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re: "Marxism as a science" does one's Marxism require the 'thick' capital theory - the declining rate of profit, the immiseration of the working class? That is: not just any political crisis but a specific crisis of endogenous overaccumulation of capital (this is derided in some corners as an Anglospheric Keynesian bastardization of the theory) or is it merely a methodology, a way of analyzing society that places a premium on economic class as a cohesive actor and concept, without any specific claims about statistical aggregates The latter gives Marxism much more breadth but likewise doesn't say very much about the material world. If it can explain anything it explains nothing These can't both be asserted at the same time, and one should avoid careless equivocation between the two ronya fucked around with this message at 07:49 on Nov 8, 2020 |
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Nov 8, 2020 07:26
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Yes - all the classical theories have some of the shared weaknesses (e.g. the comovement problem* plagues Smith, the Austrians, and the classical Marxists) the vol-2-capital-theory stuff isn't a salad bar, though - it's a cohesive strata that stands or falls together. You can't say, well, I don't want to insist on the falling rate of profit, but I want to keep the crisis of overaccumulation and all it implies - because the crisis is deduced from the TRPF conversely, the all-political-struggles-as-class-struggles framework is a method but not a set of uniform conclusions - one can propose any number of new classes and propose how they would interact, subject to the sole proviso that each class is defined in relation to their role in economic production, and none of these conclusions need be particularly left-wing * observed tendency for both consumption and investment to increase and decrease at the same time across the business cycle, rather than moving in opposite directions. For all the classicals, business cycles are endogenous, so it is necessary to explain this within the confines of the model
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Nov 8, 2020 09:29
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Better to see what permits you'd need to collect, transport, and dispose of food waste before designing the breakroom. Googling suggests that your city gives a local company EJ Harrison & Sons an exclusive contract for kerbside pickup of compostable food waste. Commercial composting is heavily regulated in California, for groundwater and air emissions reasons - you can't just deliver it to farms. There's a theme here about how regulatory institutions with mass-democratic mandates pre-empt, substitute for, or supervene upon worker self-determination and sovereignty here, perhaps... ronya fucked around with this message at 12:18 on Nov 8, 2020 |
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Nov 8, 2020 12:12
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The most impactful challenge to the class framework of the old left was not postwar liberalism but the postwar New Left. Liberalism today might echo Galbraith's bemoaning of 'private opulence and public squalor', but it's much harder to see liberalism today echoing Galbraith's comment on the red schoolhouse. Likewise the sheer spitting contempt and hatred Marx has for the lumpenproletariat who betrayed the Commune to Napoleon III is barely gasping today on the far left. These were big changes! Both class-based vanguardism and elite-based liberal technocracy are passé... The individualism is calling from inside the house. I don't think it's contractarianism at fault.
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Nov 10, 2020 14:57
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Tom Hayden, writing in 1961:quote:The problems are immense. We of the left, however, find no rest in theory, and little hope in leadership. Liberal philosophy has dealt inadequately with the twentieth century. Marx, especially Marx the humanist*, has much to tell us but his conceptual tools are outmoded and his final vision implausible. The revolutionary leaders of the rising nations** have been mostly non-ideological, either forced to be so or preferring (as is the case of Guevara***) to forge their political views in the heat and exigencies of revolution and the present... ed notes: * a reference to Marxist humanism, i.e., Eurocommunism v1, a 1960s tendency formed in the wake of the Polish October/Hungarian uprising and the Secret Speech but not yet the Prague Spring - where an explicitly Marxist but undominated Central Europe still seemed possible ** in 1961 it was still far from obvious that the wave of decolonising Afro-Asian nations would mostly lean Soviet; the 1955 Bandung conference was quick to denounce Soviet domination unambiguously as imperialism, a good three decades before the Evil Empire. Proxy confrontations until then had mostly resolved in the West's favour, or at least successful containment: Greece, Korea. The Suez crisis mainly damaged Western unity but not irrevocably so. The Congo crisis was still bubbling. The Berlin crisis did not seem irresolvable. *** not a big fan of Khrushchev's 'peaceful coexistence' **** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americans_for_Democratic_Action - shorthand for viewing the welfare state as both political instrument and goal ne plus ultra ***** can you see the trauma from a Great Depression and two World Wars making itself felt? From Geoff Mann's book on Keynesianism, seven decades later: ronya posted:Apropos of nothing, reading Geoff Mann's In the Long Run We Are All Dead: Keynesianism, Political Economy, and Revolution, trying his best to steelman contemporary liberalism: Mike Beggs review with similar remarks, etc. Embracing the twin tumults of the free market and permissive society would be what eventually separates neoliberalism from postwar liberalism - but otherwise, the commonality is its enduring commitment to benevolently elite programmes ronya fucked around with this message at 16:52 on Nov 10, 2020 |
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Nov 10, 2020 16:38
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Paris 1968 showed that direct physical control of the citizenry in the capital is unnecessary; it has no legitimacy if it cannot win subsequent elections.
