Date: Thu, 3 Jul 1997 21:01:42 GMT
From: Chris Burford <cburford-AT-gn.apc.org>
Subject: M-I: re: Chaos/Bhaskar/Marxism



I cannot safely join you on the ground of post modern
thinkers but I will try to respond to your comments about 
chaos theory:

Deb:

The terms in which the objective
world is presented by chaos theory--and those terms in the main
posit the objective world as brute matter--provide the basis for
bourgeois knowledges. 


Chris:

I do not recognise this way of putting it, that the objective
world is "brute matter". Chaos theory seems completely compatible 
to me with a Leninist view about the universe being "matter in 
motion". I am not sure about the nuances behind the word "brute".
The shifting but regular patterns of chaos, like the veins in 
a leaf, or the motion of waves on a sea-shore or in an inlet,
are neither brute nor human. They are material and have to 
my mind a beauty. Perhaps it is rather fundamental that we
have to recognise patterns, and the patterns of the 
universe are tantalisingly similar but not identical, and 
every so often the pattern becomes disrupted. 

But that too has its patterning.

Bhaskar's fundamental question (from memory) "what must 
the universe be like such that we can have scientific ideas
about it?" - seems to me to be a universe of matter in 
repetitive motion interacting in non-(recti)-linear ways, sometimes 
in conformity with chaos theory, sometimes with complexity 
theory.

I do not recognise chaos theory explaining the instabilities of 
capitalism as due to "external perturbation". It does not 
seem to me to be a "bourgeois model of change."

I do not accept that 
" conjoining chaos theory with Marxism would be only
the latest in the series of attempts to "develop" Marxism known as
"analytical Marxism". I am wary of the lack of dialectics in 
analytical marxism.

I do not intend to be combative but to state that my perspectives
feel different to yours.

I will appreciate your summarising and then commenting 
on the articles by Harvey and Reed.

Chris Burford

London



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