[lbo-talk] what is scientism why does the left love it so?

B. docile_body at yahoo.com
Wed May 10 08:52:47 PDT 2006


What is "scientism"? I know there's a weird notion in some moonbat-ish left quarters of "white male science" that says science itself has a hardwired bias towards Eurocentrism, or something like that. It's something that makes about as much sense as the Nazi notion of "Jewish physics." I understand science to be a problem-solving process or methodology that puts value on falsifiable evidence, results that can be tested & duplicated by others, peer review, etc. I'm not sure how that is slanted towards white male culture or any sort of unjust authoritarianism.

About your libertarian capitalist comment, business elites do favor market libertarianism -- except when they don't. Which is often. They want a patchwork of protections and freedoms. "Protections for me, market discipline for thee." The Rothbard-ian type of "market anarchism" I think you're referring to would be untenable for the business system as a whole. It doesn't provide the systemic stability that the State provides. The state's also a handy way for business to shift the costs of their operations onto us poor schlubs.

In any event, no, anarchism would not be ideal for corporations or for any sort of private enterprise system I know of, because business is dictatorial. You don't need leftists to say that; Carl Icahn, the famous corporate raider, told AP during the Enron scandals that businesses were dictatorships.

In "Business as a System of Power," Robert Brady wrote:

"Within the corporation all policies emanate from the control above. In the union of this power to determine policy with the execution thereof, all authority necessarily proceeds from the top to the bottom and all responsibility from the bottom to the top. This is, of course, the inverse of `democratic' control; it follows the structural conditions of dictatorial power."

That's some "libertarianism"!

-B.

Charles Brown wrote:

"I wonder if anarchism or libertarianism might be the form of organization of the bourgeois ruling class. "



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