Date: Fri, 14 Mar 1997 19:42:18 -0500 (EST) From: Louis N Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu> Subject: M-I: Reply to Justin Justin: Louis objects that game theoretic explanations of the arms race, the cold war, and various wars, etc. are not Marxust because if they focus on nations as actors they ignore class. Well, Louis and I have an unbridgeable divide about whether it matters whether explanations are Marxist in some suitable sense and it's not worth rehashing that here. I will say only, Duh? and so what? The issues is whether the explanations are true. Now of course class, imperialism, etc. are also relevant, but there can be no serious doubt that the sort of Hobbesian dynamics captured more explicitly by game theory play a major and imporatnt role in explaining various kinds of internatioanl conflict. Louis: To invoke Hobbes simply confirms the reactionary drift of much of Justin's AM. I will let Hobbes speak for himself: "Hereby it is manifest that during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war; and such a war as is of every man against every man. For war consisteth not in battle only, or the act of fighting, but in a tract of time, wherein the will to contend by battle is sufficiently known: and therefore the notion of time is to be considered in the nature of war, as it is in the nature of weather. For as the nature of foul weather lieth not in a shower or two of rain, but in an inclination thereto of many days together: so the nature of war consisteth not in actual fighting, but in the known disposition thereto during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary. All other time is peace." Unless men live with a "common power to keep them all in awe", they make war. This is what Hobbes believed. And our resident AM'er Justin believes that ideas such as this can explain WWI. You are dead wrong, Justin. When Hobbes talks about "man", he ignores class. We, as Marxists, can not ignore class. It has primacy. The bourgeoisie made war and it used force and propaganda to prosecute it. Those who opposed the war like Eugene V. Debs were jailed. The workers did not put pressure on the bourgeoisie to make war as a result of nationalist passions. Is that what you believe? Do you believe that the violent and bestial nature of working people explains the outbreak of war? I heard this sort of bullshit explanation in grade school. Surely you don't believe this sort of thing. Well, perhaps you do. Justin: Louis is not interested in various bald assertions--I note that he adopts the royal "we," or maybe he thinks he speaks fora ll of you, or for Marxists in general, or something like that--about how game theory might apply to difficulties in coalition building. If he coulkd stop and think for a moment instead of vomiting bile every time he sees a post by me he would see that a sketch of the analysis was alreadt provided: feminism is a public good for women just as socialism is for workers, and creating it involves the same public goods problems. Louis: Vomiting bile? Oh, stop squealing like a stuck piglet, Justin. I simply demanded that you explain yourself fully instead of using half-baked ideas. You still are not making yourself clear and I thought AM'ers believed in clarity like Catholics believe in the immaculate conception. "Feminism is a public good for women just as socialism is for workers, and creating it involves the same public goods problems." This sentence is just muddled phrase-mongering. You have yet to define what a "public goods problem" is. Let me formulate a Marxist framework for the problem of feminism. Feminists such as Judith Butler deny that Marxism can provide meaningful answers for the oppression of women. Sectarians and economic determinists representing themselves as Marxists have been hostile to feminism from the very beginning because they argue that it "divides the working class." Marxist feminists such as Teresa Ebert argue for a synthesis of class and gender. Now what in the world are you babbling about when you refer to public goods? Some kind of game in the Roemerian mold? You should give your typing fingers a rest and let your brain carry the load for a while. Justin: Louis characateristically misreads my application of this sort of analysis to the breakup of the USSR into its constitutent republics as an account of the economic collapse of the USSR. He knows and loathes my own analysis of that collapse,w hich is is in different nonmArxist terms, namely Haekian ones--incidentally, Louis, Hayek and Mises hated game theory as an ahistorical abstraction that ignored real social relations. Does that make you like them better or like game theory better? Louis: You are losing it, Justin. The above paragraph is incoherent, to put it mildly. Justin: Louis knwows alla bout my personal situation and knows that if I were properly motivated I could find the time to learn all about everything. I should hire him as a personal efficiency expert to see where I could get more hours in the day. In the meantime, he's right that I do love abstract argument and that's why I went into philosophy; it's also a lot of what I love about law. So, I plead guilty. What's the sentence, judge? Louis: What is it that drives people to get persecution complexes when they run into some sharp criticism? I have no idea what Justin expects to hear when he mounts a frontal assault on classical Marxism on a list that is a pole of attraction for classical Marxists. My only suggestion is that you do a better job of organizing your thoughts and presenting them. Is it necessary to answer everything I say? As I told you, I wasn't even interested in a debate with you. I simply wanted to take a whack at Elster, Cohen and Roemer. I would have done so even if you weren't on the list or had ever been born. Meanwhile, you are somebody who has identified with this school for more than a decade. But you can't muster the effort to write a coherent defense of your ideas. You simply offer counter-argument to my own posts. Why don't you give up on the idea of using 3 posts a day to rebut me. Take a week or so and put together an elegantly reasoned and logically tight defense of AM. Run it through a spell-checker and grammar-checker, by the way. The stuff you are writing now is an embarrassment to the English language and your reputation as a serious Marxist thinker. You are on thin enough ice with respect to the latter as it is. Louis Proyect (www.columbia.edu/~lnp3) --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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