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Nov 10, 2020 17:04
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The Oldest Man posted:Going back to the Stirner reading earlier, I think one way you can tell the difference between a conservative and a neoliberal (even when they're espousing the exact same set of policies) because the former is totally comfortable with this as a philosophy of governance and typically won't find any need to couch it in an abstraction of natural rights. I (or my team) have power, we have the guns, we have the support of the leg-breakers, therefore we are in charge and we will use violence to stay there and keep order. This is OK because anyone else would just do the same thing in our place. not really, it's really easy to synthesise. You might not want to sell your groundwater, but your local government might, or your central government might. "Who, exactly, has the right to sell something that may or may not have once been part of a commons?" is a question with a long pedigree, but the nub of the problem is not difficult to grasp This loops back to the metaphorical apes in the sense that one's tactical choice in clubs can slip away for completely unrelated reasons - e.g., one's standards might shift from "I'm satisfied with well water" to "I want piped pressurized water like everyone else in the developed world" - the increasing degree of integration into more complex networks of production means that existing social relations can go for a toss. A social relation to how water is extracted based in a community consensus - a community solidarity could be sustained through passive resistance and sabotage of defectors - can transform into individualist divergence in wants and needs through the introduction of production technologies developed elsewhere - it is not even necessary for anything to have been dissatisfactory locally ronya fucked around with this message at 17:52 on Nov 10, 2020 |
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Nov 10, 2020 17:49
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The Oldest Man posted:This is a lot more complicated than "we have the guns," so I think you're just proving my point here. "it's not yours to sell, it's mine to sell" doesn't seem that tricky it doesn't even require capitalism. "the rain falls here, so it's mine" is a conflict as old as sedentary civilization
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Nov 10, 2020 18:01
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Contemporary culture-war issues mainly focus on citizen-vs-citizen claims rather than citizen-vs-state claims... outside of a US fringe, the Hobbesian relation doesn't seem to occupy minds much. Governance not by consent is actually really costly, that's true, and yet great swathes of every developed nation can't plausibly be said to be continually weighing this option in the back of their heads. Your neighbourhood, your town, your region, or your state may all vote for a different vision of society than the nation as a whole, but nation-state borders have not shifted all that much since 1945/1989. People are willing to finesse degrees of disagreement with their imagined community. Family law is the main presence of the state in actually-lived-experience for a vast share of people - in the first world we do expect the state to intervene deeply and personally in the lives of all of its citizens. As far as contractarianism goes, constitutionalism today focuses on claims to process - to invoke state procedures which are due to you by your status as a citizen/human/etc. - and it is here where the overwhelming share of contemporary issues arise
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Nov 10, 2020 18:12
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Disnesquick posted:is a functionally-identical statement to but TOM is arguing for a difference, right? ronya fucked around with this message at 18:35 on Nov 10, 2020 |
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Nov 10, 2020 18:31
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Disnesquick posted:TOM is arguing that Liberalism in general (although from a contemporary-observation perspective: Neoliberalism) attempts to hide that relationship behind a complex deontological framework that can always be reduced to its utilitarian effect of power imbalance being the implicit factor behind private ownership. Neither leftists nor conservatives require those illusions because they recognize the primacy of power. is the concept of a contested right really 1) nefariously hidden, or 2) complex, as moral intuitions go, is my point certainly there are leftist theories which reject the notion of rights wholesale, a la the Stirner discussion earlier, but I don't think these are at all contemporarily influential. Most leftists are not Foucouldian anarchists revelling in the upcoming amoral unrestrained exercise of power by the victorious working class, but instead assert particular rights that should be but are not
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Nov 10, 2020 18:50
