Date: Tue, 11 Oct 1994 08:35:06 +0700 From: djones-AT-uclink.berkeley.edu (jones-bhandari) Subject: hayek (2) In thinking about Chris' Hayekian challenge to Marxism, I have been reminded of Marx's sardonic comments: The same bourgeois consciousness which celebrates the division of labor in the workshop, the lifelong annexation of the worker to a partial operation, and his complete subjection to capital, as an organization of labor that increases its productive power, denounces with equal vigor every conscious attempt to control and regulate the process of production socially, as an inroad upon such sacred things as the rights of property, freedom and the self-determining 'genius' of the individual capitalist. It is very characteristic that the enthusiastic apologists of the factory system have nothing more damning to urge against a general organization of labour in society than that it would turn the whole of society into a factory. Capital, vol I, pg. 477 (Vintage ed.) However, Chris' challenge has not for the most part invoked "such sacred things" but rather attacked the epistemological assumptions of any "conscious attempt to control and regulate the process of production socially." In a previous post, I tried to suggest that Chris seems to have assumed that the price function can play, in lieu of conscious social control, the regulatory function the necessity of which "every child knows"--"that the masses of products corresponding to the different needs require different and quantitatively determined masses of the total labor of society" and "that this necessity of the distribution of social labor in definite proportions cannot possibly be done away with by a particular form of social production but can only change the mode of its appearance..." (Marx to Kugelmann, 7/11/68) Drawing upon Laclau and Mouffe, Philip has suggested that any attempt at the conscious distribution of social labor (including of course the relationship between necessary and surplus labor which too cannot be done away with) is the legacy of Englightment optimism that easily degenerates into totalitarianism. In Philip's argument, there is thus an implicit connection between Enlightment optimism and various 20the century attempts at state capitalist control of the economy. Again the tenability of this connection has not been proven. Both Chris' and Philip's arguments are quite interesting; I look forward to trying to engage them. jb ------------------
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