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Re: [ox-en] Re: herrschaft



On Wed, 14 Jan 2004, Casimir Purzelbaum wrote:

*        Graham Seaman 	(2004-01-14  09:54)
There is an 'invisible hand' in a free society. It doesn't work 
through the medium of money, but directly through need. If I (for large
enough values of I) need some software, but that software doesn't exist
in free form, I will write it. If the software already exists in just the
form I want it, I won't bother. The supply of programmers for particular
types of program is regulated by need: this invisible hand is the hand 
that scratches your own itch...

My attempt at picturing a new mode of organizing production
(etc.) would deny the use (and existence) of invisible hands.
Need as an invisible hand is nothing else than the state of
mankind before it started to become class society. (I mean what
is called Ur-Kommunismus in German, how does this translate to
English?).

'primitive communism'. I don't think mine is at all a description of
pre-class society, though: everything I've heard about these says they are
extremely rule-bound and inflexible; certainly not working by people
randomly doing new things. In any case, my invisible hand needs a very 
large population to work at all.

 Every invisible hand is a mythical thing.

So I would replace the "invisible hand" with "vision" and
"conscious action" .

May be I should better call it something like "consciousnessful
acting" in order to hint at the difference between what I mean,
and what I take for our current level of "consciousness", a
mixture of belief and individual awareness.

And I would not see the "need" as limited as you do (here).  It
sounds a bit like "if you're hungry, you will go and do something
about it...". 

That's not a core part of the argument; I used 'need' to simplify to
brotchen level... In my sense I would see 'need' as including for example 
'I need to go and explore mars', with all the consequences that would 
have for production...

The difference between a one-off reaction to a
need and the organization of life lies within the level of
consciousness.  Over most parts of history this
quasi-consciousness was hidden in various myths, because people
could not grasp what they did and how to consciously organize
it... so they pictured it out of themselves and put it into
"inherited wisdom" or "god" or "commandments" or "law" or "habit"
or "tradition" etc..  And that's why this part of history has
been called pre-history of the human kind.

(I'm not sure if it helps to supplement the "need" with "desire"
and "whish"... because all of them exist on fairly unconscious
levels too, and, usually are dealt with, as if they were of
biological nature...)

----
I think this refers to both of your questions, but I'm not sure
how far I'm off the mark by your account (probably very fa...;)

Well, it definitely refers to the question :-)
But...

The classic argument from right-wing economists (eg. Hayek) as to why the
invisible hand is needed is that given the complexity of a modern society,
and the number of sub-products and levels of processing needed to create
any one product, conscious control of production would require
omniscience. And the only way to have omniscience is also to have
omnipotence. Since neither of these is actually achievable, a planning
system like that of the xUSSR is all that can be realized: they pretend to
set realistic targets, we pretend to work, etc...

My alternative hidden hand side-steps this argument; it is a
self-adjusting system, or maybe an emergent system, with actions dictated
neither by the needs of the market, nor by a Stalin-like planner. But, as
you point out, it also means that the way the overall system behaves is
not under conscious control.

You want to reinstate conscious control, but without the need for separate
planners. Which certainly sounds positive, but is even more abstract than
my suggestion. How do we all get conscious control over the direction of the 
whole of society without that itself being the only thing we have time to 
do in our lives?

Cheers
Graham


Regards,
Casi.
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