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The year is 2020 and it's annoyingly difficult to find a completely un-nuanced embrace of orthodox Marxist materialism as 1) the class as the relevant unit of political action, and 2) the class as a materially relevant and actually existing identifiable unit of society as its central actor. Although you sound like you're trying. The framework of historical materialism works as a thesis of class relations because there's no other actors besides classes in the framework. Class, and only class, is the unit of analysis. It is not meaningful as an individual theory, because it says nothing about whether you can convince other individuals to act in some collective manner (with 'the collective' being drawn at arbitrary groupings of individuals, e.g., through some shared sense of justice, as you say, and since this mass upbringing is true as a material fact, it exists by the argument. If it can move people to act, it is materially real), and therefore doesn't bind most of the interesting politics that one would want to explain. This also applies to what is done unto: if you shot Bezos first, he's still dead afterwards, even if all of his wealth and power came to bring the state's vengeance upon you.
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Nov 10, 2020 19:50
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Cpt_Obvious posted:This is kind of besides the point. The reality is that Bezos can visit violence upon a worker without recourse, and a worker would not be protected the same way. In fact, this proof is doubly true if you look at the relationship between cops and the public. Cops can and do shoot whoever they want whenever they want, and never punished for such violence. We just saw it happen with Breonna Taylor where the officer was never prosecuted for murder. I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess you mean the bolded as a generalization and not as a specificity that holds in all circumstances...?
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Nov 10, 2020 20:17
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Okay, I'm not arguing with alternative facts. Let's leave it at there.
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Nov 10, 2020 20:27
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Disnesquick posted:Yes the year is 2020. Next year will be 2021 and last year was 2019. As a man as familiar with calendars as yourself, I am aware of these year-based facts. I'm not sure why this is germane to a discussion on modern Leftism however? Amusing japes aside, my actual point here is that "the year is" statement is an implicit nod to the kind of "history's end" nonsense you used to hear from Liberals before their ideology failed in 2008. Most branches of Leftism, particularly Marxism, are inherently rooted in a sense of evolving history, and must, therefore reject Fukuyama's Folly. It's a jape. But if I were picking a point where Western leftist theory largely discarded this mode of analysis, I'd have picked 1968, not 2008. I don't mean "revolutionary praxis", I mean "actually-existing reality". If you, Bezos-shot, wished to assert any claim to justice, either by appeal to state process or to public support, you would assert it in terms of rights. As you yourself have said, rights discourse is the dominant milieu. It is this assertion that would move people to act against their interests (however infinitesimally, by e.g. giving you the time of the day) to act in yours. You might not succeed, of course, but nobody here ever claimed to already live in a utopia. In the meanwhile, most of the people one would be interested in pursuing a rights claim against can be credibly pursued on the basis of rights. Indeed these are the rights claims most are interested in* - e.g,. over groundwater, or more prosaically, over e.g. healthcare. Countries generally agreed to have a right to healthcare, and even effective delivery of that right, are still going to have instances and individual people where this right idiosyncratically or systematically fails (because, again, not a utopia) - but this does not invalidate the concept of it as a right, either materially (because it is actionable as a claim to whatever degree) or ideally. In scenarios these rights are contested, it would come down to shifting coalitions and institutional inertia and some idealism, rather than overwhelming manichean power (hence 1968). Re: #1, #2. I don't think your #1 and #2 are sufficient; I'm going to play annoying philosophical nitpicker and hold this strictly to the against/in-interests definition you've offered. By the same token, #1. His vast power compared to you also removes you from interactions with him, and #2. His vast wealth compared to you also removes any interest he might have from shooting you, Random Internet Person i.e., Bezos, our unfortunate stand-in for a generic 0.1%er, is paid by his massive power and wealth into not shooting you, relative to e.g., random family member (who is statistically much more likely to murder you). You have nothing to offer him. As with #2, incentives count as coercion. The flaw here. I think, is from playing fast and loose with the word 'coercion' - you're tacitly bundling assumptions of just and unjust acts in there anyway. It's assuming the conclusion re: Weberian monopoly on legitimate violence. * personal anecdote time: I grew up in one of those fun countries where monarchs retain sovereign immunity in a meaningful way, i.e., where the crown prince bludgeoned or shot and killed a number of people in various incidents across the 1970s and 1980s and then went on to be king, anyway (during which he continued assaulting and occasionally killing people in a variety of increasingly farcial incidents - various servants, staff, etc.). So the Bezoseque hypothetical is not all that fantastical! Nonetheless you may be unsurprised to learn that the politics of that country was still very exercised about rights, in a way that drives its political coalitions, rivalries, and the material aims they articulate and pursue - especially rights contested between people and groups of people likely to interact with each other, and not the especially scenario of being killed by the unruly monarch.
