Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> On Apr 10, 2009, at 10:48 AM, Chris Doss wrote:
>
> > the inescapable system lying behind everything
>
> Is it The System, or just a system? There's going to be system in any
> human society, presumably some preferable to others. But you can't
> escape it because it's so much bigger than you.
I don't know. Usually when one speaks of "system" one means a system of interconnedted parts, such that a disturbance/change/whatever to one part of the system reverberates through the whole. _NO_ human society is _fully_ systematic in that sense: one would have to really stretch to say that the hour you woke up on Feb. 3 had an effect on t axi traffic in Paris or vice versa.
BUT it seems to me (from my reading of Marx (and various Marxist scholars) that he holds (and I tend to agree) that Capitalism _is_, insofar as any society can be, a system (with all the caveats given above), and that it can be studied as a system (in abstraction) in the way no other human society (past or one hopes future) can be. It is not good to lvie in a social system in ths sense; it is antagonistci to human freedom.
Carrol