Subject: Re: AUT: Re: Are heterodox (non-marxist) economists our friends?
From: chris wright <cwright.21stcentury-AT-rcn.com>
Date: 16 Jun 2003 20:49:10 -0500


> Hello Chris and all,
> Chris do you think what you are saying is what Debord meant in thesis 41 of 
> Society of the Spectacle when he wrote: 
> 
> "With the coming of the industrial revolution, the division of labor 
> specific to that revolution's manufacturing system, and mass production for 
> a world market, the commodity emerged in its full fledged form as a force 
> aspiring to the complete colonization of social life. It was at this moment 
> too that political economy established itself as at once the dominant 
> science and the science of domination."
> 

I would say that the next section, 42, does pretty much encapsulate in a
dense form, what I am saying about science as a whole, and not merely
economics, which is not a conspiracy of stupid, sloppy and bought-off
pawns of capital, but the genuine forms of appearance necessarily
following from commodity society:

"THE SPECTACLE CORRESPONDS to the historical moment at which the
commodity completes its colonization of social life. It is not just that
the relationship to commodities is now plain to see ? commodities are
now all that there is to see; the world we see is the world of the
commodity. The growth of the dictatorship of modern economic production
is both extensive and intensive in character. In the least
industrialized regions its presence is already felt in the form of
imperialist domination by those areas that lead the world in
productivity. In these advanced sectors themselves, social space is
continually being blanketed by stratum after stratum of commodities.
With the advent of the so-called second industrial revolution, alienated
consumption is added to alienated production as an inescapable duty of
the masses. The entirety of labor sold is transformed overall into the
total commodity. A cycle is thus set in train that must be maintained at
all costs: the total commodity must be returned in fragmentary form to a
fragmentary individual completely cut off from the concerted action of
the forces of production. To this end the already specialized science of
domination is further broken down into specialties such as sociology,
applied psychology, cybernetics, semiology and so on, which oversee the
self-regulation of every phase of the process."

No part of life is free from the commodity, much more so than in Marx
and Bakunin's day.  I would even go further to say that 'science' in all
its forms tends towards the reproduction of the commodity in the very
forms of thought which approach every aspect of life, including into
'nature' and the study of it.

The very assumption of a separation of man and nature in our
consciousness indicates a certain development in human society.  Marx
does not, in his famous paragraph in Chapter 6 of Capital about the bee
and the architect, pose humans as biologically different, but as having
becoming different over time, through our development.  Nature is
anything but natural, but a conception based on a relation to the world
in which we have become outside it and it has become Other to us, as,
for example, resources.  Nature is a social phenomena and so are the
natural sciences.  In so far as they do not reckon with nature as a
social phenomena, they are led to believe that they study the world as
it really is, missing all along that the very alienation of man and
nature is at the very root of their 'science.'

This is too quick and I will re-read this section and come back to it. 
As it is I still owe Thiago a little more explication of why those
things I raised earlier were causality, and not just the old
Aristotelean First, Formal, Efficient and Final Causes (where I think
Thiago is really fixated on formal and efficient causes.)

Cheers,
Chris



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