[lbo-talk] Keynes: Marx and the Koran

Yoshie Furuhashi critical.montages at gmail.com
Thu Sep 20 07:03:17 PDT 2007


On 9/19/07, Shane Mage <shmage at pipeline.com> wrote:
> >Word order here means everything. Schumpeter's claim that capitalism
> >caused "creative destruction" clearly means that capitalism destroyed
> >the outmoded to create something new and improved. In reality
> >capitalism blindly destroys things that retain value in order to
> >deliver spurious innovations -- things that are New! and Improved!
> >only in terms of advertising puffery....
>
> Marx and Schumpeter were talking about technological progress in the
> *means of production* under capitalism with its *concomitant*
> destruction of "capital values." The economic analysis of neither is
> in the least concerned with their own subjective views of the
> worthiness of particular consumption goods offered on the market. To
> condemn capitalism because of the alleged "spuriousness" of those
> use-values is to wallow in what both Marx and Schumpeter would
> unhesitatingly call philistine sentimentality.

What's wrong with judging the capitalist mode of production by standards, whether they are moral or political, religious or aesthetic, that are other than the standard of liberalism: "Freedom, Equality, Property, and Bentham"? Marx's political ideal was free development of each as the condition for conscious and collective self government, an Aristotelian ethic married to a republican politics. While Marx never elaborated how free development of each is to be practically reconciled with conscious and collective self government, nor did he have a chance to participate in the creation of a revolutionary society that attempted such reconciliation, it's clear that those who desire such a society, to say nothing of those who are building one, must have a perspective other than that of the market that disregards use values and human sentiments.

Moreover, what actually moves most rebels and revolutionaries, perhaps aside from traditional and organic intellectuals who lead them, is neither "Freedom, Equality, Property, and Bentham" nor Marx's own refined ideal. The subjective and objective conditions of rank-and-file rebels and revolutionaries are better explained by a combination of approaches of James C. Scott, Theda Skocpol, E. P. Thompson, and so on than by Marx's analysis of the capitalist mode of production in abstract, which was not meant to explain how and why people revolt in any case, let alone designed to teach people to always see things from the perspective of the market and the market alone. -- Yoshie



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