From: Rakesh Bhandari (rakeshb@STANFORD.EDU)
Date: Wed Jun 02 2004 - 19:48:07 EDT
Ian wrote: > >The purchase of commodities with money by economic actors is a >feedback signal -- it is no accident that money flows in the >*opposite* direction to commodity flows. Once the economy is >identified as a kind of control system some questions naturally arise. >What is the goal state in this type of control system? How is it >represented? What causal relations support the representation? By what >mechanism are the objects of control brought into conformance with the >goal state? How does the system react to perturbations? And so on. Having earlier flirted with analogies to cybernetics in the analysis of economic reproduction, Godelier argues that economic reproduction has to be thought with the basic notions of contradiction: "The appearance of a contradiction is, in fact, the appearance of a limit to the conditions of invariance of a strcture. Beyond this limit a change structure becomes necessary. In this perspective the notion of contradiction I am putting forward would perhaps be of interest to cybernetics. This science explores the limits and possibilities of nternal regulation that allow any system (whether physiological, economic or whatever) to maintain itself despite a determined range of variation of its internal and external conditions of functioning." The Problem of the Reproduction of Socioeconomic Systems: A New Epistemological Context. In Ino Rossi Structural Sociology. Columbia U Press, 1982. rb ps on the analysis of money, it seems that we have to reach clarity as to what kind of account Marx is providing. He refers to it as an ideal genesis of money--this seems to be the key phrase. How does this compare to a history of money? What about money is it supposed to explain? Is it an evolutionary account?
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Thu Jun 03 2004 - 00:00:01 EDT