Date: Thu, 28 Jul 1994 02:05:03 +0700 From: djones-AT-uclink.berkeley.edu (donna jones) Subject: laws of tendency I reproduce here a passage from Daniel Little's The Scientific Marx. It is about a crucial question in Marxian social science. Does anyone want to comment (I apologize for previous typos and typos to come): Marx's arguments give rise to "laws of tendency" rather than "iron laws of devlopment" Once again the disanalogy between astronomy and the theory of capitalism...bears emphasizing. Whereas celestial mechanics provides exceptionless "laws of motion" of the planets, Marx's account of capitalism provides only laws of tendency: Other things being equal, we can expect the rate of profit to fall over the medium term. This difference has much to do with the great complexity of factors involved in social change. Marx isolates certain factors from the rest of the social system and deduces their influence on the system as a whole. But because he has abstracted from other causally relevant factors, the behavior of the whole may be expected to differ in some ways from that predicted by the abstractive model. D-H Ruben...discusses the ontological significance of laws of tendency and shows that the tendential character of Marx's conclusions is not ontologically significant; it does not correspond to a tendential character of social processes. Rather,it is an epistemological fact: it has to do with the limitations of the ability of a social theory to take account of a sufficient number of causally relevant factors to produce non-tendential laws....This treatment of marx's reasoning gives content to his idea that the capitalist mode of production has a logic of development. This sometimes sound like a very Hegelian idea...But the interpretation offered here establishes the consonance of the idea of a "social logic" with other branches of empirical social science by showing how a logic of development can be understood in terms of the logic of institutions. (149) Some questions: 1. What sort of essentialism is operative in this account (see also Meikle, 1985 and in the Cambridge Companion to Marx)? 2. a sociological counter-hypothesis: marx's laws of tendency (about the reserve army of labor, about the degradation and insecurity of the working class, about the falling rate of profit) do eventually work themselves out but at the level of the system as a whole. The epistemological uncertainty expressed here comes from the greater potentiality of escape from priviliged islands within the imperialist countries. It is a denial of the necessity of communism for associated humanity. What is the ontological and epistemological status of Marx's laws of tendency d jones
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