On Mon, 26 Nov 2007 13:15:41 -0800 (PST) andie nachgeborenen
<andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com> writes:
>
>
> Kolokowski, back when he was a Marxist, actually
> argued that Marx had a flat-out pragmatic James-Dewey
> conceptions of truth as, crudely, what works, and
> Sidney Hook, when _he_ was a Marxist, argued the same
> in Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx. I think
> that's a mistake, although In the Theses on Feuerbach,
> Marx calls practice the "test" of truth. Long ago
> (1993! yikes!) I published a paper on the objectivity
> of Marxism and Marx's conception of objectivity,
> arguing that Marx and the pragmatists have a lot in
> common, with respect to the priority of practice (will
> send a PDF copy to anyone on request). I said then
> and still think that, unlike Lenin, Marx doesn't give
> a lot of thought to any philosophical conception of
> truth but operates with a pre-reflective
> correspondence notion.
>
> Subsequently I have come to think that James and Dewey
> actually have a more "realist" conception of truth
> than is usually attributed to them -- I have a draft
> paper on this, based on reflections on the young Hook,
> someday I shall have to work it up and publish it.
Didn't the neo-Thomist, Mortimer Adler, make a similar argument concerning James's pragmatism years ago?
>
> Anyway I don't know why a traditional pragmatic
> conception of truth, even if you had it, would drive
> you to work for Goldman Sachs and dabble in Democratic
> party politics. Bleak as things are, surely you are
> not saying with Carrol that historical materialism is
> true but idle because we are all doomed anyway. Are
> you? Dewey was a small d-democratic socialist, and
> both James and Peirce hated Gilded age robber baron
> capitalism. (Which the Democrats of the day, William
> Jennings Bryan possibly excepted, did not any more
> than the Democrats today.)
William James was also quite the anti-imperialist: opposing both the Spanish-American War and the counterinsurgency that followed against the Filipinos.
>
> But this is the thing with respect to value theory,
> and I think Doug and I are on the same page here. It
> absorbs an enormous amount of time and attention, it's
> very difficult and obscure, and it doesn't seem to
> make any difference. My own experience has been that
> you can state just about any non-value-theoretic
> proposition in historical materialism, and many
> propositions stated in value-theoretic terms. without
> using value theory. That goes for the thesis that
> there is a tendency of rate of profit to fall, or
> towards crises over overproduction or
> underconsumption, or that labor is exploited (I wrote
> a paper on that too), etc. To my way of thinking this
> has been pretty definitively shown by the work of
> Robert Brenner, who has probably made the most
> powerful statement of HM for our time, and Gil
> Skillman. The neo-Ricardans offer one (not necessarily
> the most useful) kind of highly abstract and
> theoretical explanation of why this is, likewise
> Okishio and Mishima, and in a different vein
> Samuelson, or in another, Roemer, but you don't have
> to accept these sort of critique to have doubts about
> the point of value theory.
The young Sidney Hook, as I recall in his *Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx* provided a pragmatist defense of the "labor theory of value." He admitted that the evidence was equivocal at best that that theory had any utility in understanding economic phenomena like price changes, however, it seemed to him that this theory when accepted helped to lead people to taking a critical stance towards capitalism and so facilitated revolutionary action, and that seemed to the young Hook sufficient justification for retaining the theory.
>
> Now the difference this makes is that, as the
> classical pragmatists put it, a difference should make
> a difference to matter. You don't have to think that
> truth can be reduced to practical success to wonder
> about the scientific purpose of positing a theoretical
> quantity (value) that doesn't make any difference in
> predicting or explaining the behavior of its supposed
> subject matter, even if you have a broad notion of
> explanation that includes, for example, theoretical
> unification. Kliman, Levy, Devine (a nice person),
> Rakesh (ditto), Shaikh, argue in different ways that
> value theory can be shown to be consistent, that we
> don't have to worry about the transformation problem
> (though Marx thought we did, see Cap. III, Chap. VIII,
> Sec. 6 and Chap. XV, Sec. 5), or other problems.
> Perhaps not. That still leaves the redundancy
> question, why posit value as a quantity? What does it
> do that we can't do without it? Because it's in accord
> with scientific practice to apply Occam's Razor to
> anything that does no work. Scientific concepts have
> to pay their way. Doug and I don't think that value
> theory does.
Perhaps if you pressed them on the issue they would give an answer similar to the young Sidney Hook.
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