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Nov 10, 2020 22:28
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Cpt_Obvious posted:China has the largest educational system in the world and they lean heavily on teaching dialectical materialism. So, you should probably reframe your claim to "The capitalist West had abondoned this worldview." Yes - I did say 'Western'. Indeed in many other countries the civil-rights framing sailed by. I'm not very up on my contemporary Chinese communist theory, but to my knowledge the theory does emphasize that ideals drive material behaviour (revolutionary ideals (革命理想高于天), rather than bourgeois ideals, but still non-material factors regardless). Its materialism is a little leaky. To be equally material, Western context: rights claims shape coalitional behaviour and mass politics in the large, and shape one's immediate social relations (to e.g. one's workplace) in an immediate fashion. Welfare states today are large. The reach of the regulatory capitalist state is long and govern virtually every sphere of economic interaction. People are strongly motivated not only toward rights claims for themselves and their immediate community but also how these rights are contested on the other side of their countries, amongst people they have never met and will likely never meet. Thread all of these together, and the way to reshape bureaucracies across a massive human superstructure is to tweak its mandate in how it should interact with individuals in their roles as citizens, or residents, or humans, or whatever. This doesn't answer "which rights claims" but hopefully addresses the why. It's also the case, at the same time, that in liberal democracies there are 5-15% of people who don't think that this is what politics should be really for or about, but they'll be perpetually outvoted. To them, it'll look like the status quo is a static big ape, even whilst to others the political sphere is clearly a responsive and rapidly-evolving arena. Ahem. Although usually I would put people unreconciled to the permissive society and people who missed some past irredentist boat in this category.
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Nov 10, 2020 23:18
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Crumbskull posted:But what is the comovement problem? Classical theories (incl Marx) of business cycles usually assert in some form that business cycles occur when investment increases at the expense of consumption or vice versa - for Marx the organic composition of capital keeps increasing from ever-increasing investment (accumulation) and corresponding decrease in consumption (immiseration) This is not what we observe in business cycles, which is that investment and consumption both increase at the same time during booms and decrease during busts - i.e. that they co-move together It's possible to explain this in various Marxist ways but it's always necessary to extend the theory
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Nov 11, 2020 00:09
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e: nah, I shouldn't take obvious bait
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Nov 11, 2020 00:15
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actually-existing states achieve massive degrees of inter-regional transfers, so some mechanism to override a local consensus needs to be achievable, or otherwise it must be conceded that richer regions would regard poorer regions in much the same way richer countries regard poorer countries today (in 1956 the Socialist International first recommended that the industrialized countries of the world set aside at least 1% of their GDP as development aid for the non-industrialized world; this has never been achieved)
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Nov 12, 2020 01:00
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contemporary anarchism in the Two Cheers vein seems to descend more from late Malatesta methodologically-individualist anarchism - where the good society is composed of people who are personally, dispositionally anarchist and voluntarily come together to form a society that reflects those outlooks - rather than anarchism achieved via institutional transformation producing a proletariat that can live under anarchism - there doesn't seem much actual appetite for forcing revolutionary change, in a non-metaphorical sense, on people who might reject living under anarchism even when given the option early 20th century Spanish anarchism was massively anti-clerical to a degree that contemporary anarchisms find repellent
