From: Rakesh Bhandari (bhandari@BERKELEY.EDU)
Date: Thu Nov 25 2004 - 14:05:33 EST
>At 22:30 +0100 24-11-2004, Anders Ekeland wrote: >> >> The economy is not a deterministic machine, it is full of people, >>of idelogical fights, of political activity, full of *learning*. And gambling. Lipietz may have been trying to replace the automaton putatively implicit in Althusserian structuralism with the gambler. Yet the gambler, even the heroic Schumpeterian entrepreneur remains in what Lukacs called the contemplative state which is structurally selected by the reified structures of commodity fetishism. A lot of activity, even political and ideological activity--and capitalist society is hyper active--would hardly be praxis in a Lukascian sense. I am thinking here of limited wage gains conditioned on productivity improvements. Activity and fight yes, but not praxis. The Sraffian model may be open in some sense but it is not open to praxis of freely associated producers. The ex post facto fight over the surplus as physical objects by proletarians as wage recepients takes the relations and organization of production as technical givens, as reified, as perduringly objective. The Sraffian model can appear open only in a world where contemplative common sense has made praxis unimaginable and closed it off. If it is opening up the reified world to praxis that is the concern, social scientists would be better served by Lukacs and his student Guy Debord, not the Cambridge capital critiques. rb
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