Date: Tue, 16 Apr 1996 23:14:05 -0400 (EDT)
From: Justin Schwartz <jschwart-AT-freenet.columbus.oh.us>
Subject: Re: Group or individual -Reply -Reply -Reply



> Me: Lisa wants to reduce class struggle to conflicts of interest between
> individuals. 
> 
> Lisa:  Coming from you, I know that "reduce" is not a curse-word. OK.

Not in principle, Here, I was characterizing your position. But whether
reduction can work in any case has to be shown by doing it. 

> JS: I don't think this will do. The "similarly situated" is covering
> up the structural aspect of class. [snip] No one has the interests of
> a proletarian or is a member of that class outside the network of
> social relations. 
> 
> Lisa:  "Those with similar/ compatible interests" is at a level of
> generality that is intended to refer to something that is not
> confined to capitalism, it applies much more broadly.

Yes, so?

  You have
> explained very well the specifics of capitalism, but I don't see a
> conflict between these two views.  Of course many needs, benefits
> desired, interests are specific to classes as defined by social
> relations, especially in a _class_ society.  I don't disagree with
> that.  [I also see all such specific interests as related to / within
> a bio/evol/ecology context of bottom-line self-interest, but I don't
> see this as contradictory either.]
> 

How does this help with reduction? No doubt any humans in any
circumstances have biological interests in what some people call basic
needs, sufficient food and water to live, shelter and cloathing in many
climates. These are not, thus characteruzed, class interests. They are
explanatorily relevant to class struggle insofar as class relations may
threaten these interests, but that does not mean mean can explain class
struggle in these terms.

First, we still have to refer to the class relations and how they threaten
these interests. Second, beyond pretty basic levels, much class struggle
is carried out over interests that are socially rather than biologically
defined. The interests that provoke resistance and domination are usually
not those in physical survival, but the quality of material and moral
life. Issues of self-respect play a big part. 


> "Similar or over-lapping interests" is not intended to hide anything.
>  It does include some specific situations where there are no
> "classes" as typically defined.

OK, but if there are no classes, there are no classes to be explained, and
no class struggle to be explained either. Unless you want to tell a story
about how classes evolve out of a classless situation. If you have one,
please tell.

> > JS:  I think rational choice theory has a lot more to tell us about
> why class consciousness is hard to develop than it does about why
> classes exist and struggle. 
> 
> Lisa:  Tell me more!  What does it say about that?
> 
This stuff is pretty obvious. Prisoner's dilemmas mean it's rational for
workers not to cooperate, instead, to free-ride. Adaptive preference
formation means that they tend to want what it's rational to expect to
get. Since collective action requires overcoming the free rider problem,
which is hard, it's rational not to want what you can get only by
collective action. So workers pursue individualistic strategies based on
individulaisticaly self-interested desires. Elster is good on this, as is
Buchanan, in his piece on Revolution and Rationality in Marxism and
Justice. Przeworski has done empirical and theoretical work on these lines
in Paper Stones (about the decline of European social democracy) and
Capitalism and Social Democracy.

> 
> JS:  So I would say that so far, we have no good RCT account of how
> classes develop de novo or why they exist, rather than perhaps of the
> circumstances in which one set gives way to another. 
> 
> Lisa:  The Method. Individ. I was taught takes it as legit to start
> with any set of existing specific circumstances, in order to make
> sense of what people do next.  After all, nobody ever lived without
> living _within_ some kind of situation.  So I'm surprised to see you
> call that "semi"-individualistic.

If that's the MI you were taught it is only semi-individualistic. Insofar
as it takes the existing circumstances, including thye social relations,
as unexolained in individualistic terms, it's not fully individualistic.
In contrast, compare the ambitions of classical microeconomics, which
seeks to explain social outcomes wholly in terms of the properties of
individuals with no more relations than their beliefs about each other;s
actions. 
 > 
> To ask where those circumstances came from is also a perfectly legit
> question, and I expect there is a good MI answer [in addition to
> other kinds of answers.]

If so, I don't know of it. 

  But the "circumstances" of the change are
> not enough are they?  Or why does Brenner [or anybody] think that
> people react _in a particular way_ to _those specific circumstances_
> ?

Well, orthodox RCT says that they're maximizing expected utility. To put
bite in this answer it had to be understood as egoistic, self-interested
mutually disinterested E.U., or it becomes a vacuous claim that people try
toi get what they want given their beliefs. Unfortunately the answer with
bite is false, and obviously so. People act as they do because of customs
and normd, and habit, and aspirations, and ideals, and all sorts of things
that cannot be explained in Benthamite terms. Now, Brenner explains
landlord-tenant and lord-serf relations using these terms and his answer
is fairly compelling in a restricted sphere. But even thenone has to ask,
as Polyani does, or Weber, where does this set of motivations arise
andunder what circumstances does it become widespread? Because it's not in
all, or even many circumstances. 

> 
> I don't know a lot about non-MI theories of the origins of classes,
> but what little I have seen has not been very inviting to further
> study.  I read Engels' Origins and found it rather unsatisfying.  I
> once took a sociology class on Social Evolution and found it both
> unsatisfying and downright insulting to intelligence - no
> 'microfoundations' for _anything_ just general invocations of social
> progress which made no sense to me at all.  Sweeping generalizations
> about rituals and rites of passage all 'stabilizing' the social
> structure and thus 'keeping the group together' are vastly
> unconvincing to me, and don't offer any understanding of social
> change, either.

Well, I'm not an anthropologist and don't have any but the vaguest idea
about how classes developed from where there weren't classes. One guess
that I seem to recall in a dim way is that it had to do with the
interaction of agriculture and nomadiwarrior societies. The latter
conquored the former in order to get them to work for them, and that's how
it all started. This is not an orthodoc Marxist answer, which would seek
something about the structure of production itself. Anyway, I can't help
you here.

--Justin




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