roseweird posted:
which of these intellectual powerhouses will win the brain crown in this meeting of minds
me
c_man posted:lol i just realized that reassembling the social is part of a series on "management studies" including such titles as: "The Modern Firm: Organizational Design for Performance and Growth", "The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business and Society" and "The Logic of Position, The Measure of Leadership"
http://www.moderntimesworkplace.com/archives/ericsess/sessvol3/Ackoffp417.opd.pdf
Doug posted:http://www.moderntimesworkplace.com/archives/ericsess/sessvol3/Ackoffp417.opd.pdf
ive always felt that marketing people is the group that has made the most gains from developments in psychoanalysis, behavioral psychology and cultural studies
stegosaurus posted:babyhueypnewton posted:I agree with C_man, this isn't simply a pedantic point. To say there is nothing outside of nature is to say there is nothing outside of capitalism, and socialism only arrives from the contradictions within that system. Any attempt to create revolution before capitalism or outside it (agricultural communes, lifestyle anarchism, peasant rebellions, worker cooperatives, etc) always ends up subservient to the laws of capital. Only when capitalism has devoured everything before it and finally itself can revolution emerge as the next stage in history. The ideas in this thread that we can open a farm somewhere and not be subject to the accumulation of surplus value on a world scale derive from this confusion.
Famous Marx knowledge:
No social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed; and new, higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself.
isn't marx saying not that 'capitalism will never be overthrown until socialist society is completed inside of it' but that because that is the case, we need to do things like create cooperatives and vote for communists and fight for unions, to weaken the power of capitalists, enhance the power of workers and so forth? worker owned businesses, or a network of them, could be a part of that. didnt he also say in the critique of the gotha programme that, uh, the transitional stage of socialism will actually still be subject to the accumulation of surplus value i.e. capitalism, and that this is unavoidable? and didn't mao and maybe lenin (havent read this) admit frankly that their respective states were basically state capitalist and that this was ok because it was a concrete improvement and gave working people internationally a tremendous advantage?
i completely agree that utopian stuff like the diggers or the back to the land movement are wrong but only in the sense of immediate tactics, the problem with the diggers was that they couldn't resist being thrown off their land. if they had more resources and more support they would have been a much larger problem, and how would gathering a large number of workers under a 'state capitalist in one county' system of cooperatives, with provision for housing and health care and so forth, decrease the power of workers relative to capitalists?
The next part is more explicit:
In broad outlines Asiatic, ancient, feudal, and modern bourgeois modes of production can be designated as progressive epochs in the economic formation of society. The bourgeois relations of production are the last antagonistic form of the social process of production — antagonistic not in the sense of individual antagonisms, but of one arising from the social conditions of life of the individuals; at the same time the productive forces developing in the womb of bourgeois society create the material conditions for the solution of that antagonism. This social formation brings, therefore, the prehistory of society to a close.
Having said that I completely agree with you. But that's because both economic determinism and radical contingency are present in Marx, and it's not so easy as separating the young and old. It's obvious to anyone who lives in the real world like ourselves that societies do not go from a feudal mode of production to a capitalist one necessarily, and it is not progressive in the age of imperialism. But trotskyism is present in Marx, it's not enough to confront it on the level of 'revisionism'.
Let's not forget the demands for communism in the manifesto have almost all been accomplished in the west, but we are no closer to communism. The interaction between the scientific rigor of marxism and the realpolitik of actual revolution is not an easy answer, it is a question for historians as Marx would say.
NoFreeWill posted:i don't know what fields/books/theorists cover the topic, so i'm asking if anyone does.
it depends what you want to cover.
do you want a babby's guide to the relationship between energy and the economy? if so, read Energy and the Wealth of Nations: Understanding the Biophysical Economy. i've got a pdf copy if you want one.
