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In this video David Harvey seems very confused. Perhaps he ought to read “Capital as Power”?
Now David Harvey is more intelligent than I am and a more accomplished scholar, thinker and writer. He also seems to be speaking extempore and not using technical jargon. If I went on Youtube (I won’t so don’t worry) I would make a bigger mess of explaining contradictions in capitalism than he does in this video.
Yet, it still seems valid to ask why he is struggling so much, with a scholastic Marxist background, to explain what is going on. The main contradiction which seems to puzzle him is that there is a market but it doesn’t work like a market. Or rather, that there is a market which does work like a market down at one level but over and above that there is another market which also works… but not like a market. In other words it is a not-market. But Harvey struggles to explain – never even starts actually – how the market and the not-market work and more especially how they interact. Sure, it’s a Youtube piece but he needs to offer more than the metaphorical confusion of basements and attics.
It reminds me of the enormous knots I tied my own thinking in, in trying to understand how markets work and what capital and economic value (so-called) are. I mean before I read CasP. It was in a post in another economics blog quite a while ago and Jonathan Nitzan replied to my prolix confusion. After that I went and read CasP. I am not saying CasP cleared up all my confusions. Even if CasP cleared up all confusions it would not clear up all confusions of mine. But, back to the topic.
Markers that Marxians are confused seem to revolve around the assumption markets work or rather that they work according to classical economic theories and rules like supply and demand (explicitly mentioned by Harvey) and economic value (implied). Thus, Marxists / Marxians (at least some of them) seem confused by the market’s ability to appear as a market and appear as a not-market at the same time, at least when applying their theories.
These market / not-market behaviours appear far less confounding when one views matters through the prism of capital as power. To my thinking, CasP resolves the “value controversy” by abolishing it. Prices are not about value. They are about power. Even classical economics makes its Freudian slips. After all, it talks about purchasing power.
I’m not making any big point here. More being conversational. But believing in markets as a valuing and choice system seems to lead to an enormous amount of confusion. Looking at markets as administered price systems and then looking at prices as administered allocations seems to clear these confusions away.
If we are looking for an analogy then the market is a Ouija board. There are hands on the board moving the pointer. No invisible hands necessary. But the table is crowded, indeed the entire room is crowded, and a few big players have their hands clamped firmly on the pointer. They can rarely be unseated. They can be jostled a bit. What of the crowds that can’t even get to the table or even into the room? What agency do they have? It appears that they could only beat the game by abolishing the game.
Update: Harvey mentions Braudel. From Wikipedia I get this snippet:
“Braudel argued that capitalists have typically been monopolists and not, as is usually assumed, entrepreneurs operating in competitive markets. He argued that capitalists did not specialize and did not use free markets, thus diverging from both liberal (Adam Smith) and Marxian interpretations. In Braudel’s view, the state in capitalist countries has served as a guarantor of monopolists rather than a protector of competition, as it is usually portrayed. He asserted that capitalists have had power and cunning on their side as they have arrayed themselves against the majority of the population.” – Wikipedia.
This view appears to align more with CasP and/or CasP appears to align with Braudel. One wonders how Harvey can mention Braudel but not use his insights to clarify matters.
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Analytically, ‘economics-politics dualists’ — namely all economists, Braudel’s included — begin by conceiving capitalism as a self-regulating atomistic economy, and then tuck on power as a ‘distortion’. This is akin to physicists assuming 4 elements and then adding everything else they know as a ‘distortion’.
Science cannot tolerate logical contradictions — and yet that is exactly what splitting politics from economics ends up doing.
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Analytically, ‘economics-politics dualists’ — namely all economists, Braudel’s included — begin by conceiving capitalism as a self-regulating atomistic economy, and then tuck on power as a ‘distortion’. This is akin to physicists assuming 4 elements and then adding everything else they know as a ‘distortion’. Science cannot tolerate logical contradictions — and yet that is exactly what splitting politics from economics ends up doing.
I don’t know that the particular error at work here is Harvey’s reliance on the economics-politics duality. To me, the real error is the belief in the market metaphor.
