[lbo-talk] socialist response to hayek

Philip Pilkington pilkingtonphil at gmail.com
Tue Mar 31 12:28:45 PDT 2009



>
>
> Allin F. Cottrell and W. Paul Cockshott, "Information and Economics:
> A Critique of Hayek."
> http://www.reality.gn.apc.org/econ/hayek.htm
> _

That really is a fine piece of writing. Was I the only one though that was a little disconcerted by the authors' argument. I don't mean this from any logical or rational point of view - indeed their article was extremely tight and one wouldn't be hard pushed to see something of the sort eventually come into existence, this especially in light of the disastrous results of today's potent combination of misinformation and human stupidity.

What really irked me though was their discussions of the "single mind". They were absolutely right in pointing out that Hayek and the rest of the Austrian Schoolers spent more time projecting their Oedipus complexes onto non-existent authority figures than actually attempting to account for the real reasons that people act, conform and obey. What the authors didn't seem to recognise was that in deriding Hayek's "subjectivism" they themselves were, in a sense, attempting to build a model of such a "single mind". True this "mind" was not a human one, but their conception of a planned economy seems to promote the building of some sort of fully integrated technocratic society - a sort of a "hive mind", if I can address the Star Trek nerds in the audience.

While its tempting to try and picture this in light of the internet I think to do so would be quite wrong. I don't know if anyone recalls Adorno's criticism of the exchange principle, but this seems to be the perfect place to invoke it. He was basically saying that in the bourgeois principle of exchange (i.e. that the qualities of something can be converted into quantities which would then be measured in order to find a measure of equivalence - essentially: "use-values" into "exchange-values") the notion of identity had reached its highest point. He claimed that by elevating the exchange principle up to sovereign status capitalist society was likely to ensure the homogenising of said society. Now the theory being put forward here seems to be something like a technocratic society run by a giant computer which itself ran along the lines of perfect exchange/identity/equivalence. Thus after dismissing Hayek's "director" figure they sneak him in the back door... in the form of some sort of giant computer!

This raises an awful lot of questions and not merely cultural ones, like what such a society would look like and how desirable living in it would be. It also, in my mind at least, raises questions such as: what exactly happens when you have a computer that follows two basic axioms: exchange and growth?



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list