File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/97-03-16.132, message 14


From: Carrol Cox <cbcox-AT-rs6000.cmp.ilstu.edu>
Subject: Re: M-I: Application to Reality?
Date: Fri, 14 Mar 1997 12:58:33 -0600 (CST)


    According to John Adams one could never trust the English government
to act in its own self-interest (that is, to know its own self-interest).
For example, granting that in many situations racism is in the self-
interest, narrowly defined, of some white workers, there is no trusting
those caught up in racist ideology to be able to distinguish between
the instances when that is true and when it is not true. All attempts
at analysis of almost anything defined in terms of individual actors--
a government is a sort of individual, as is a corporation, but NOT
a class or even class fraction or (even) a nuclear family--break down
on the simple confusion of life for the individual in a market society.
    Carrol

Doug Henwood writes:
>
> At 10:27 AM -0500 3/14/97, Justin Schwartz wrote:
>
> >Louis wonders whether game theory and Prisoner's Dilemma and its analogues
> >can be applied to the real world. He ignores the example I did offer of
> >application, the ratioonal choice explanation of why it's so hard to
> >organize workers into a class solidaristic movement that transdcends
> >individual rationality.
>
> Ok maybe game theory is good at explaining something like this, though I
> don't see why you need the whole apparatus to explain something that can be
> rendered just as easily in plain English ("individual workers don't see how
> the certain increase in their personal risk is worth a possible collective
> payoff sometime in the indefinite future"). But it can't explain why people
> sometimes - maybe even often - don't act according to these rule of
> rational self-interest, either irrationally or selflessly (which to the
> bourgeois mind is the same thing). Any transformative social movement that
> stakes its appeal on self-interest is already operating according to
> bourgeois standards, and is therefore almost certainly doomed. The point is
> to disrupt what Keynes called the Benthamite calculus, not to insert
> different values into pre-existing variables.
>
>
> Doug
>
> --
>
> Doug Henwood
> Left Business Observer
> 250 W 85 St
> New York NY 10024-3217 USA
> +1-212-874-4020 voice  +1-212-874-3137 fax
> email: <mailto:dhenwood-AT-panix.com>
> web: <http://www.panix.com/~dhenwood/LBO_home.html>
>
>
>
>
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