The “market” of today’s political economy is essentially a company store in a company town, and its consumers are actually being consumed. The company store metaphor is consistent with CasP and fits perfectly with the phenomenon Harvey attempts to describe.
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Scot, I like your metaphor far better than mine (about the Ouija board). “The “market” of today’s political economy is essentially a company store in a company town, and its consumers are actually being consumed.” Well put. It has both objective and aesthetic truth to it. It certainly captures how I have felt for my entire adult life living under capitalism.
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As I mention in another post (a reply to the Pharmaceuticals topic), I have not read Braudel. Relying on a Wikipedia precis is obviously fraught with pitfalls. I took the statement, “the state in capitalist countries has served as a guarantor of monopolists rather than a protector of competition”, to indicate, at least in itself, a non-splitting of economics from politics. However, I haven’t read Braudel and relying on a brief, ambiguous Wikipedia entry is not something I am prepared to hang my hat on.
“Science cannot tolerate logical contradictions.” – Jonathan Nitzan. The wave-particle theory of light, as an example, might give us pause. It seems the more (nearly) correct statement would be that it is formal logic which cannot tolerate logical contradictions. I refer here to the Law of noncontradiction as an axiom of logic. To simply assume that the law of non-contradiction applies to all real phenomena in the entire real cosmos, could be a significant mistake. It is not provable that the law, or rather axiom, of non-contradiction always applies in reality. Indeed, there are probably enough hints in fields from quantum mechanics to cosmology to suggest other possibilities. On the other hand, the law of non-contradiction appears to apply often enough and consistently enough for it to be taken as an axiom within the logical, mathematical and scientific reasonings which permit us to deal scientifically, pragmatically, consistently and accurately with some aspects of meso or human-scale real phenomena.
At the same time, I would make at least one exception to my last sentence above. The behaviours of human beings might well cause one to question the Law of noncontradiction. Humans appear to be consistently self-contradictory. If irrationality or self-contradiction exist in humans then by extension the systems humans build will contain self-contradictory elements. As heterodox political economists, we indeed do tend to reject the notion of humans as rational agents, as the rational calculators that conventional economics postulates for the foundations of microeconomics.
This problem with humans, with conceptualizing what humans and their systems are, in total, can perhaps be looked at through the lens of causation. Bottom-up causation of the mechanistic and deterministic variety appears to exist above the quantum scale and up to but not including the emergent behaviours of complex and intelligent organisms. This is the delimited realm of phenomena which support the assertion that the Law of noncontradiction is a dependable scientific principle in addition to being an axiom of logic. However, the emergent behaviours of complex intelligent organisms (at least) appear to confound us. Bottom-up causation no longer appears to be the only form of causation. We can note the appearance or apparent appearance of top-down causation.
If the appearance of top-down causation is mere appearance then all our arguments are baseless and fruitless. We are mere fully-determined beings, constrained to “strut and fret like idiots”. In that case, consciousness itself as self-aware and self-reflective consciousness is clearly real as it is a self-proving identity. I self-consciously reflect therefore I am (self-consciously reflecting). That is Descartes’ formula. However, the feeling of free-will and choice would perforce be an illusion. Taking evolution as fact, one would then be led to deduce that there was and is an evolutionary reason for the evolution of the illusion of free-will. Very possibly, an intelligent, self-reflecting fully-determined being would be in a kind of continuous agony; an awareness of internal and complete compulsion and imprisonment, without an evolved illusion of free will and choice. A being in that continuous existential agony would scarcely be seeking further life and reproduction of life. The co-evolution of the free-will illusion with intelligence and self-reflection would be necessary.
If however, top-down causation is real too, then we would be forced to another view of free-will so-called. The best we could do, without putting a ghost in the machine, would be to look at quantum indeterminism as the source of indeterminate, unpredictable and contradictory behaviours, that is aside from looking at the contradictions of social programming and biological programming which is also clearly another arena of internal (psychological) contradiction and external (social) confliction and conflict. The thinking and research program, of some neurologists, is that there are some brain-cell structures which are of a scale that quantum effects in the brain might be possible. This would move the issue of “free-will” from complex, emergent but still fully determined behaviours (as per chaos theory) to an arena of indeterminately emergent behaviours which permit the self-illusion of free will to be affectively achieved as internal qualia.
