strange fetishised way appearing all powerful over people's lives. The automobile industry in the USA, say, is ruined and hundreds of thousands of peoples lives are ruined.
There are miserablilist versions of marxism, but part of the optimistic version of marxism is that if people realise the social relationship lying beneath money, economics becomes again potentially a process vulnerable to social control.
How is that for an explanation - not one empirical fact!
Chris Burford