Autoplectic wrote:
>
> On 5/7/05, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
> > Marx, Grundrisse, p. 161, on the expanding scope of capitalist
> > markets and the urge for acquiring information that it produces:
> >
> > [clip] this spontaneous interconnection,
> > >this material and mental metabolism which is independent of the
> > >knowing and willing of individuals, and which presupposes their
> > >reciprocal independence and indifference. [clip]
>
> ----------------------
>
> The first sentence has serious problems re the use of 'independence'.........
I don't see those problems.
If I buy a breakfast at Baker's Square, my knowing and willing is confined to the use the eggs etc. have to me, just as if I were to cook them myself at home or eat them at a friend's house. In the latter case, the friend's knowing and willing is a conscious willing of my visible purpose. But the purposes (willing and knowing) of the waiter, the cook, the cashier, etc. are clearly independent of my purposes, my willing and knowing: in fact the purpose of the waiter (whatever she is to purchase with that day's wage) may well be identical to the purpose of the taxi driver who took me there. This infinite series of connections is clearly only possible because of our independence from each other: that is, the separation of act and meaning (purpose) in a commodity-producing social order.
And if I leave a large tip to the waiter certainly my knowing and willing is quite independent of the (possible fact) that he uses the money to purchase cyanide in order to murder his wife, and that that murder means that someone now living in California gets the job formerly occupied by that wife, and ....
[Looking backward on pre-capitalist societies we can, of course, see that their actions too always had unintended consequences (often behind their backs and even invisible after the fact). But we can _also_ see that the interconnections of all [nearly all?] phenomena only became _visible_ from the analysis of capitalist relations. (Marx expresses admiration for Aristotle on the two uses of sandals, but he also points out that _understanding_ of this conundrum was not possible in the framework of a slave society.)]
Carrol
P.S. And this morning Doug Henwood wrote: "Yeah, that Marx fellow had a problem with not fully understanding the complexity of signs and significations. Good thing we're so much wiser today."
Couldn't you give an argument instead of a wisecrack?