What has all this to do with political economy and CasP? In my view, it has to do with unexamined a prioris. Science cannot tolerate logical contradictions? I would say rather that logic cannot tolerate logical contradictions and deterministic science cannot tolerate logical contradictions, and correctly so in each case. Science embracing indeterminism may perforce be required to accept certain contradictions. Does CasP position itself in a fully deterministic world as its presumed purview? I am not sure.
I will be honest. I struggle with every system of thought almost precisely at the point where I feel it is becoming doctrinaire in some fashion in some particular. CasP is a very useful model of political economy. I think CasP’s refutation of the classical thesis of economic value is ground-breaking and I have said this before. It is a major advance. It resolves the “value controversy”, as I call it, by abolishing it. It is correct to abolish it. The thesis of objectively quantifiable, comparable and aggregable economic value in and between economic objects is completely unsustainable. There are many aspects of the CasP model which I consider are homomorphically congruent with reality (my touchstone of propositional truth is homomorphic correspondence of the statement or model with some aspect(s) of reality). However, when I encounter statements like “Science cannot tolerate logical contradictions,” I become concerned. I am not entirely sure what is meant. Does it mean CasP is pure science and cannot tolerate contradictions?
How then does CasP deal with human and human system contradictions such as irrationality? Does it mean CasP limits its field of investigation and is not attempting to resolve such contradictions? CasP proves classical value theories untenable. I certainly agree with that. That people still believe in (the majority believe in) classical value theories of one form or another (utils, snalts or fancier modern variants) remains an extensive fact. How do we deal with this fact?
I hope I can indicate my unease at the bald statement “Science cannot tolerate logical contradictions.”, without appearing contrarian or disrespectful.
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However, when I encounter statements like “Science cannot tolerate logical contradictions,” I become concerned. I am not entirely sure what is meant. Does it mean CasP is pure science and cannot tolerate contradictions?
Let me try to explain.
When scientists encounter logical contradictions — namely, when their theories make contradictory propositions — they become restless and try to resolve these contradictions. Some of the greatest advances in the history of science relate to resolving logical contradictions, usually by proposing new concepts/theories (plus empirical research) that eliminate those contradictions.
The bifurcation of politics and economics tends to generate logical contradictions. When economics assumes self-equilibrating, atomistic markets, this assumption contradicts the recognition by other social scientists that there exist large corporations, governments, unions, NGO and crime syndicates, not to speak of larger networks/hierarchies of these entities. When economists assume that humans are driven by absolute utility maximization, this assumption contradicts the recognition by many other social scientists that humans seek relative power. When economists assume (usually unknowingly) that they can aggregate ‘real’ magnitudes based on individual utility, this assumption is contradicted by other social scientists who think that humans are different from each other and therefore that their utilities cannot be added, that people are often very irrational, that they are largely unaware of their preferences/utilities, and that most of their preferences/utilities are not their own in the first place. I can go on, but I think the point is clear.
Economists treat such contradictions by declaring that one element is a ‘distortion’ of the other, but this treatment leaves the contradictions intact.
How then does CasP deal with human and human system contradictions such as irrationality? Does it mean CasP limits its field of investigation and is not attempting to resolve such contradictions?
I don’t think irrationality per se is a logical contradiction. The logical contradiction arises when the theory assumes that human are always rational as well as that they are often irrational. CasP doesn’t assume that people are rational or irrational. It observes that the thoughts/actions of human beings are shaped, at least in part, by the hierarchical structure in which they exist, and that the result often seems irrational to us (though usually not so to the rulers). It also recognizes that humans are capable of autonomy, and that, under certain circumstances, they might create autonomous relations and perhaps even autonomous societies. Since the position of society on this spectrum is not a starting assumption, but something to be examined, it does not generate logical contradictions of the type I mentioned earlier.
