Date: Mon, 23 Sep 1996 18:45:25 -0400 (EDT)
From: Andrew Wayne Austin <aaustin-AT-utkux.utcc.utk.edu>
Subject: Re: Mental Illness




On Mon, 23 Sep 1996 MSPRINKER-AT-ccmail.sunysb.edu wrote:

> production to that given in classical economy.  Andy, would you like 
> to say that Smith and Ricardo are just as valid as Marx?
> Or that Milton Friedman's account of contemporary capitalism
> is explanatorily on a par with Mandel's?

Smith and Ricardo form the foundation of Marxian political economy. The
analytical divisions of use value and exchange value - even more critical,
the formulation of the labor theory of value, are found explicitly in
Smith and Ricardo. These concepts are sound and are in line with Marx. 
Marx's magic was worked with such deftness because it engaged the
bourgeois political economists within their own system of knowledge. Marx
correctly understood the use of critique. 

Milton Friedman is an idealist. The neoclassical position is subjectivist,
arguing that exchange value is only a thing in the mind, that it is not an
objective, measurable entity. Of course, Marx, as Smith and Ricardo, for
that matter, demonstrated that exchange value is an objective entity and is
measurable by the amount of labor power contained in a commodity. But even
Marx stressed that this was only an objective reality *under* capitalism. 
Only under the capitalist social formation did labor assume the character
of a commodity (labor power) and obtained the capacity to be utilized as
as a source of wealth by capitalists. This allowed the genesis of
exploitation to move from exchange to production, what Marx called a
mystification. My position parallels Marx, i.e. that the content of social
forms (and even the forms themselves, in so far as we can hypostatize
conceptual morphology) are transitory. As for Mandel's analysis of
capitalism? It is more correct than Friedman's, precisely because it
follows Marx. But Mandel is philosophically mistaken; his dialectical
materialism is idealism. 

> I repeat, somewhat more elaborately, my previously stated point:
> without some notion of explanatory superiority that ranks
> different accounts of the world hierarchically, no concept of
> science as a progressive institution is possible.  This is a
> philosophical argument, though, not one about the validity of
> any particular scientific practice or specific theory (e.g.,
> the theory of mental illness).  Both psychiatry and shamanism
> could both be wrong about mental illness, and the point I am
> urging would still stand.

Michael, you would sacrifice critical inquiry for some sort of convenient
and soothing order (hierarchy, as you put it). This is hardly scientific. 
The point you begin any investigation at is the paradigm in which the
facts are to be given their meaning, i.e. you critically evaluate the
frame. Michael, you want to start from an a priori position that seeks to
order explanations according to some sort of preordained criteria that
merely asserts a false dilemma: that we cannot judge the superiority of a
perspective unless we already hold that perspective superior in the first
place. Your position is tautological.

I know the temptation to make shortcuts in the difficult task of
understanding and explaining the manifold totality of socially reality in
all its manifestations is hard to resist, but resorting to the quick and
easy method of positivism leads us further away from the task and directly
into the arms of folly. 

Andy