Science, Science & Marxism: A Last Word From me

Justin Schwartz jkschw at hotmail.com
Mon Jan 14 08:06:02 PST 2002


Ted, I've resisted being drawn back into the market socialist debate, and this is the heart of it. I won't do it now, I have not theenergy, I will only add that the way you go about does not strike me as productive, I think if you want to refute Hayek's arguments you have to show that there is a institutional structure compatible with planning that gives individual (yes!) people the incentive to gather, accurately compute, and honestly report, the relevant information without imposing too high transaction costs on the information gathering process. Talk about internal relations is absolutely no help here. Anyway, I'm not not up for this debate, so I'm signing off. Enjoy!


>>
>Hayek's conclusions about markets don't follow from Marx's premises. In
>fact, as I tried to show, Marx's premises lead to conclusions about markets
>opposite to Hayek's at least so far as their role in an ideal society is
>concerned.
>
>In Marx higher forms of social relations are identified by their greater
>consistency with the development and expression of rational
>self-consciousness.
>
>This dependence of the degree of rationality in the individual on the
>individual's relations embodies the ontological idea of "internal
>relations." Hayek implicitly treats social relations as external rather
>than internal when he assumes that the "rationality" of individuals is
>independent of their relations. This is what underpins the explanatory
>approach Popper calls the "logic of the situation" in the passage I pointed
>out to Brad recently. Popper, in identifying the approach with
>"economics,", has Hayek explicitly in mind.
>
>For Marx the fully rational self-consciousness is that of the "universally
>developed individual," a concept that sublates a great deal of earlier
>thought about "rationality" e.g. it sublates Aristotle (the concepts of
>sophia, episteme, techne, nous and phronesis) and Hegel (the concept of the
>"educated person"). One aspect of this is that the "will" of such an
>individual is both a "will proper" and a "universal will."

etc.

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