More on these issues: The Capital As Power Approach. An Invited-then-Rejected Interview with Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan
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Jonathan,
Thank you for your reply. Your points are clear. And I find myself agreeing with every one as it is presented. To be self-critical, my mode of thinking seems to be bedevilled by a peculiar or idiosyncratic gap: many gaps in fact. Specifically, I had some hard sciences training and some humanities schooling but my glaring gap is the social sciences. Even my philosophical studies, if I can call them that, have been autodidact and confined to the British Empiricists and the American Pragmatists and thus I have scarcely gone beyond the 19th C. I have paid most attention to Berkeley, Hume and Peirce (and Marx). I put no store in Peirce’s Triadism. I invert Berkeley’s monist idealism to “existentist” monism, though for everyday pragmatic purposes I can be regarded as no different from a materialist or physicalist (of the monist variety).
In trying to grapple with what was wrong (and frankly infuriating) with conventional economics and even parts of Marxism which did not add up to me (classical economics in toto in other words), I hurdled the social sciences, or rather stepped blindly over their whole ground knowing nothing about them, and attempted to go back to (my self-developed) ontological first principles for empiricism. Then I have tried to work out again from those first principles as it were, to try make sense of what I call “hybrid” or “amalgam” disciplines like “economics” or classical political economy . I call them hybrids or amalgams because they attempt to mix the real and formal, or the descriptive and prescriptive if you will, without an adequate ontological base analysis. That is to say their taxonomy of fundamental ontological objects (fundamental to the disciple) is confused: completely wrong in fact with prescriptive objects treated as descriptive objects, with descriptive and prescriptive mixed indiscriminately and so on. That has been my basic diagnosis to date.
My unfinished 60,000 word autodidactic ontological thesis (but not the other 60,000 words of false starts, notes and speculations) seems to make some sense (to me) but results in a dog’s breakfast as soon as I try to work back to apply it to anything, like real world political economy. Jesus Cherizola’s paper does something of the type of thing I would have hoped to be able to do from my ontological first principles, albeit he did it much better than I could ever hope to do. But I completely fail to “reverse engineer” the appropriate social sciences and CasP approaches from my purely theoretical or “pure reason” ontological approach. You have permission to laugh. I am laughing at the naivety of my own attempts at this point.
What I am saying here is that when I qualitatively and logically-deductively run, as it were, CasP and CasP papers through my ontological schema, CasP “passes” the test of being congruent with my partly developed ontology. (One should really say my ontological schema appears to pass having a empirical discipline monograph run through it.) CasP not only passes but also illuminates my approach and allows me to expand upon it. When I attempt to qualitatively and logically-deductively run conventional economics and even some parts of Marxism through my ontological schema, they simply do not pass the test. But as I say, I cannot “engineer upwards” from my more or less pure reason approach. This should be no surprise to me. Now, I don’t know why I thought I could do it.
I’m not going to study formally again. That ship has sailed for me. But what should I start reading to overcome my learning gap with respect to the social sciences (and modern philosophy for that matter). It’s easy to sense the solid foundation behind CasP and behind your answers but what should I read to get a proper handle on it? I guess I need to read some foundational texts and modern texts. Where do I start and where do I read up to? Can you recommend say five or six texts, any size, all original authors (in English, translations available if necessary) and not surveys unless you regard a given survey as belonging in such a small foundational group of texts. I will have to go away and read these. I simply don’t seem to have the foundation to write anything useful on this forum. Also, I completely misconstrue your succinct one sentence answers and keep pushing you to paragraph sized answers. I don’t want to continue being so obtuse.
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I’m not Jonathan, but I want to reply to this post’s intention. Don’t stress about asking for clarification because the forum is not a place for experts to gate-keep with prerequisites. Frankly, this site could use more readers like you. Questions drive conversation.
