There is a second level of debate, though, as to whether better working conditions, unions, enfranchised working class, is a consequences of capitalism or of a long, difficult struggle to capture those rights for workers. I agree, you might guess, with the latter.
Actually, I think both. I refrained from pushing into that realm in my posts to you and Bill.
Just so you know where I'm coming from.
I think it's necessary to look at 'what's there', 'the things themselves'. That gives me considerable latitiude but also certain risks. They're ordinary risks - confusing ought and is and making a hash of the description - that sort of good enlightenment thing. If a "system" doesn't show humans as original actors then for me it starts out flawed. I always found Adam Smith more congenial than Marx for this reason.
If we walk about in a "economic world" we find it's contingent, sort of. It requires folk cooperate in symbolic operations. I think it miraculous our ancestors hit on exchanging fish for furs. A number of things stand out in that. Unlike a lot of animals they didn't just take the desired things from the other. They hit on some amount of each thing that made the exchange worthwhile doing, they gathered/made and saved items beyond immediate needs to exchange. Even more miraculous, at a certain point they invented money - pieces of wood, cooked clay, etc., were the representaion of numbers and a name, that's money - so they didn't have to carry stuff around or stash it the back room. Our ancestors were really smart. Think of the amount of psychological operation, conscious and unconcious, that goes into this: promising, trusting, planning individually and in concert, cooperation. And this was part time activity!
Mostly our ancestors just hung out and got heavily into art, (singing, dancing, sculpting, painting, story telling), conversation, fornication,religion, anthropoid dominance contests, government, and sometimes they'd go to war. Some of them of course cheated and stole things but this was the exception, not the rule. The priest, chief, king, would take some of it and sometimes folk would put money in the pot for general improvements.
Now I've left a lot out, but one thing we can see in it is cooperation, initiative, huge adaptability, and especially, improvisation and specialization This is true when and wherever we look in the world.
War, famine, plague, climate change, political upheaval, are interuptions in the basic projects of human animals which are making and exchanging things, art, conversation, religion, idling singly and together, dominance contests, etc.
Facts don't fit Marx's procrustean system. It's probably enlightening to look at Nietsche on the subject - he was only mad.
The view of a Martian with a couple of million years of civilization behind her is that we don't do these things very well but we're not doing bad for beginners only sometimes we really step in the doo doo.... We stepped in it a while ago and it looks like we might be doing it again. But that's contingent. TWT
The 19th century, Marx.
Workers' wages were increasing. despite Marx's denial of the fact.
Productivity was increasing. During the recent capitalist era at a rate of @2%/yr. (And possibly throughout history as a result of human effort though that's hard to check exactly but an indication is the awful lot of things that got built so there must have been quite a bit of left over stuff beyond what was produced for "subsistence" needs)..
But anyway, those are facts - they can be checked.
Workers also organized and used their indispensability to the capitalist process as a lever for better conditions.
The folk who had been taking over from the rulers as modernity again established itself legislated reforms for the obvious reason that people rebel aginst regimes that are too harsh - the reason for the rebellion isn't just material privation (that looks like an ought but I think can be shown to be an is) - but loss of the important human projects mentioned above - in a word, liberty, or at the very least the 18th century 'satisfaction' or 'happiness'. The new folk, (what Marx called "the committee") who had taken over from rulers believed in these things just as they believed in science (reason) - not all of them, of course, but enough..
Marx's work is an insane anti-enlightenment reaction.
I haven't looked at Polyani.
What concerns Harris is the apparently widespread belief the US is getting rich from the impoverishment of 3rd world people. Harris hasn't made a very good direct connection from internationalized Marxian immiseration to Wallerstein with regard to the anti-americanism that concerns him.. The connection's there though, whether direct or indirect. I've trolled through a lot of websites belonging to various objectors to status quo: anti-globalists, anti-war, anti-imperialist, islamist, socialist, a number of newspapers from Europe, Asia, N America and its smushed together with everything else.
To a degree this is right because the US is the largest exemplar of status quo but it's not the be-all and end-all of what's problematical.
I've got to go out. It's the reality of hybrid metaphysical things that lead to a lot of the difficulties. |
