File spoon-archives/marxism.archive/marxism_1994/marxism_25Jul.94, message 57


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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