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Nov 12, 2020 01:25
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Aruan posted:The idea that that the way to respond to the existential threat of climate change is through voluntary, temporary, self-organized communities is... something. quite, but it was also the predominant Western anarchist response to the existential threat of nuclear annihilation for a good couple of decades, so the salience of existential threats don't really seem to challenge the outlook much
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Nov 12, 2020 01:31
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duly note that Foucault was writing at a time before tax revolts showed the limits of top-down socialization in effecting acceptance
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Nov 12, 2020 01:41
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any model of the politics of environmental regulation needs to consider e.g. how European directives have successfully compelled rivers management and postindustrial cleanup over varying degrees of cooperation or resistance from muni/regional/national governments manichean, zero-sum models of power and self-interest don't fare well as explanations this is not to assert that existing institutions are necessarily capable of ever-larger challenges, mind - but rather than one's model of how institutions and stakeholders and interests interact might be flawed ronya fucked around with this message at 02:48 on Nov 12, 2020 |
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Nov 12, 2020 02:33
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Disnesquick posted:Why must any model consider this? one's apparent macrohistorical-moment left-wing movement in the continent might be blindsided by liberal green parties seizing the moment instead, for instance... and lead left movements, both parliamentary and extraparliamentary, to have trouble explaining why their programme is the unique answer to climate anxiety being able to articulate concerns shared by the masses is not the same as translating that concern to support for given ideological outlook (never mind programme) - it's not unique to contemporary issues, you can see this problem recurring in left responses to mass anxieties over nuclear annihilation (where support for disarmament was not the same as support for unilateral disarmament, and yes, the distinction mattered)
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Nov 12, 2020 04:09
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I did say 'in the continent'... I'm alluding to the recent successes of the green wave in France, Germany, and Austria, set against the apparent stagnation the left parties now seem to be mired in, after initial successes in the wake of the GFC
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Nov 12, 2020 04:47
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the main instrument the Soviet system used to render local elections predictable was not to invalidate voting itself but to stop candidates from ever showing up on the ballot, fwiw "should a socialist electoral system allow candidates whose platform is that they will dismantle institutions or measures we regard as critical to the continued success of Socialism" was a real question the Soviet bloc (and eventually also Chinese bloc) had to contend with, and well, its answers are all well-known
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Nov 12, 2020 05:21
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Crumbskull posted:Its a child's game to invent an absolutist interpretation of a (highly diverse and centuries old) political philosophy and then go Ah Ha! when the reality of proposals put forth by its actual adherents doesn't gel with that. Anarchist federations are not neessarily paradoxical, as long as the powers of the federation stem from the will of the constituent groups and by extension their individual members. If this suggests to you that perhaps anarchist governance will have to grapple with many of the same issues as other systems of government: you're right! but if the gains are so small - if Red Monday is not sufficiently utopian - then it's hard to justify the human costs of revolutionary change "All right, I can see the broken eggs. Now where's this omelette of yours?"
