>> They are internally related where their identities depend on their
>> relations. Where relations are internal there are no "substances" in the
>> above senses.
>
> =============
> Right and that just reduces 'internally' to a trivial proposition.
Internal relations made concrete in the human case have to be conceived so as to be compatible with other ontological ideas. As with the internal relations of all living things, human relations must allow logically for self-determination and purpose.
My relations now are constitutive of me now (this makes it impossible for me to be presently in more than one universe since I am a particular universe now from my standpoint). They constitute me now as a set of possibilities open to closure by me, this is the self-determination. Another ontological premise is that these possibilities are open to objective valuation as better or worse so that the purpose that guides self-determination can be based on rational valuation of alternative possibilities.
Marx assumes that a human individual is an individual potentially having a will proper and a universal will, i.e. a will whose content is fully open to rational self determination on the basis of knowledge of the objective values (Marx belongs to a tradition in thought that takes these to be "love" and "beauty") which provide the foundation for ranking possibilities. (Anyone claiming that people are naturally resentful, naturally envious, naturally selfish, naturally exploitive etc. is denying that they potentially have a "will proper".) The possibilities open to me now depend on (are "internally related" to) past decisions and actions so that self-determination in the past can create a current set of possibilities, a "real potentiality," that includes the ideal.
The will is only potentially proper and universal, however. Persons require particular relations in order to realize this potentiality, i.e. become fully rationally self-conscious. Their actual relations can be more or less consistent with this. I'm not a Sovietologist but my impression (from, for example, Gorky's My Childhood) is that the social, including the family relations, characteristic of the Russian peasantry (the vast majority of the population in 1917) were very far from what would be required for the development of full rationality, that their likely usual result would be an adult personality characterized by primitive defences against psychotic anxiety i.e. a more or less paranoid, extremely hostile, sadistic personality. These particular internal social relations would then explain the coming to dominance within them of a paranoid, hostile, sadistically murderous mentality. It is in this way that "internal relations" might help to explain the last 80 or so years of Russian history including the disastrous consequences of the collapse, important features of which were the product of advice from "economists" of the Hayekian sort having no knowledge either of the psychological factors I've just pointed to (they are explicitly denied any role in explanations framed in accordance with the "logic of the situation"), of the "internal relations" which produce them (the approach treats social relations as "external"), or of the truth contained in the passage from Keynes that Brad recently quoted.
The passage implicitly calls attention to the irrationality of apocalyptic thinking. Such thinking goes together with the obsessional Ricardian vice and the sadistic puritanism to produce the conclusion that immense present pain and suffering are justifiable because in "the [for Keynes unknowable] long run" there will be enormous positive benefits that will far outweigh them, a belief Keynes claims can't be rationally justified and attributes to a psychological need to deny that "in the long run we are all dead."
Ian also claimed that my description of "Oh, that's it; use internal relations as a stand in for ineffability ..." as contemptuous was "patently untrue."
"Oh, that's it" expresses scorn. Placed before "use internal relations as a stand in for ineffability" it makes "ineffability" mean the concept of "internal relations" is "indefinable" because meaningless. A meaningless concept is worthless.
The ordinary definition of "contempt" is "a feeling that a person or a thing is beneath consideration or worthless, or deserving scorn or extreme reproach".
Ted