From: Nicola Taylor (nmtayl@YAHOO.COM.AU)
Date: Tue Nov 28 2006 - 20:34:45 EST
DOGAN wrote: > What is your response to what you describe? Is it > really as value neutral as > you describe or there are some normative aspects in > this, which we can use to > evaluate whether it is really rational how these > entrepreuners accumulate > their individual capitals? As a reply to this > question Adam Smith does not look > at what is necessary from an individual > entrepreneur's point of view. Rather > he prefers to look at it from general interets of > sicety's point of view: > satisfaction of the needs of people and progress. > Dogan you are right that Adam Smith begins with the question of what is socially desirable; however, he rapidly concludes that the pursuit of individual interest leads *naturalistically* to a socially beneficial outcome so long as *social* institutions don't interfer with the invisible hand of the market. In conjuring up an invisible hand as a social metaphor for the associative mechanism in a disasssociated community Smith effectively errects a protective wall around the concept of self-interest. Post-Smith economists no longer weighed individual interest against other social ends. What is rational for individuals is also, miraculously, taken to be rational for societies. Indeed, the so-called value-neutrality of mainstream economic theory depends upon the assumption. Unfortunately, to challenge the value-neutrality of self-interest economics from Smith to the present is not enough because, as Jerry rightly points out, modern neoclassical and new classical theories have their own critiques of irrationality inbuilt. Any theory of imperfect competition (into which my Nike example fits perfectly), or divergence from equilibrium solutions, is by definition a theory of irrationality. Imo, Marx's enduring contribution lies in his alternative conception of the logic of capital driven by the value form (money) and, as a result of the existence of this *social* form, capital's unique relation to wage labour. There is nothing 'ethical' in this alternative conception of capitalist logic as Marx's investigation concerns what CJ Arthur has called the 'spring' or motive force behind capital's reproduction (and not it's social desirability, or otherwise). In explicating contradictions in the development of capital's logic Marx's goes far beyond any critique of individualist rationalism, imo. But I will have to leave it there. Nicky Send instant messages to your online friends http://au.messenger.yahoo.com
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