Home Forum Political Economy Marx’s notion of alienation and CasP Reply To: Marx’s notion of alienation and CasP

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Thank you, Jonathan, for your succinct reply. My comments tend to be discursive and prolix. I also appear to have missed the point.

The term “dialectical determinism” I will take to encompass the additive meaning of “dialectical materialism” and “economic determinism”. I accept your point that there is a problem in basing “dialectical determinism on narrow economic arguments”. Whether Marx does this in the entire body of his works might be an open question. However, the practical point is that the Marxists do it. The orthodox neoclassicals also do it.

CasP has refuted the arguments for narrow economic value measures (UTILS and SNALTs): the “value controversy” as I call it. Of course, CasP has not ended arguments about value per se and I don’t think CasP claims that. CasP has simply pushed arguments about human and human social value(s) back to where they belong, in axiology and ethics.

I agree with your point 2.

In point 3 you write “Hanging these delays on ‘countervailing forces’ is reminiscent of neoclassical ‘distortions’. A theory that claims to grapple with the fate of humanity should include any meaningful countervailing force in its core.” I agree, if the countervailing forces actually are not at the core or if the program of finding the countervailing forces is not at the core of the dialectic. There is a further problem. Countervailing forces can emerge or evolve at higher or later stages.

However, CasP again sidesteps or annuls this problem. If it finds, or reasserts the finding of, power at the core of the system, as it does, then it has fixed on a “timeless verity”, at least in the time span of human history. Power or rather social and physical power always lie at the heart of human societies (along with other basic verities to use that terminology). New forms of power can emerge and evolve and must be newly identified at the “speciation level” but power as such is a constant genus or category.

It is all too easy to slip into old habits of thought while attempting to grasp a new conceptual paradigm. I continue to make this mistake. At the same time, I take nothing on trust. Where the taking on of an unorthodox theory could entangle me in a new orthodoxy I am wary to say the least. The touchstones have to be science but not scientism and empiricism but not the settling for mere surface appearances.

  • This reply was modified 2 years, 6 months ago by Rowan Pryor.
  • This reply was modified 2 years, 6 months ago by Rowan Pryor.