From: "Howard Engelskirchen" <howarde-AT-twcny.rr.com>
Subject: Re: BHA: Re: capitalist social structures are false
Date: Tue, 2 Dec 2003 20:10:39 -0500


Hi Mervyn, Hi Phil,

Yes, of course, about Uncle Ben.  He is not a proposition.  Instead we say
he is a fraud because of what, materially, he does  -- e.g. Uncle Ben
presents himself as a fitness buff, but all he does is watch extreme sports
and exercise videos on the couch and he never passes up a second helping of
dessert.  What he does is not false -- he actually sits on the couch and he
actually eats dessert twice.

In other words, Uncle Ben -- the material person and peresonality structure
that he is -- secretes, as you say, contradictory meanings.

So I take your point to this extent:  Necessarily two material and actually
existing social relations combine to produce the capitalist mode of
production -- the commodity relation and the capital relation.  We can also
say that these secrete inevitably contradictory meanings -- one generates
notions of equivalence, the other presupposes inequality.  In that sense we
can say capitalist social relations generate inevitable hypocrisies, ie they
are false.

 But that takes some explaining  -- you must understand "false" in the sense
of material and actually existing social relations that are intrinsically
contradictory in their meaning.  You cannot understand it in the sense of
"fictious" or "untrue" in the sense of not causally efficacious.

We have to be even more precise about the two constituent relations taken
one at a time.  The separation of workers from the means of production is
not false and the separation of productive entities from each other is not
false.  Now if we look closer, the separation of productive entities
presupposes that each produces goods useless to them.  There is nothing
intrinsically false about that.  It is contradictory in the sense of false
to the extent that it involves a person relating to his or her own
activities and capacities not as an end but as a means.  In other words,
human action is characterized by intentionality as Bhaskar says.  You act to
realize ends you set yourself.  But where you set out to use your activity
as a means to realize ends alien to you, then your action itself is
intrinsically contradictory.  It doesn't mean that you can't produce goods
useless to you without realizing a contradiction.  It does mean you have to
own your activity in a way you cannot given the mediation of private
exchange.  And this same analysis can be extended to the capital relation
itself.  Because the laborer is separated from her conditions of production
and subsistence, her daily reproduction of her capacity to labor, the
richness of that potential, is useless.  So in that context her potential,
what Marx calls the real meaning of wealth, is intrinsically contradictory.
It is a potential that isn't a potential at all.

So, yes, you can make the case, but it will not do to paint with a broad
brush.  In order to make the case a distinction must be made between the
causal efficacy of material social structures -- these do exist and are
efficacious and in that sense are true -- and the fact that in their real,
not fictious, operation they generate contradictions that are intrinsic to
what they are -- contradictions in the sense that they simultaneously
present meanings that work against one another -- equalities that are
unequal, purposeful actions that are purposeless, and potentials that are
not.

That is, understanding depends on the distinction between the causal
structures which exist efficaciously and the contradictory consequences of
their real operation.  It won't do to forget Marsh's point that oak trees
are filled with sap, not falsehoods.

We might be tempted to say that capitalist social relations are
intrinsically contradictory as a clear way to capture the point, but
presumably all social relations, including those where associated workers
cooperatively control their common wealth, are contradictory.  So like the
difference between bad infinity and its virtuous counterpart, we have to
distinguish between good and bad contradictions.  Is 'false' the word that
adequately does this?  What characterizes each of the bad contradictions
above is that the negation is destructive and undermining -- inequality
undermines equality, purposeless, purposeful, and lack of capacity the
reproduction of potential.  By contrast a "good" contradiction would promote
flourishing, wouldn't it, the way pushing your hands together builds muscle,
say.

There is another issue that gets mixed up here.   I think we have to keep
pretty close track of what causal structures depend upon meaning and how.
G.A. Cohen, for example, couldn't explain the base without recourse to
rights.  Compare Bettelheim -- the separation of workers from the means of
production describes without rights and really without recourse to features
of consciousness either.  The wage form is different.  Meanings get secreted
in the recourse to exchange and causal structures can no longer be
understood without reference to them.   In other words there are emergent
meanings and stratifications that depend on them.

Howard





----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Mervyn Hartwig" <mh-AT-jaspere7.demon.co.uk>
To: <bhaskar-AT-lists.village.Virginia.EDU>
Sent: Tuesday, December 02, 2003 1:58 PM
Subject: Re: BHA: Re: capitalist social structures are false, Ruth


> Hi Howard,
>
> >It is possible to say the wage form is false.  But while the separations
I
> >just referred to can be described pretty much the way an oak tree can be
> >described, the wage form is false because of the meanings embedded in it.
>
> Seems to me you've conceded the point here. Of course the wage form
> secretes meanings, but it's not a proposition, it's a set of internally
> related social practices, i.e. a social structure.
>
> >capitalist relations are through and through, to their deepest
> >recesses, hypocritical, and that is true -- they cannot be made not
> >hypocritical.  But now I know I am talking in the way I would talk about
my
> >uncle Ben.
>
> But your uncle Ben isn't a proposition either. He's a fraud, and to that
> extent a false being, untrue to his essential or higher self (as he
> himself attests in his cringing body language).
>
> Mervyn
>

>      --- from list bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---



     --- from list bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---