> The paradox is that none of us really knows or could know exactly and
> all of what Marx said or meant. In this case, my interpretation agrees
> with Justin's. John B.'s position would appear to be the "utopian"
> socialist position that Marx criticized repeatedly: that the labourer is
> entitled to the entire product of his/her labour. But that's just my
> interpretation. The fact that none of us really knows exactly what Marx
> meant (or if he alone was 100% consistent) is not a problem. It is a
> paradox. It would only be a problem if there were a way to solve it, but
> there isn't. One bunch of people is telling others to "give up" a way of
> analysis because in *their* opinion it is useless. Well, that's their
> opinion and that's all it is. They won't give up their opinion, so why
> should the others give up theirs?
>
> Another paradox is this, why is it so urgent to the people in the
> give-it-up group that the others give up their assumptions and opinions?
> Are they so unsure of their own opinions and assumptions that they need
> to "win" in order to keep believing what they believe? These are not
> rhetorical questions and they are not yes or no questions. They are
> meant to provoke an examination not of who is right and who is wrong but
> why it seems to matter to people that they are the ones who are right.
>
> The Sandwichman
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"Natural selection does not care whether a brain has or tends towards true beliefs, so long as the organism reliably exhibits reproductively advantageous behavior.........The notion of truth is suspect on purely metaphysical grounds, anyway. It suggests straightaway the notion of The Complete and Final True Theory: at a minimum, the infinite set of all true sentences...But *nothing* whatever guurantees the existence of such a unique theory......" [Paul Churchland]