From: "Stephen D'Arcy" <darcy-AT-chass.utoronto.ca>
Subject: Re: Capitalism and Justice
Date: Wed, 29 May 1996 00:29:30 -0400 (EDT)


> >                                          The rich can get richer
> > at a faster rate than the poor get poorer. The result will be an
> > increase in wealth, but this does NOT mean that the poor are not
> > getting poorer.
> 
> 	This thought experiment is used to reassert Marx's (totaly 
> false) "contradiction" of capitalism--that it will create more misery 
> for the masses than it will create positive economic benefits (for those 
> greedy bastards)--without stepping up to the plate to say that that is 
> *really* what is happening, and thereby subjecting the position to 
> possible falsification.
>

I, for one, am perfectly willing to assert that this is indeed
happening in Ontario, Canada, where I live.  Here profits are
increasing precisely when (and partially because) welfare rates have
been cut by 22 percent.

By all means, try to "falsify" this claim.

Re:the claims you attribute to Marx, I will only suggest that you read
section 4 of chapter 25 of CAPITAL, volume one, where Marx explains
the sense in which he believes that, "whether payment [of wages] be
high or low, the lot of the labourer must grow worse" in proportion as
the productivity of labour increases.  By way of previewing what you
will find there: Marx is talking not about declining income but about
the way in which, under capitalism, "all means for the development of
productivity transform themselves into means of domination over, and
exploitation of, the producers," and "mutilate the labourer into a
fragment of a _Mensch_" and "estrange from him [or her] the
intellectual potentialities of the labour-process in the same
proportion as science is incorporated in it as an independant power"
and so on.


> Also, as a philosopher who 
> denies human agency, Foulcault seems also to think.......
>
> 	Nicholas
> 

I can cite a passage where Foucault affirms human agency:

"[Power is] always a way of acting upon an acting subject or acting
subjects by virtue of their acting or being capable of action.  A set
of actions upon other actions." (From "The Subject and Power," printed
in Dreyfus and Rabinow, MICHEL FOUCAULT, 2nd edition, p. 220.)

Can you (or anyone) cite a passage where Foucault "denies human
agency"?

I think that discussing an actual passage where Foucault is thought to
deny agency, especially if there are thought to be such passages
written in the '70's or '80's, would make for a more productive debate
on the subject.

I have to admit that I have read quite a bit of Foucault's work, and I
haven't seen anything in it that suggested to me that Foucault was a
"philosopher who denies human agency," although I would concede that
agency is not a concept that fits well into the agenda of _The Order
of Things_.  On the other hand, perhaps that is one reason why
Foucault's thought shifts TOWARD a focus on agency (as it seems to me
to do) starting with "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History."

Steve.