From: Rakesh Bhandari (rakeshb@STANFORD.EDU)
Date: Thu May 22 2003 - 15:34:48 EDT
>Paul C wrote on Thursday, May 22: > >> But would add that a key factor of human labour is its >> flexibility we are 'RUR', we are the universal robot, >> the universal worker. What gives abstract labour >> a reality is this human adapability. This is why the >> labour of horses or cattle, useful though they have >> been to farmers and teamsters, can not be treated > > as abstract except in the abstract sense of horse-power. > Yes this excellent point speaks against Nicky's earlier attempt to assimilate slave labor to the work of cattle. American plantations in the South shifted between indigo, tobacco and cotton in response to market signals (Fogel); slaves were also rented out to mfg enterprises (Starobin). There is also the sense in which human genetic underdetermination and thus human genetic volatility gain a far greater practical reality in modern society than time previous. Here I draw from Ernest Gellner in "Culture, Constraint and Community" in The Human Revolution. ed. Paul Sellars. It was Adam Smith's insight that "the system of differentiated and minutely proscribed activities" (the division of labor) which make up a given society is not predetermined, but "can be elaborated and developed to a point of refinement." Modernity has meant a relative liberation of human plasticity so evident in the cognitive and production innovation of modern societies. Yet given our volatility we have to be capable of communicating and cooperating with each other. "Without plasticity, no diversity, and without diversity, none of that rapid exploration of alternative stratgies which has made mankind what it is. But without cultural restraint, the plasticity would become malignant and excessive, and move much to fast. It would also be unable, through its very very volatility, to retain any advantages gained. So the plasticity needs to be counterbalanced by restraint and constraint." How to recognize both that plasticity and the constraints on it were the questions which I believe Austo Marxist and Kantian Max Adler's theory of the social a priori was meant to answer. To the extent that the social a priori was not posited as transcendental, plasticity was allowed for (we know that the Kantian aprioris have not stood up to 20th century physics); to the extent that a condition of society is the sharing of social a prioris, they operated as a constraint other than coercion. The social a prioris "restores behavior to relatively narrow limits in any one cultural milieu, but not to the same limits in all milieux." (Gellner) Adler's ideas seem to me to have been unduly ignored; he was no less philosophically interesting than the venerated Max Weber. For example, Adler critiqued the empiricist idea that learning operated by the interaction of individual minds with experience since on this model each individual would build up his own system of association, in the light of an inevitably and idiosyncratic experience. Divergence between individual minds would be so enormous that the communication and cooperation on which society depends would simply be unthinkable. And it seems to me that Gellner worked on some of the same questions as Adler in what I consider to be his most brilliant piece in his controversial body of work (see Aziz Al Azmeh's compelling criticism of Gellner's work on Islam in the last Socialist Register). Yours, Rakesh
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