>> Why do I never see stuff like this in radical papers? No one can
>> bother
>> to crunch the numbers? Anything short of total revolution is useless?
>> What?
>
> ===========
>
> It smuggles in a decadent bourgeois concept called the diminishing
> marginal utility of wealth and for that DH must be pilloried for
> refusing
> to make use of a tautology that Joan Robinson called the incantations
> aspect of Marx's theory.
Joan Robinson isn't a good guide to the bath water in Marx. For her, the baby is Ricardian; the bath water is Hegelian.
I don't think Doug is a Bedlamite economist.
Marx's idea of a fully ethical distribution of material means differs from the utilitarian (Benthamite) idea.
Its foundation is the idea of a good life as a life filled with love, beauty and truth, all goods which when shared increase in amount. In an ideal community, each member is able to live a good life in this sense. Material and other means are so distributed as to enable each to do this. The "needs" met in this way include the developmental needs of a universally developed individual (a "transcendental subject") e.g. the need for truly loving and wise infant and child care. Such an individual is able to perceive truly and hence able to "recognize" others and to create and appropriate beauty and truth.
It seems to me this is the idea at play in the films of Kurosawa we were recently discussing i.e. the films embody this conception of the ideal and elaborate, as the rational foundation of hope for its future achievement, the demonstrated capacity of humans to perceive truly.
In To Live (Ikiru), for instance, a man (played by Takashi Shimura, the woodcutter in Rashomon) living a very much alienated life as a government bureaucrat discovers that he has terminal cancer and only a brief time to live. He undertakes to discover what has so far been missing from his life, what it would mean to live truly.
As does Goethe in Faust, Kurosawa represents this as a directly perceivable truth, i.e. a truth discoverable through experience. In fact, the movie makes this relation to Goethe’s Faust explicit by having the character who undertakes to show the man what it means to live truly describe himself as taking on the role of Mephistopheles.
Following a series of experiences that disappoint, the man is implicitly represented as finally discovering the truth that the experience to which he could say stay would be the experience he would have if he lived in a community of universally developed individuals.
In the present, such a moment isn’t available; he can only, as does Faust, imagine it. The best of the moments actually available is determined by what he knows of this ideal moment and its prerequisites.
This is the moment associated with so acting in his present real potentiality as to bring about the greatest possible advance toward realization of the imagined ideal.
Kurosawa represents these truths as the man deciding to undertake the very difficult task of helping a group of women meet the "needs" of their children. He uses his knowledge of the bureaucracy to enable them to obtain the permission and material means required to transform what amounts to an infested swamp in their neighbourhood into a properly designed playground. (It's this that makes his "socialism" "scientific" rather than "utopian.")
In the process he demonstrates mastery of the fear of death (both by not being immobilized by conscious awareness of his own impending death and, related to this, by remaining calm and rationally undeterred by threats against his life from individuals wishing to appropriate the land in furtherance of their own greed). This mastery is implicitly represented as mastery of what in the past has stood in the way of his ability to perceive truly and, hence, of his living the best of the possible lives available to him.
Ted