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Nov 13, 2020 00:10
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Crumbskull posted:I don't know what you are taking about or what a Red Monday is but personally I agrue for peaceful transition to worker and community ownership. fair. This more applies to the direct action set
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Nov 13, 2020 00:14
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anarchoprimitivism is a well-known school, but "WEIRD industrial society, but with village flogging" is novel I'm not sure I've seen any literature espousing that
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Nov 13, 2020 00:27
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OwlFancier posted:Capitalism requires growth. It grows by finding new places, people, resources to exploit, or increasing what it can squeeze out of the existing ones. That is why it makes new things to sell to people and favours removing their ability to meet needs themselves so it can sell them new things to meet those needs. note the subtle distinction between pursuing profit vs pursuing the rate of profit Marxian firms don't maximize profit. They maximize the rate of profit, which is why a firm would keep investing in additional capital accumulation even beyond neoclassical profitability it is this which is doing the conceptual work when comparing the LTV to contemporary concepts of value ronya fucked around with this message at 05:59 on Nov 13, 2020 |
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Nov 13, 2020 05:42
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they shut down the country because the reference pandemic in their governing experience is SARS, which had a 10% case fatality rate even assuming that hospitalization resources are not exhausted. An uncontrolled SARS pandemic would have people dropping dead in the street. For comparison, Covid-19 has a case fatality rate of about 1-2%, almost entirely concentrated amongst the old, and mainly wreaks havoc by overwhelming hospital capacity the other East Asian states that went through the SARS outbreak also reacted quickly and severely to COVID-19, despite an astonishing spread of experiences - from liberal democracies recently emerged from brutally authoritarian dictatorships and deeply skeptical of state overreach (Taiwan) to authoritarian city-states (Singapore) to liberal city-states rocked by riots (Hong Kong) - citing ideology is perhaps problematic
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Nov 13, 2020 06:09
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Cpt_Obvious posted:I am not citing ideology, I am citing centralized systems of resource control vs decentralized. the Chinese govt relies on a modernized public procurement and tender system, too, with scope for emergency requisitioning and export controls etc. If you're envisioning Soviet gosplanning it is certainly not the case - as with other industrialized countries, there are layers of private brokers and logistical houses who bridge the links between the factories and end users it's certainly the case that some countries continue to formally value rapid visibility and expertise in what actually goes on in logistical chains, who makes decisions, and how to structure contracts - but this arguably reflects varying degrees of corporatism, industry access, and whether public health authorities perceive their institutional mandate to be able to expand towards wrangling manufacturing chains during a crisis. Hindsight is always easy. Costly Tamiflu stockpiles have endured more than a decade of biting criticism and outrage. Industry ties sufficiently deep for civil services to know who to talk to and when are also, in more peaceful contexts, known as a revolving door. There's always a tradeoff.
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Nov 13, 2020 06:41
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if anything, Western consolidation in the logistical chains that supply household consumer goods - the P&Gs, J&Js, etc. - gives Western countries a leg up there, in the sense that there's probably at least one person who knows how the pencil is made from raw material to end user, rather than the anarchic chaos of Chinese b2b
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Nov 13, 2020 06:53
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Cpt_Obvious posted:So you agree with me, the market acts as an appendage of the state. ask Chinese mainlanders about baby milk formula sometime... the Western world, conversely, has absolutely no qualms regulating their domestic food production chains, especially for export these reflect difference in degrees of political priorities and stakeholders, rather than being a difference in kind in market-state relationship, I would say
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Nov 13, 2020 06:56
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Fine "poo poo's complicated, yo"  there's probably no usefully clear dichotomy of a market->state vs state->market relationship ronya fucked around with this message at 07:06 on Nov 13, 2020 |
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Nov 13, 2020 07:03
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Sharks Eat Bear posted:Re: the discussion of how to know if capitalism is failing, I have a question for the thread. At what point does capitalism become feudalism with better technology and with global reach? Or is that what it has always been? I think my historical and theoretical chops are lacking such that I can’t really deal with the nuance of this question, but it feels like if capitalism was successful as a project of liberalism, it would be progressing the world away from feudalism towards a brighter future, to use a cliché. But it feels like with every passing year, the gilding strips away a bit more and it becomes more apparent that capitalism effectively has created a global feudalist system, but with computers instead of ploughs or whatever. if you go to the market and find yourself considering the cabbages by whether buying or not buying it will offend your grocer or impact whether they will stand with you in a social feud or strife, you will have arrived at a premodern economy if, on the other hand, you mainly weigh the produce by taste and cost, without regard to the specific identity of its trader, then what you have is an alienated commodity
