Yawn. You've made your point, though you're very slippery on describing just who these "liberals" are and what their "liberalism" is. Could you move on to some other obsession?
To be fair, Doug, Yoshie did specify the sort of liberalism she had in mind, the sort who invoke "Liberty, Equality, Property, and Bentham" (to justify capitalism?) That would exclude, for example, my Political Liberalism (universal suffrage, competitive elections, extensive civil and political rights), which is by itself wholly neutral about the best form of the economy. Or Rawls' liberalism as official state neutrality on what is the best kind of life or what things are ultimately good.
To answer Yoshie's question, there's nothing per se wrong with assessing capitalism (or socialism or any economic system) from a point of view other than the liberal one specified or other than any point of view that might be described as liberal. But whether a particularly framework for assessment is defensible or worthwhile depends on the alternative one offered.
No one would seriously suggest that capitalism could be usefully evaluated from a medieval perspective involving the divine right of kings. No one here would think that fascist values would likely be an especially illuminating way to appraise capitalism. Few here would suggest that a Stalinist framework would be helpful. Probably only you, Yoshie, here,anyway, would say that an Islamist appraisal would be useful for much more than understanding how Islamists think. So you have to be specific about your alternative and the reasons for adopting it as a point of view and what purpose it would serve to do so.
Some people might still defend Marx's officially relativist claim, described (defended?) by Shane that there is no framework other than capitalism's own for evaluating it. Allen Wood and (formerly?) Richard Miller have espoused this view. It's far from dumb, but I don't think it's defensible and I I don't think it's properly motivated even if you agree with Marx and Hegel and Dewey and Rorty that all effective critique is immanent, that you have to start where you are, and this is where we are; that we cannot fully or, probably, accurately imagine what values people would have under future arrangements that have never existed.
Still, Marx seems to slip back and forth, without recognizing that he is doing this, between an official view that there One Capitalist Value Framework (liberalism qua liberty, equality, property, and Bentham) that is possible as a way to think in bourgeois society, and the recognition that capitalist society is contradictory and involves many possible perspectives, some highly critical of capitalism -- including a standpoint of the proletariat or of (as he puts it in a rare moment of explicitness on this) of what he calls in the Theses on Feuerbach, of humanity.
The second view has to be right, or more right than the first. because otherwise Marx's own critique of bourgeois society seems totally impossible.
--- Shane Mage <shmage at pipeline.com> wrote:
> Yoshie wrote:
> >
> > > 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"?
>
> What is "wrong" (anti-historical-materialist) is to
> judge an entire
> epoch of human history, the capitalist mode of
> production, by
> subjective rather
> than historical standards--and historical standards
> are objective, imposed
> by history itself. The capitalist mode of
> production is judged, can be judged,
> is being judged, will be judged, only by its own
> inner standards. The
> judgment, as foreseen by Marx, is that a mode of
> production whose inner
> essence is the unlimited development of humanity's
> productive forces
> was doomed by its specific inner contradictions to
> become a "barrier"
> to the
> development of those productive forces so severe
> that its tendencies to
> self-preservation would become--have indeed
> become-threatening to
> the survival of civilization, perhaps of human life
> itself.
>
> Shane Mage
>
> "Die Weltgeschict ist das Weltgericht" (Hegel)
>
>
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