[lbo-talk] "Process without a Subject or Goal(s)"

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

>[lbo-talk] The Paradox of Choice: Competition and Monopoly
>Michael Dawson -PSU mdawson at pdx.edu, Fri Mar 12 14:00:29 PST 2004
<snip>
>I don't equate freedom with the power of choice.  I say freedom 
>would mean nothing without the power of choice.  The power of choice 
>is necessary, but not sufficient.

If you define freedom as the power to choose between two or more 
alternative courses of action, you may say that the power of choice 
is a necessary condition of freedom, but isn't the definition 
tautological?

Are citizens of a nation whose government provides universal health 
care, with no power of choice for citizens to buy or sell private 
health insurances, less free than citizens of a nation whose 
government provides a public health care plan and whose private 
insurance companies offer many competing private health insurance 
plans?  If the power of choice is a necessary condition of freedom, 
aren't citizens of the latter freer than the citizens of former?

>[lbo-talk] the gains from variety
>Michael Dawson mdawson at pdx.edu, Sat Mar 13 09:18:29 PST 2004
<snip>
>So I actually do understand your horseshit argument.  You are wrong, 
>as was Althusser, perhaps the single most over-rated Marxist 
>theorist in all of history.
>
>"The subject-agents are only active in history through the 
>determination of the relations of production and reproduction, and 
>in their forms."
>
>Poppycock.
>
>The rest of what Yoshie posts is Althusser trying to have his cake 
>and eat it, too.  Niether Marx nor any other sane Marxist ever 
>posited Man and the automatic Subject of History in the way Hegel 
>did, so Althusser's claim that he's clarifying Marx is caca.

Well, the young Marx was a left-Hegelian.  If there is any 
disagreement, it concerns the nature and extent of Hegel's influence 
on Marx's theory in later years.  Althusser may be justly criticized 
for minimizing the extent of Hegel's influence on the later Marx. 
Theorists like Althusser, Etienne Balibar, Pierre Macherey, and 
Antonio Negri thought that Spinoza was cooler than Hegel -- I'm 
agnostic about whether Spinoza was preferable to Hegel.  :-)

>Althusser claimed that history is a machine and the people are robots. 

Your conception of ideology is different from Althusser's, but take a 
look at the essay you co-authored with John Bellamy Foster, "The 
Tendency of the Surplus to Rise, 1963-1988," _The Economic Surplus in 
Advanced Economies_, ed. John B. Davis (Hants, England and 
Brookfield, VT, USA: Edward Elgar, 1992): "In the increasingly 
universalised monopoly-capitalist economy and culture of the final 
decade of the twentieth century, people no longer need what they want 
or want what they need.  Wants are artificially manufactured while 
the most desperate needs of innumerable individuals at the bottom of 
society remain unfulfilled" (42).  The essay discusses "people" not 
as concrete individuals whose wants and needs are unique to 
themselves but as subjects of ideology that can manufacture wants 
artificially.  Moreover, the essay's explanatory principle of 
historical changes -- the transition from "accumulation in the age of 
free competition" with its "law of the tendency of the rate of profit 
to fall" to "monopoly capitalism" with its "law of the tendency of 
the surplus to rise, as well as changes within the period of 
"monopoly capitalism" -- is not idiosyncratic choices of unique 
individuals.

>[lbo-talk] "Process without a Subject or Goal(s)"
>Ted Winslow egwinslow at rogers.com, Sat Mar 13 14:47:59 PST 2004
<snip>
>The claim that one can and should "read one's authors closely" 
>is inconsistent with the claim that one is not a "subject" (in the 
>sense of a self-determined being able to rationally self-determine 
>an author's meaning i.e. base interpretive claims on the evidence 
>of texts).  On Althusseur's ontological premises, no one's 
>interpretation of a text can be consistently conceived as 
>"determined" in this way.  All intepretations must be "ideological" 
>in his sense, a sense that excludes any role for self-determination.

On the subject of the paradox of ideology, Althusser has this to say: 
"It is necessary to be outside ideology, i.e. in scientific 
knowledge, to be able to say: I am in ideology (a quite exceptional 
case) or (the general case): I was in ideology" ("Ideology and 
Ideological State Apparatuses [Notes towards an Investigation," 
January-April 1969 and April 1970, _Lenin and Philosophy and Other 
Essays_, Monthly Review Press, 1971, p. 175).  Presumably, Althusser 
thought that subjects of ideology, who act as if they were uncaused 
causes of history, can come to recognize themselves as ensembles of 
social relations, who act as subjects of ideology under the 
circumstances that are products of class struggle, transforming the 
circumstances as well as themselves in the process; and that it is 
worth the trouble of trying to do so, beginning with the act of 
contemplating the idea that they are not uncaused causes of history. 
I don't think, however, that Althusser believed that such scientific 
self-recognition is a necessary condition for participation in the 
making of a socialist revolution.

>In the second passage Marx is rejecting the role Hegel assigns to 
>World-Historical Individuals in his account of the historical 
>development of human subjectivity to rational self-consciousness.  I 
>pointed to this difference between Hegel and Marx a week or so ago 
>in the context of explicating a passage from Engels that makes use 
>of Hegel's idea of the "passions." As I also pointed out there, part 
>of the meaning of this idea that Marx sublates is the idea that 
>human individuals are real subjects in the above sense characterized 
>by a potential for what Hegel defines as a "will proper" and a 
>"universal will" i.e. by a potential for rational self-consciousness.
>
>This means that the claim that, for Hegel, "the dialectic at work in 
>history is not the work of any Subject whatsoever" is also mistaken 
>if it includes the meaning that Hegel doesn't conceive human 
>individuals as real subjects (i.e. as self-determined beings 
>potentially able to  rationally self-determine their ideas and 
>actions).  As I've said,  Hegel defines human being as the potential 
>for a "will proper" and a "universal will."  In the Philosophy of 
>History he explicitly connects this idea to his conception of the 
>role of individuals in historical development.

Do you think that Hegel and Marx are arguing that "rational 
self-consciousness" of individuals is the uncaused cause of 
historical change, rather than a necessary (for Hegel) or contingent 
(for Marx) result of historical development?
-- 
Yoshie

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