> 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.
I just showed you that Justin. The "yes!" means you didn't understand what I said - Marx's argument starts from "individual people". If they are "universally developed individuals" they have all the incentives you mention. You should say "talk about internal relations is absolutely no help" *to you*. Your assumption that if you don't understand a concept it must be "obscurantist" is mistaken.
In The Open Society and Its Enemies, Popper made the same kind of "argument" re Whitehead's elaboration of the concept in Process and Reality.
"Whitehead considers himself a rationalist philosopher too; but so did Hegel, to whom Whitehead owes a great deal; indeed, he is one of the few neo-Hegelians who know how much they owe to Hegel (as well as to Aristotle). Undoubtedly, he owes it to Hegel that he has the courage, in spite of Kant¹s burning protest, to build up grandiose metaphysical systems with a royal contempt for argument." (vol. 2, p. 247)
"And I feel that way about the whole book. I just do not understand what its author wished it to convey. Very likely, this is my fault and not his. I do not belong to the number of the elect, and the large number of the lost. But lost as I am, I can only say that, as I see it, Neo-Hegelianism no longer looks like that old crazy quilt with a few new patches, so vividly sketched by Kant; rather it looks now like a bundle of a few old patches which have been torn from it.
"I will leave it to the careful student of Whitehead¹s book to decide whether it has stood up to its own 'proper test', whether it shows progress as compared with the metaphysical systems whose stagnation Kant complained; provided he can find the criteria by which to judge the progress. And I will leave it to the same student to judge the appropriateness of concluding these remarks with another of Kant¹s comments upon metaphysics:
'Concerning metaphysics in general, and the views I have expressed on their value, I admit that my formulations may here or there have been insufficiently conditional and cautious. Yet I do not wish to hide the fact that I can only look with repugnance and even with something like hate upon the puffed-up pretentiousness of all these volumes filled with wisdom, such as are fashionable nowadays. For I am fully satisfied that the wrong way has been chosen; that the accepted methods must endlessly increase these follies and blunders; and that even the complete annihilation of all these fanciful achievements could not possibly be as harmful as this fictitious science with its accursed fertility.'" (pp. 249-50)
A footnote (note 40, p. 360) offers the following rationalization for this style of "arguing."
"Concerning my remark, later in the paragraph, that I just do not understand what the author wishes to convey, I may say that it was only with great reluctance that I wrote this. The 'I do not understand' criticism is a rather cheap and dangerous kind of sport. I simply wrote these words because, in spite of my efforts, they remained true."
He must have discovered at some later point that the concept was not "obscurantist" and that his inability to understand it was indeed his "fault." In The Self and Its Brain, he accepts that "modern physics" has demonstrated that physical reality is characterized by "internal relations."
³Thus the law of conservation of matter (and of mass) had to be given up. Matter is not 'substance', since it is not conserved: it can be destroyed, and it can be created. Even the most stable particles, the nucleons, can be destroyed by collision with their anti-particles, when their energy is transformed into light. Matter turns out to be highly packed energy, transformable into other forms of energy; and therefore something of the nature of a process, since it can be converted into other processes such as light and, of course, motion and heat.
³Thus one way say the the results of modern physics suggest that we should give up the idea of a substance or essence. They suggest that there is no self-identical entity persisting during all changes in time (even though bits of matter do so under 'ordinary' circumstances); that there is no essence which is the persisting carrier or possessor of the properties or qualities of a thing. The universe now appears to be not a collection of things, but an interacting set of events or processes (as stressed especially by A.N. Whitehead).
"A modern physicist thus might well say that physical things - bodies, matter - have an atomic structure. But atoms have a structure in their turn, a structure that can hardly be described as 'material', and certainly not as 'substantial': with the programme of explaining the structure of matter, physics had to transcend materialism.² p.7
Given his treatment of Whitehead and the concept in Open Society, something more than a parenthetic acknowledgement of Whitehead would seem obligatory. Popper, however, makes no mention of or apology for his earlier demagoguery.
Ted