How about the people on the other end of the whip?
>What is the non-estrangement
>baseline that determines that the love of money is irrational?
By love of money here I'll assume you mean the constant creation of wealth for no other reason than the creation of more wealth (based on the idea that you'll "need it" sometime).
How about whether or not that more wealth is "really" needed to keep one's head above water and reasonably comfortable? Loaded definitions, sure, but more acceptable than "the sky's the limit (and not even then)".
It's one more thing to get hashed out in class struggle I suppose.
>I thought capitalism was a process without a subject; how can a
>non-subject/agent be irrational? Who gets to decide?
But didn't it have to start out with subjects? And aren't those subjects embedded in the system to begin with? I'm far from arguing that, to stop capitalism, we need to "do something" with the capitalists (although something along those lines'll probabaly come up sometime).
As for who gets to decide, well, there's that whip thing again . . . .
>A lot of the sections of C v. I you refer to below look like
>representative agent models which lots of left economists, sociologists
>etc. are leery of when used by people like Robert Lucas etc. Why should KM
>get a free pass?
"Representative agent models." Does that mean individual capitalists?
>If capitalism is an economic-ecological determinism, an ontological
>necessity and opposition to it is a necessity then contradictions are
>necessary too, no? For if capitalism were necessarily consistent then why
>would opposition to it be considered rational if rationality is
>monoontological?
>If the former is a necessity -in terms of being a *mechanism*- but the
>latter isn't, then.........?
>If the latter is, but the former isn't, what is the necessary baseline
>from which we decide capitalism is a form of individual and collective
>self-estrangement? If the baseline itself is contingent then what is the
>meaning of the term self-estrangement?
>Or is *mechanism* and similar terms in KM's discourse
>metaphorical.........?
Du-uh . . . . Wudjoosay? In English?
>Oh yeah, Aristotle. A guy who never lacked a material comfort in his adult
>life and hung out with the Donald Rumsfeld of his time. He's a moral
>authority on wealth.
Just because Aristotle was a member of the ruling class and friends with an apparently grade-A screwball, how does that invalidate his critique of the use of wealth?
>There is no effective decision procedure whereby we can irrefutably
>determine whether the love of money is irrational. The 'in itself' issue
>is just so much Kantian baggage.
Eek! Ian! We haven't even won the war yet, and you're talking about "effective decision procedures for irrefutable determinations"? I'll happily endorse some procedures like that for certain things, but every one . . . ? Too much, too soon, I think.
>Does anyone really believe Warren Buffett and Bill Gates are psychopaths
>and would tell them that to their face if they had the chance.
Well, I don't think they're psychopaths in the popular sense of drooling, maniacal kife-wielders, but I don't think they really care what they're doing so long as they get their money and they get it yesterday. OTOH, being charitable, they could just be "victims" of Zizek's "will-not-to-know". In which case they're still dangerous within the system and need to be corralled.
Todd
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