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Nov 13, 2020 10:01
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Falstaff posted:This is one of the major contradictions of capitalism: the capitalist class needs to pay the proletarian class as little as possible in order to maximize profit, and continually works to keep wages low... And yet they also need to sell the commodities produced by the system to that very same class they are underpaying, so in attempting to maximize profit they are necessarily harming their ability to actually exchange the commodities produced. Over a long enough period of time, this is going to lead to crises of liquidity, ever-shrinking proletarian buying power, and falling standards of living. to clarify an important point: Marxian firms do not maximize profit, but instead maximize the rate of profit (ratio of surplus value to capital invested) this is why Marxian Mr Fischoeder does not at any point say: welp my additional capital accumulation will earn a negative return at the margin, so I'm going to just spend on on a holiday instead Firms fundamentally behave differently in the analytical-Marxism formalism; it is from these differences that the different larger behaviour emerges* - this why the Marxian macroeconomy overaccumulates capital and immiserates labour (because it produces too much capital, even beyond the point of profit maximization, and produces too little consumption goods, even as the soaring capital accumulated makes whatever remaining employed labour ever yet more productive**). And yet it cannot stop because, again, Marxian firms do not maximize profit * Kaleckians and other Marx/Keynes-synthesis "crisis of overaccumulation" schools also typically bundle a somewhat different theory of the money and labour markets. The Marxian firm theory alone yields overaccumulation but does not (off the top of my head anyway) generally yield other common left-wing-heterodox-econ concepts like a paradox of (labour) costs (the claim that decreasing wage levels tends to decrease rather than increase employment - the labour-market mirror of the Keynesian paradox of thrift in the money market). The important point here is that if one forces Marx into an analytical box of neoclassically rational individuals doing marginally rational things, the Marxist characteristics emerge from different agent behaviours in the model and much of the literary desiderata is necessarily discarded or trivialized. The interesting behaviour in the framework entirely rides on whether the stylization of what-firms-really-maximize is true in reality (or whatever other choice of bolt-ons to an otherwise neoclassical analytical formalism) ** compare the other classical heterodox school still standing today, the Austrians, who base their irrational capital investment on a different argument but have otherwise strikingly similar macroeconomic dynamics. As I remarked previously upthread, all the classical schools tend to share this dynamic. ronya fucked around with this message at 02:21 on Nov 15, 2020 |
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Nov 15, 2020 02:00
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if you already think the general meetings of voluntary clubs and societies are tedious and yet full of traps for the unwary - so how about that sinking fund motion, huh - imagine a club where it's EGM time all the time and you can't opt out
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Nov 15, 2020 07:21
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Crumbskull posted:You seem well versed in economic theory and also to see some big flaws with marxian analysis, I'm wondering if there is an economic theory that you personally feel has more validity and/or use? don't affiliate yourself to schools of thought and see your duty as a servant to uphold it. An acolyte who barely knows their own literature, never mind the wider field, charging around waving a banner is just engaging in public foolishness. Don't let the first persuasive pamphlet you happen to read determine the rest of your intellectual life; most issues in life are complex, and constructing sympathetic narratives around complex issues is just an exercise in rhetoric, not reflection instead, first look for literature reviews to know what the major schools are in a field or issue (as a distinct coherent body of thought, not by left v right - there's a lot of non-Marxist left-wing thinking out there, for instance). Then, to contextualize a particular school, look for introspective literature where champions of an individual school are talking to each other unguardedly over open issues (in journals or academic books), or for synthesis literature where adherents try to engage in fusion - this is a research strategy that requires relatively little time for a lot of payoff university reading lists are often freely available and are a great way to obtain a grounded overview, albeit this is a serious time investment (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Nov 16, 2020 01:30
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| # ¿ May 16, 2024 01:15 |
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Cpt_Obvious posted:You seem to be putting all your emphasis on consensus opinion, not the theory itself. the reason for looking for essays written by, for, and within a consensus is so that the participants are frank about what the extant disagreements or open issues are exhaustive "author A says X, and another B replied Y, and author C highlighted that Z, and..." is, again, wont to be 1) a serious time investment, and 2) renders the problem of setting the earlier reading in context into a kind of chicken-and-egg recursion anyway I'm sorry if this comes off as a bit "first, do your homework and eat your veggies" but yes there's a minimal legwork that should be done. I feel like you're asking the wrong question. If I tell you, well, I think Kaleckian neo-Marxist/post-Keynesian economics is interesting and worth examining, it would absolutely be the wrong thing to grab it and rely on it for every issue you come across. Rather, one should be able to assess various mainstream takes and the various heterodox takes (of which poor Michael Kalecki would only be one) and envision how they would apply
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Nov 16, 2020 01:54
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