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Thank you JMC. However, a bit of self-objectivity requires that I recognise that there’s something about the CasP approach (as social science method) which I just don’t get yet. If I could read several key sociology or social science texts it would help. The autodidact approach has its limitations of course but I find immersive reading of key original thinkers helps a lot. (Or at least I believe it does.) One begins to absorb the way of thinking and more of an instinct for applying the same methods. Learning to write in the same technical terms helps too. Who should I start with? Durkheim and Weber? Which texts? Also, which recent texts?
My reading has been over-directed at a small subset of philosophy. Hence my habit of going a long way off on speculative and irrelevant tangents. I think I am questioning the fundamental assumptions of an approach but often all I am doing is going too far down the rabbit hole of Pyrrhonism.
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It’s easy to sense the solid foundation behind CasP and behind your answers but what should I read to get a proper handle on it? I guess I need to read some foundational texts and modern texts. Where do I start and where do I read up to? Can you recommend say five or six texts, any size, all original authors (in English, translations available if necessary) and not surveys unless you regard a given survey as belonging in such a small foundational group of texts.
This is not an easy question to answer, and I’m not even sure it is the right question to ask.
I’ve looked through my library for innovative books that influenced our thinking over the years – studies of society, science and history, as well as novels — and I counted about 100. There is no way for me to rank them by their importance. They all are. But reading alone won’t help anyone ‘find his/her way’, so to speak.
Our own experience taught us that to develop our opinion – rather than to adopt the opinion of others – we must do our own empirical/historical research. One reason is that research allows us to ask and perhaps answer questions that others haven’t. But the more important reason, I think, is that it sharpens our sense of judgment. Research allows us to better discern what question are important and what are secondary, or unimportant; which subjects are crucial and which less so, or not at all; which opinions are innovative, and which are silly; etc.
For this reason, I make my course work research dependent. My students, both undergraduate and graduate, are given two empirical assignments and a final theoretical-empirical term paper. The first assignment asks them to mimic my own empirical work; the second makes them answer a series of empirical questions; and the final one requires that they both invent and answer their own theoretically-inspired empirical questions (see https://bnarchives.yorku.ca/702/).
Not everyone is cut for this type of work. But in each class, there are some students who rise to the challenge, and in due course, some of those become first-class political economic researchers. I can also attest that many of these would-be experts started my class with no prior background in political economy, mathematics, and statistics.
So, I know that this method works – and, most importantly, that it is open to anyone. You don’t need to be a university professor, a PhD student, or a math wizard. You only need to be young, regardless of your age.
I hope these notes are useful.
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Rowan,
At the very beginning of their 2009 book, Nitzan and Bichler observe:
It should be noted upfront that economics – or, more precisely, the neoclassical branch of political economy – is not an objective reality. In fact, for the most part it is not even a scientific inquiry into objective reality. Instead, neoclassical political economy is largely an ideology in the service of the powerful. It is the language in which the capitalist ruling class conceives and shapes society. Simultaneously, it is also the tool with which this class conceals its own power and the means with which it persuades others to accept that power.
Nitzan and Bichler (2009), Capital as Power: Towards a Study of Order and Creorder, at pages 2-3.
CasP’s characterization of mainstream economics neatly fits Jason Stanley’s definition of propaganda as “flawed ideology”:
It is an example of what I will call a flawed ideology. When societies are unjust, for example, in the distribution of wealth, we can expect the emergence of flawed ideologies. The flawed ideologies allow for effective propaganda. In a society that is unjust, due to unjust distinctions between persons, ways of rationalizing undeserved privilege become ossified into rigid and unchangeable belief. These beliefs are the barriers to rational thought and empathy that propaganda exploits.
Stanley (2015). How Propaganda Works, at page 3.
I have come to call Stanley’s “flawed ideologies” “normative myths” because these “ideologies” are intentional, they are meant to provoke action or inaction, as the case may be, much as Plato’s “Noble Lie.” Many (if not all) of what Jonathan refers to as assumptions of mainstream economics are, in fact, normative myths intended to shape reality, not to reflect it. The normative myth of the politics-economics duality resulted in overturning laws that protected workers in favor of laws protecting capitalists, for example.
