[lbo-talk] the paradox of choice

[Carrol Cox]

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relations but not 'repealed.'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