>I think questions can be raised about the internal consistency of the
>Mises/Hayek argument respecting prices as communicators of information etc.
>but the question I was raising was much more fundamental. I think the
>premises are unrealistic even as a starting point for analysis of markets
>in
>capitalism let alone for drawing conclusions about socialism or communism.
>The premises are radically different from Marx's.
>
>The starting point of Austrian economics (Mises, Hayek, Robbins etc.) is
>that we have ends and limited means for achieving them.
Which is true and inescapable.
Using means
>"efficiently" means realizing from their use the best of the limited set of
>possibilities such limited means allow. This seems unobjectionable. The
>content given to it, however, is radically inconsistent with Marx.
>
>The Austrians claim not to be making any particular assumptions about ends.
>But this isn't so. They don't allow for ends as these are conceived by
>Marx
>for whom the end of existence is a "good" life understood as one in which
>"love" and "beauty" - concepts with very particular meanings expressing
>knowledge of objective values - are realized.
Nonsense.
While .
>
>One sign of this is insatiability. Desire conceived in the Austrian way
>can
>never be fully satisfied. Individuals always prefer more of the "stuff" of
>happiness as this stuff is conceived in this scheme. They are insatiably
>"greedy".
Their arguments do not require this assumption even if they believed it.
>
>This isn't true of Marx's conception of ends. In that conception (which
>doesn't of course originate with Marx - this is why the same conception can
>be found in Keynes who foolishly despised Marx) what Hayek et al are
>treating as ultimate ends are themselves treated as means. "Consumption"
>is
>a means to the good life, not the good life itself.
Hayek would never deny this.
A life of relations of
>mutual recognition whose content is beauty is a life of desire satisfied.
>This imposes a limit on the means. They must be what is required for the
>actualization of the good life. Among other things, the time spent
>producing means has to be minimized in order to create maximum time for the
>good life itself.
This is a Hayekian premise, fundamental to his argument.
The needs which production in the "realm of necessity"
>satisfies include the provision of what is required for the production of
>"beauty" in the "realm of freedom."
>
>This is one obvious way in which the conception of "rationality" in Hayek
>differs radically from the conception in Marx. Hayek assumes rationality
>can only be instrumental; reason must be the "slave" of the passions.
Where does this come from? Marx does not talk about rationality or claim to have a Kantian ethic on which the good life can be shwon to be demosntrated as a certain liferequired by reason.
>
>Instrumental reason is also identified with deductive reasoning from axioms
Heaven forbid, a very bad thing.
>- maximizing a "utility" function etc. In Marx even instrumental reason
>involves much more than this.
He never uses thsi Frankfurtian term.
Formal logic is subsumed within human logic
>e.g. the assumptions from which deductive reasoning begins are themselves a
>topic for rational determination
Where? Text please.
Ends are up for _debate_, but hell, Hayek and even Weber wouldn't deny that up to a point. It's just that you get to a point where it's hard to know how to go on. I say, I love to shop. You say, that's no life for a human being. I say, why not? You say, you don't realize your human potentials through free productive activity. I say, you mean work? Yuck, I hate work, You say, that's only beacuse you live under capitalism. If you lived under communsim, you'd love work. I say, then I don't want to live under communism, because I'd hate to be the sort of person who loved work. What I love to do, is shop. You say, That's irraional. Oh yeah? Why isn't that just an expression of horror at my ignoble and base final ends? Where is my mistake?
( philosophy, as conceived within this
>conception of rationality e.g. by Whitehead, is "the search for premises,
>it
>is not reasoning from premises").
Marx rejected philosophy. He was no Whiteheadean. And if raesoning isn't from premises, it ain't reasoning.
Moreover, what is to be reasoned about
>will not always allow for deductive reasoning particularly formalized
>deductive reasoning making use of the logical concept of a "variable".
Of course? Who said otherwise? Not Hayek, who was no formalism fetishist. You can read the collected works of Hayek and Mises, and you will not find a formalization or an equation. Like Marx, they were political economsits with a vision of society.
>Internal relations, for instance, often work in a way that makes such
>reasoning inapplicable.
That's why talk of internal relations is obscurantist rubbish, not because it escapes formalization, but because it escapes intelligible statement at all.
This is particularly true in reasoning about ends
>because the good is an "organic unity" in the sense of internal relations.
>The "beautiful," for instance, can't be fully analyzed into atomic parts; a
>beautiful whole is more than the sum of its parts (Keynes also insists on
>this, an idea he's taken from G.E. Moore - he explicitly criticized
>"utilitarianism" on this ground).
Is internal realtions then just a rejection of atomism, a claijm that
relations between parts count too? Well, that's intelligible and true, but
not very exciting. ANd Hayeka nd Mises would not deny it. Indedd, you cannot
state their arguments without assuming that it is true.
>
>"Rationality" in Marx's sense defines the "universally developed
>individual."
Text, cites,please. Marx talks about all-around development, etc., but not about rationality. And why should we follow him whether or not he does? His saying something does not make it right. Andeven if it is right there is the point that in a free society, we do not impose a particular conception of the good on people who reject it, even if it is miataken for them to reject it.
The social ontology Marx adopts makes this kind of subjectivity
>the outcome of an historical process of internally related stages of
>"bildung" in which "relations of production" play a key role not in the
>"determination" of "consciousness" in a deterministic way but in the
>development of rational self-consciousness, a radically different idea. A
>corollary is that self-consciousness does not begin as rational, it only
>becomes rational through a long and difficult process. Self consciousness
>in capitalism etc. is therefore to some important degree irrational.
Ah, I see. You are a Hegelian. It is OK gfor thecommunsits to impose the happy beautiful life on poor benighted consumerist me because, in my blinkered way, I have underdeveoped rationality, so I'm not fully responsible. I will thank you when you have done washing my basin, I mean developing my consciousness.
None of these arguments Ted raises bear on the fundamentals of the Hayekian critique of a nonmarket economy, which suggested that the incentives such an a economy gives to individuals within it will deprive them of thae ability to accurately gather and report information about needs, resources, and meand to connect them. Thsi informational deficit will lead to universal material poverty. As far as I can tell, Ted (in an earlier post) asserted without argument that somehwo communist man would, in virtue of losing his capitalist greed, have the necessary incentives. Here he suggests that, immersed in the rational pursuit of beauty, communist man will not care about material things and therefore will not mind being poor. Neither of these arguments strike me as remotely plausible. Sell them to the working class if you can. The workers I know wouldn't buy it. They also want material goods. Of course they are blinkered by false consciosuness, but they resent the hell out of commies who suggest they're rationally deficient.
jks
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