As someone with an electrical engineering background who was forced to learn about real scientific models, I concluded long ago that mainstream economics was not a science. Classical political economy began as an effort in apologetic rhetoric to square the inequities of emergent capitalism with the egalitarianism of emergent liberalism. Marx somehow managed to tease something of a science out of the rhetoric of classical political economy by filling in the obvious gaps that rendered the rhetoric fallacious. Unfortunately for us all, Marx posed a challenge that capitalists, then truly coming to power, to overcome, and they did so by proposing a theory of value in contradiction to Marx’s theory of value. In spite of their reliance on the analogy of physics, neoclassical economists modeled their theory of value on Marx’s, even incorporating its fundamental flaw of insisting on measuring an immeasurable value metric.
I view CasP theory as still in its infancy, and I believe a lot of work still needs to be done to improve and extend CasP’s explanatory power. Frankly, if past is prologue, most of that work cannot be done by economists or even other social scientists. The neoliberal era of capitalism we are living in now did not emerge by accident but was the result of an inter-disciplinary movement of economists, sociologists, lawyers, cognitive scientists, philosophers, mathematicians, etc., some of them unwitting (e.g., Myrdal, Von Neumann, Tversky and Khaneman, etc.). At the moment, CasP lacks a compelling call to action to inspire a movement, but I do believe that a movement can be built on CasP theory.
Here is an article that Jonathan has recommended to me in the past: Theory and Praxis, Theory and Practice, Practical Theory.
You might find it interesting, if you have not read it before.
–Scot
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Scot,
I have read “Capital as Power: Towards a Study of Order and Creorder” once. Once is not enough of course. I “crash” read it on the computer screen. I don’t mean speed reading but reading fast, not taking notes and skipping some graphs and graph explanations. And I am a person who usually likes graphs. But reading a long text on computer screen is very uncomfortable, I find. I absorb stuff better from real books in an arm chair or at a study table. But one is still very lucky to have access to the pdf of course.
The two quotes you give, I agree with completely. The fundamental thesis of CasP I also agree with completely and I find it entirely empirically supportable. There is one aspect of CasP I have sort of “instinctive” reservations about but unless and until I can enunciate my unease clearly I wonder whether I should prefigure it or not. It is this unease which causes me to jump precipitously to question or criticise when I suspect J.N. or CasP theory of veering too close to scientism or its own dogma. It has turned out on each specific occasion I have been completely wrong. J.N. has answered my questions in a way which clearly illustrates a scientific approach and no trace of being scientistic.
It’s almost as if I am hard science literalist and I have in a prejudicial fashion thrown out the entire social sciences from my thinking, probably precisely because conventional economics is so atrocious and so obviously ideological. It has given the whole school of social sciences a bad name in my mind, along with the often obviously ideological Political Science. I have been interested in hard science and philosophy and nothing in between other than literature and cinema (but then considerations of aesthetics belong to philosophy). I tend to think there are only two subjects. It’s a kind of motto of mine. “There are only two disciplines. Physics and philosophy. Every other subject is a derivative or an amalgam.” The derivative extensions of physics, namely chemistry and biology are still acceptable to me because I can look at them in an entirely physical and physics light.
Physics and philosophy is an interesting dualism for someone who claims to be a monist. But I find it consistent because human perceptions (impressions) and understandings, I hold, are based entirely on modelling and modelling only. Modelling processes can be be conceived as operating wholly in the monistic system, the single system of sub-systems. Our modelling in turn is based entirely on physical processes and information transfers as a patterns via and through physical media. The human visual system (from eyes to visual cortex) is a perfect example and the modern computer hardware and software analogues to vision which we have developed now enable us to conceptualize quite clearly that our view of a room (as a sighted person) is a HUD (head up display) in our visual cortex. I had already begun to philosophise about vision (as a sensory modelling system) when a set of retinal tears forced me into a series of eye surgeries, if I wanted to save the sight in my left eye. My experiences before and after the surgeries and even in the conscious “twilight” anaesthesia period of eye surgery foregrounded very clearly to me that the vision system is a combination hardware-software or physical-logical system and brought forward further experiential details how it does its modelling. Of course, if I had studied what my eye surgeon had studied I would already have had this understanding.
