I wrote:
It's the combining of invisible and visible hands which makes Marx appear a positivist and scientist.
================ Someone responded:
Or he couldn't let go of hierarchical and teleological thinking, with all their attendant fallacies, when it came to macrosocial dynamics.
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I meant to say Marx appear as a positivist or scientist and revolutionary, the former when giving his invisible hand explanations and the latter as a political fighter.
As for the response from ? Marx's explanation is not teleological; Marx does not intuit the goal history is supposed to reach. I find these one line challenges pretty cheap. It's one thing wrong with the internet.
What do you mean by teleological? Or hierarchical? That Marx studied the production of surplus value before its circulation and distribution though he then allowed for rebound effects? Reject the importance production has in his analytics? Should Marx not have begun with the question of the total value in circulation can be increased rather than one of the groups which lays claim to new value--merchant capitalists, bankers, landlords, the state? But wasn't Marx through his hierarchical method able to discover the inner connections between apparently independent forms of wealth and the role each played in the total reproduction of capital? Isn't your one line--nay one one word-- criticism a bit cheap?
Are you upset that he tried to think through the consequences of a system abstracting from a host of institutions and relations? Are you against such abstraction in the social sciences as such? Have to do it through mental operations in the social sciences rather than experimenation. But are you saying we should let go off any such attempt to understand the extant and dynamic consequences of commodity production itself?
To some extent Marx was trying to explain why an invisible hand had created what it already had. Many of the these consequences had already been recognized as early as say 1805 by William Playfair--powerful tendencies for capital to widen in scope, to globalize, to increase the the size of the working class, to mechanize, to concentrate and centralize, to quicken the pace of social life, to develop the forces of credit, to develop through boom and busts, to eat up the gains in productivity disproportionately in depreciation, investment and rising capitalist consumption rather than shorter working days and/or higher real wages, to increase in absolute number those who had become surplus to the system.
He was interested in the present effects and future likely consequences of machine production, what it could not escape or allow.
Marx surely was interested in the ways in which the the boom and bust cycle would change in the course of accumulation, to the detriment of the working class. He tried to show why he thought this was likely so. But he referred to laws of tendency.
You would not allow theory such ambition? You want something more modest. Would you have the mind live in the specious present? It really can't.
How modest should theory be?
Be Nietzschean--be a bit suspicious about your modesty. Reflexivity alert. Big time.
Rakesh