Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> Carrol Cox wrote:
>
> >The main virtue you claim for the
> >market, its provision of information on the basis of which the present
> >may be connected to an invisible future, is its fatal flaw.
>
> "By 'uncertain' knowledge, let me explain, I do not mean merely to
> distinguish what is known for certain from what is only probable. The
> game of roulette is not subject, in this sense, to uncertainty; nor
> is the prospect of a victory bond being drawn.... Even the weather is
> only moderately uncertain. The sense in which I am using the term is
> that in which the prospect of a European war is uncertain, or the
> price of copper and the rate of interest twenty years hence, or the
> obsolescence of a new invention, or the position of private
> wealth-owners in the social system in 1970. About these matters there
> is no scientific basis on which to form any calculable probability
> whatever. We simply do not know."
> - Keynes, The General Theory of Employment
I'm not sure whether my two kinds of uncertainty are the same as Keynes's or different. At a very crude level my distinction is the difference between production for use and commodity production.
If I plant tomatoes in my backyard, I am very uncertain as to whether I can carry out the action itself successfully -- i.e., the plants may never bear tomatoes because the squirrles get them, or I don't water them enough, or a neighborhood kid tears them up. But I know with absolute ceretainy that _if_ I carry out the action successfully, I will realize the motive for it: that is, if I grow the tomatoes, I know that I will have tomatoes to eat.
My contrasting example is actual, one of the more vivid memories from childhood. My grandfather raised fruit in southwestern michigan, and in the late '30s one of his major crops was strawberries. In 1938 the crop froze. He didn't carry out his action succesffully. In 1939 he had 20 acres of strawberries (a large acreage at that time), everything went perfectly, and he harvested hundreds of crates of berries every day. On one day, my uncle returned home from the wholesale market with all 300 crates of berries: the highest bid he had gotten was 15 cents a crate, and the packaging cost 22 cents. It was cheaper to save the packaging for reuse and dump the berries to the hogs. That his, my grandfather had carried out the physical action to perfection, but (in a sense) just because the action succeeded it failed!
Both involve "uncertainty," but radically different kinds of uncertainty. Is this the same contrast as Keynes makes?
My argument is that the latter kind of uncertainty, where even success does not promise success, becomes intolerable when it is fundamental in human life, as it is in capitalism.
Carrol