To bring it back to modelling, I hold as I said that human perceptions (impressions) and understandings are based entirely on modelling and modelling only. That’s a fundamental tenet of my developing empirical philosophy at this point. Thus, there are only more complete and less complete models and only models accurate enough for some purpose or not accurate enough for some purpose. Finally, in the set of models not accurate enough for some purpose are those which possess no homomorphic congruences at all (homomorphic congruence being my touchstone for modelling validity as per the correspondence theory of truth) with reality. These are illusions and delusions. In the monist purview, models are perforce a subset of reality and only contain a modelled subset of the relevant relations in reality. Hence, models are always incomplete.
But certain extensive false models are special in the sense that they are shared and given group or social credence. We can fit in this space the myths and ideologies you are I are talking about (and CasP is talking about). We consider that it is fairly clear to us that all, or least major aspects of, classical economics is/are myths and ideologies without an objective scientific basis for their claimed “truths”. Nevertheless, these models tell compelling stories and give compelling visions and hopes to people and people live by them just as they live by religions. The empirically false system (false with respect to at least some more fundamental facts) creates a new extensive empirical reality as a social reality and with its generated real relations, many a of which are built on original or more fundamental falsehoods. The social-fictive (a word I probably have borrowed from social science) becomes its own reality and self-validates, generally with circular logic.
It is this capability of persons and societies to erect social-fictive superstructures over and above an objective base (they still draw things including matter and energy from a real base) that becomes very difficult to deal with theoretically in one important sense. How do I inoculate my own theorising from its own propensity to develop a personal-fictive superstructure? I can get pretentious and call my personal foolish fictions speculative philosophy. This does not save a person’s case. The next step is to seek empirical corroboration; clear enough in the hard sciences at least where one is not dealing with too many emergent complex system phenomena. What is then happening extensively and in a feedback manner gets difficult to analyse. Attribution of causes also gets extremely difficult. And so much the more difficult do things become when socially shared illusions and delusions create new concrete relations. The next step is to seek consensus observations. A game of “Do you see what I see?” also sometimes called an echo chamber. We seek like-minded people who will validate our theories, measurements and perceptions, we start suffering from confirmation bias and so on, if we are not very careful.
If we see and name the myths of classical economics, as we in this blog tend to do, we rely not just on in-group consensus but on objective, scientific observations. That is good and valid so far as it can be taken. But what if our methods partially involve measurement of or in the social-fictive dimensions we seek to theorise? At one level this is not fraught. “Measurement of” is not a problem in one sense. We can measure how many people in a population believe in a standard statement that essentially says markets work and value things correctly and efficiently. CasP seems to move at times into “measurements in” social-fictive dimensions. It does this as J.N. has explained to me a couple of times by saying (if I get it now) that “capital is power” (yes I get that), that it “instantiates power rather measures value” (yes I get that too and I hope my way of expressing it is correct). Thus it is valid to take money as the measure of that power because it instantiates and operatively (performatively) implements it.
But then some theorising moves on to talking of “hype” and another recent concept, the word for which eludes me right now, and these start to feel to me like more purely speculative notions. J.N. has explained to me a couple of times their objective basis in his theory and I seem to get it with J.N..’s words in front of me. But a day later the explanation and justification elude me again, in my head. If one cannot understand concepts well enough for recall and paraphrase, it’s a rather clear sign one hasn’t grasped them properly.
Naturally, I don’t want to put people to the trouble of explaining such things over and over again to me. That is the particular level I need to work on. I will try going back to the articles you suggest and to the main monograph and re-reading the later chapters which I perhaps did read to quickly. If I can’t organize my thoughts, I can’t give an attempted refutation. I very doubt I am going to refute any part of CasP. More likely, it might result in more elaborated explanations for persons like me who have particular blind-spots to particular ideas.
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