File spoon-archives/marxism-thaxis.archive/marxism-thaxis_1998/marxism-thaxis.9802, message 568


Date: Tue, 24 Feb 1998 21:49:33 +1100
From: Rob Schaap <rws-AT-comserver.canberra.edu.au>
Subject: Re: M-TH: being determines consciousness ?


Hugh writes:

>Money was a very bad example. Social facts (facts of human behaviour in
>society) are obviously dependent on human existence and with this you get
>language, but they exist not because of language but because of
>relationships of production and distribution that are independent of
>language and individual will.

I did not say money existed because of language - I argued language was
necessary to construct the institution that is money.  I stressed it was
not sufficient.  By any scientific definition of causation, language would
have to be both necessary and sufficient to claim 'because of language'.

To the extent I'm being a 'criminal revisionist' (thanks, Carrol), it is
because, while I'm convinced the way we organise ourselves in our material
reproduction, ie our mode of production, does bring into being
relationships which are independent of our will - I'm also convinced that
the exchange relation, and the concomitant institutionalisation of money
that has ensued -  come about only through the mediation of language.  The
mode of production is therefore also necessary but not sufficient to
institutionalise money.  And language can not be relied upon to do
everything the mode of production might 'want' of it (although it may end
up doing just that - and extant institutions, to the extent they are
compatible with the balance of power and interests that pertain, have a lot
of power in reproducing language as required - hence students, taxpayers
and prisoners are all now 'clients').

Habermas matters to me because, for him, language has in it an inbuilt
tendency to get at the truth.  This lies in the universalist claim (yet to
be unvalidated to my knowledge) that we can, in *all* languages, put
propositions and question those propositions.  In it we have the past and
the future in dialectic play.  Norms enable speech (communicative action),
but can themselves be brought to book in that act of speech (and H calls
the critique of background consensus 'discourse') - and to quote Roderick:

'internal criticism can only succeed if it clarifies to social actors the
meaning of their own critical standards which must unequivocally be in
social and historical reality.'

I ask we not neglect this insight.

Hugh also writes:

>Either/or gets you nowhere.

Well, 'either/or' ain't the currency of dialectics perhaps (and what of
'EITHER formal logic is right OR dialectics is'?).  But it is the stuff of
the institutions within which we operate.  If money is shown to be a social
fact as opposed to a brute fact, is there progress?  I reckon there might
be.

What is it that's so outrageous about this (admittedly rambling) line of
thought?

(thinks) I have of late lost all my mirth ... Marxists give me not joy.
No, nor Habermasians either.

I need a drink.
Rob.


************************************************************************

Rob Schaap, Lecturer in Communication, University of Canberra, Australia.

Phone:  02-6201 2194  (BH)
Fax:    02-6201 5119

************************************************************************

'It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have
lightened the day's toil of any human being.'    (John Stuart Mill)

"The separation of public works from the state, and their migration
into the domain of the works undertaken by capital itself, indicates
the degree to which the real community has constituted itself in
the form of capital."                                    (Karl Marx)

************************************************************************




     --- from list marxism-thaxis-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---

   

Driftline Main Page

 

Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005