Hubbert posted:.custom215461{}NoFreeWill posted:i don't know what fields/books/theorists cover the topic, so i'm asking if anyone does.
it depends what you want to cover.
do you want a babby's guide to the relationship between energy and the economy? if so, read Energy and the Wealth of Nations: Understanding the Biophysical Economy. i've got a pdf copy if you want one.
sounds sick. I'll report back.
c_man posted:im not really sure what nofreewill is saying...
sounds like I win the brain contest then.
daddyholes posted:You'll think the show's sexist, but it's actually trying to critique sexism. Seems like you might be the kind of guy to see right to the heart of that one.
You're a fucking Catholic lol fuck off
NoFreeWill posted:You're a fucking Catholic lol fuck off
You ever notice how most people don't respond to you even when you attack them directly? Exercising some Christian charity with this statement NFW: you need to read more and post less
daddyholes posted:.custom216455{}NoFreeWill posted:You're a fucking Catholic lol fuck off
You ever notice how most people don't respond to you even when you attack them directly? Exercising some Christian charity with this statement NFW: you need to read more and post less
i've read a bazillion books, just not ones about this particular subject. my OP was terrible and incoherent but I did end up getting the recommendations I wanted so i consider it a success.
tsinava posted:
nnice WDDP content
NoFreeWill posted:i've read a bazillion books, just not ones about this particular subject. my OP was terrible and incoherent but I did end up getting the recommendations I wanted so i consider it a success.
well, i have a lot of other recommendations if you want.
kenneth boulding and nicholas georgescu-roegen are some of the big progenitors of the ecological economics movement so you can also read stuff from them
if you want more of a marxist view, lessons posted stuff from caffentzis and others talked about bellamy foster ("metabolic rift"). teresa brennan may also be a good bet, if these scans from a book i read are any indication:
Did Malthus really mourn over baptisms, while celebrating funeral rites with a particular zest? His population control measures were denounced by many of his fellow Christians, who rejected them as an offense against charity, not to say common sense. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels weighed in as well, damning his theories as an "open declaration of war of the bourgeoisie upon the proletariat," and Malthus himself as a "shameless sycophant of the ruling classes, terrified by Europe's burgeoning working class and the French Revolution.2 His theories were embraced, however, by members of the British upper class. An increasingly barren lot themselves, they feared that the poor were becoming too prolific, not to mention too powerful at the polls and in the marketplace. These Malthusians, as they came to be called, helped to ensure that their founder’s “Essay on Population” was a commercial success, appearing in no fewer than six editions from 1798 to 1826. Population horror stories have sold well ever since.
Edited by Hubbert ()
if you want more of a marxist view,
marx was anti-malthusian you clueless trot
tsinava posted:
LINKLINKLINK
http://antidotezine.wordpress.com/2014/02/08/fun-with-graeber/
DG: ...This was the big point that I was trying to make in the piece. Alright, we seem fine with this idea of the “selfish gene,” that somehow our DNA molecules—which are just strands of amino acids—“want” to expand. Through sex and reproduction they want to make as many copies of themselves as possible. So we learn to attribute this self-interested motivation to certain types of cells. But why not crystals? Why not a snowflake? Why not an atom, an electron? We can’t predict how electrons jump. The whole point of quantum theory is that you can’t actually predict what a particle is going to do. You can do a statistical analysis, say 40% of them will do this and 20% will do that. But you can’t predict what this one’s going to do. It seems something like free will. But somehow we shudder at the idea of doing the same thing that we do with DNA molecules.
Why not do that with a snowflake? Well, it’s easy. You can’t apply an economic self-interested model to a snowflake. A snowflake doesn’t have self-interest. You can’t apply it to an electron. An electron is not trying to reproduce, it’s not trying to gain an advantage over other electrons. The only way that you could attribute agency or intentionality to those sorts of phenomena would be to say they’re exercising freedom just for the sake of doing so. But then you’re saying, basically, they’re having fun. It’s a form of play. Play is, if anything, the basis of all physical reality, it’s the ultimate natural principle. And if you think of the world that way, it’s a very different place.
