On 2/16/10, Nelson Goodman <nelsongoodman at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> Lakshmi, whether or not it is best captured by Carrol’s
> phrase of “operating wholly independently of human will,” the idea that
> capitalism is a “system” – i.e., an institutional structure with a set of
> associated dynamics or logics that cannot be reduced to the will of individual
> persons, is, I think, an indispensable idea. At the most abstract level, the basic notion as I see it is as
> follows: the institutional structure of
> capitalism – namely, private ownership of productive assets + commodity
> production (or production for exchange value) + wage labor – forces all
> individuals within that institutional structure to act in ways that they might
> not otherwise wish to and, further, results in a series of typical dynamics
> that stem from the properties of the system rather than the pre-systemic traits,
> desires, etc. of individuals. While none
> of the dynamics can occur without decisions and actions taken by the
> individuals who comprise the system (and to that extent it the system is not “independent”
> of individuals), all that is needed in terms of individual choice is that people
> wish to avoid some combination of destitution and indignity, with all further
> variations between individuals being secondary factors (and thus the system’s
> operation is to that extent not “reducible” to individuals).