[lbo-talk] the paradox of choice

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Sat Sep 19 06:06:50 PDT 2009


In my first response to shag's post (quoting myself on Milton) I failed to note the subject line - and that subject line is profoundly mistaken. There is no paradox at all involved, or if there is it is a paradox only within the confines of bourgeois ideology. Early conservative reactions to the growth of capitalist relations were in fact grounded to a great extent in their recognition of the incompatibility of freedom and limitless liberty of choice. (And of course the fate of burridan's Ass reflects this old recognition.

Not too long ago in a brief post, which only Joanna picked up on, I defined freedom as grounded in the direct relation between act and motive, which of course is destroyed by bourgeois liberty of choice, grounded as that is in the invisible unity of all human labor (the point of Marx's Theory of Value - which has nothing whatever to do with economics and everything to do with the Critique of Political Economy). That freedom can ge gained (if it can be gained at all) only through the abolition of value, whatever else flows from that need.

Some restrictions (I think permanent restrictions) on human freedom. One tha Ian occasionally emphasizes: the 'law' of unintended consequences, which would be 'dented' as it were by the abolition of capitalist relations but not 'repealed.' The other is caught up in a 19th-century cliché (which I remember my grandmother, born 1885, lloved to repeat): There's many a slip / 'Twixt the cup and the lip, which captures what I have called the God of Contingency.

Carrol



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