CM: You write, “the neo-Darwinists went even further than the Victorian variety. If old-school social Darwinists like Herbert Spencer viewed nature as a marketplace, albeit an unusually cutthroat one, the new version was outright capitalist. The neo-Darwinists assumed not just a struggle for survival but a universe of rational calculation driven by an apparently irrational imperative to unlimited growth. This, anyway, is how the Russian challenge was understood. Prince Peter Kropotkin’s actual argument of cooperation, the Russian argument, is far more interesting. Much of it, for instance, is concerned with how animal cooperation often has nothing to do with survival or reproduction but is a form of pleasure in itself.”
I know this sounds like a stretch, but is this the very essence of the Cold War? Did the cutthroat capitalists win?
DG: Well, the Cold War made it an ideological imperative to say that capitalism itself is located in our genes. Even back in the 19th century, they were trying to make the argument that capitalism was really natural, that we’re all basically capitalist.
But there was a whole alternative school that talked about cooperation. Kropotkin, who was an anarchist, put a shot across the bow at the social Darwinist position, saying almost all human achievement comes through cooperation, not through competition. Even animals cooperate and enjoy cooperation. Sure, competition exists, but it’s not really what drives things forward.
So they had to scramble. They really took this threat seriously. And that’s why they came up with an explanation for altruism and cooperation based in genes. The discovery of genes and eventually the double-helix made it easier to make this argument. But in doing so, they went from a mere market model to this idea of capitalism.
Capitalism is based on infinite accumulation. That’s why economies always have to expand. The new version, where you have the “selfish gene” and we’re willing to sacrifice ourselves to maximize the furtherance of our genes, it’s the genes that are really pushing it. The genes want to expand infinitely. That’s real capitalism. It’s not just a market; our genetic code is all these little corporations which are seeking infinite growth.
Doug posted:i read an article he wrote where he said that most of critical theory is unfalsifiable and thus bad and "critical theory" is basically done outside academia by conspiracy theorists and that critical theory needs to work alongside scientists instead of just yelling at them
so, what, he's trying to bring back logical positivism? blegh
aerdil posted:Doug posted:i read an article he wrote where he said that most of critical theory is unfalsifiable and thus bad and "critical theory" is basically done outside academia by conspiracy theorists and that critical theory needs to work alongside scientists instead of just yelling at them
so, what, he's trying to bring back logical positivism? blegh
not really, he still treats science as a social system and says what scientists create are texts and stuff like that he just thinks that STS etc. tries to explain science in terms of power or ontology only and this isn't correct
i'm stealing this from somewhere
Latour suggests that about 90% of contemporary social criticism displays one of two approaches which he terms “the fact position and the fairy position.” (p. 237) The fact position is anti-fetishist, arguing that “objects of belief” (e.g., religion, arts) are merely concepts onto which power is projected; the “fairy position” argues that individuals are dominated, often covertly and without their awareness, by external forces (e.g., economics, gender). (p. 238) “Do you see now why it feels so good to be a critical mind?” asks Latour: no matter which position you take, “You’re always right!” (p. 238-239) Social critics tend to use anti-fetishism against ideas they personally reject; to use “an unrepentant positivist” approach for fields of study they consider valuable; all the while thinking as “a perfectly healthy sturdy realist for what you really cherish.” (p. 241) These inconsistencies and double standards go largely unrecognized in social critique because “there is never any crossover between the two lists of objects in the fact position and the fairy position.” (p. 241)
http://linguisticcapital.wordpress.com/2011/06/18/oedipus-habitus-on-latours-division-of-the-social-sciences/
TL;DR
It is my hypothesis that the initial impulsion for a person to become stuck in thinking in terms of Latour’s ‘fact’ or ‘fairy’ position (see excerpt above) derives from a person’s experience of Freud’s Oedipus complex during childhood.
The fairy position comes from a (male) child disliking his mother, but feeling inexplicably drawn to her nonetheless (by the Oedipus complex which forces him to love/desire his mother .)
