----- Original Message ----- From: "Todd Archer" <todda39 at hotmail.com>
>Just *who* gets to define what self-estrangement means in the
sociological
>sense of the term you seem to be using?
How about the people on the other end of the whip?
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Fair enough, but they too would still need a definition of non-self-estrangement on which to base claims to compel-persuade others to cease the behavior that they assert results in said self-estrangement. If there are irreducibly conflicting meanings to the term self-estrangement, all we've done is gone in a circle. Sadly, the historical record shows that violence is then resorted to.
This is my beef with Hegel and Marx, they assert that the societies in which they-we live are fairly well saturated with self-estrangement, yet they do not provide us with the relevant counterfactual on non-estranging social relations which would entice-secure majoritarian or unanimous consent sufficient for their societies to come to individual-collective recognition that estrangement was ubiquitous and overcomeable. Their virtue is that they invite us to imagine that such non-estrangement must surely be possible, yet in the absence of such *concrete definitions* or examples of large scale sustainable individual-collective performances of non-estrangement we have no way of knowing whether their claims of ubiquitous estrangement are true.
>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).
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Right. That and the fallacy of composition problem as it relates to technological change and changes of consumption preferences. Seems to me any society with money as a technology for mediating social relations of production is going to have people who love money for it's own sake. Money as means and ends becomes inexorably conflated in the incredibly complex computations and feedback loops that are relative prices and valuations of all the artifacts human are capable of creating. To suppose that some philosopher or economist can stand above it all and assert self-estrangement results when people don't even have an agreed upon definition of the term or a ready to hand counterfactual with which to determine the veridicality of the claim is, imo, hubris plain and simple when people have differing notions of selfhood.
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.
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Most definitely. And that means more discussion of related terms like selfhood, liberty, consequence, externalities, liabilities..an enormous list.
>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).
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Sure. The whole subject-structure and internal relations issue that Ted is really strong on are extremely pertinent on this score. What's missing is the seemingly intractable problem regarding the fallacies of composition when it comes to conflicting norms that are not reducible to, or solely internal to, business competition. To the figures of Aristotle and Hegel that Ted loves to cite I would simply counterpose the names of GLS Shackle and Ludwig Lachmann; they too are disharmony theorists who take the fallacies of composition problem quite seriously in their own way. To capitalists a post capitalist society would, by definition be oppressive, because it would preclude the reestablishment of capitalist behavior; to them that would be grounds for asserting that self-estrangement is ubiquitous in society.
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?
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Yes. The individual capitalist is a representative of his class. I don't have the exact cite in CvI where KM lays that assumption out to begin his analysis. Suffice it to say that all capitalists are clones in the sense that they are all compelled individually by competition, the laws of double entry bookkeeping etc. to make M-C-M' or M-M' their primordial utility function. Yet if we *imagine* some Olympian perspective 'outside' the system-as-a-whole there seems to be no historical necessity why that system and not some other exists; what is necessity within the system is, in a different frame[s] of reference[s], purely contingent, almost capricious from, say, a geological perspective. It is this imagined 'outside' from which A, H and KM assert that the subjects in the system undergo estrangement with their attendant normative judgments.
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?
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It doesn't. But his mere assertion that chrematistics is somehow inferior to his vision of the good life as laid out in the Nicomachean Ethics, without providing an incorrigible argument for the virtues of the latter vis a vis the former, along with his position in Greek society makes his views look more like ideology than anything else. Barry Allen's "Knowledge and Civilization" cogently juxtaposes Aristotle's view with that of the earlier Greek reverence for knowledge as action and artifice and finds it wanting:
"The lauded contemplation of philosophical Truth is the antithesis to this older culture of knowledge. Aristotle does not speak for immemorial tradition when he says 'those to whom contemplation more fully belongs are more truly happy, not as a mere concomitant but in virtue of the contemplation, for this is in itself precious.'" Allen goes on to show that A's view has no room for a Prometheus or a Daedalus, nor does Hegel and Heidegger and all those other thinkers who have thinly disguised anxiety and contempt for uncertainty, unpredicability, technological change and the wealth that comes in their wake yada yada.
>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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I think we don't have the slightest bit of evidence that WB and BG are anything other than rational when it comes to M-C-M' anymore than we have irrefutable evidence that *Keynes's claims that "the essential characteristic of capitalism ... is the dependence on an intense appeal to the money-making and money-loving instincts of individuals as the main motive force of the economic machine" and that "the love of money as a possession - as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life - ... [is] a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease."* is true. Keynes is making a jugdment that is extremely contestable. To the extent that he and Aristotle and Hegel and Marx each in their own way use such rhetoric to make such judgments without rigorous and incorrigible evidence to justify such claims does nothing but beg many, many questions.
Ian