Analysing capitalism

Why did you expect that political philosophy would help you understand the financial crisis, any more than it would help you understand a crisis in, say, the automobile industry? To me at least the crisis seems rather technical in origin, and the non-finance part of the world only cares because the financial part has so much influence on the rest.

I guess it makes sense to ask why it has so much influence, and whether that influence is really necessary, but a study of finance detailed enough to help understand this crisis seems better left to pure economists.

Why would anyone expect analytic philosophy to have anything to say about an issue like the credit crisis and neo-liberal financialisation in general? Analytic philosophy has progressively jettisoned any concerns with major contemporary issues in favour of certain sets of intellectual puzzles. Analytic philosophers don’t claim to be public intellectuals, or if they do their attempts are rarely convincing as analytic philosophy has little to add to public debate. They are technical experts, adroit at addressing certain problems that other analytic philosophers find interesting. There is no more point asking the average analytic philosopher for their views on contemporary capitalism than there is asking a crossword writer.

To do what I want you really have to rethink the analytic-continental divide. Continental Philosophy is not just a way of writing but mostly a tradition (far from being a monolitic block) that addressed modernity in a certain —critical— way. There are lots of people who tried to get over analytic political philosophy’s narrowness, arid specialization and uncritical take on modernity without falling into some of the excesses that you dislike. One of them has been Charles Taylor. We need to abandon the sterile labels such as liberal vs. communitarian (and others) and rethink what does it mean to think modernity politically.

What do you mean by “capitalism”?

He said, sitting in Vietnam.

and just to add, most Rawlsian political philosophers still just proceed as if the assumptions underlying

choose dp-optimal basic structure > reliably generate outcome

are unbroken. But they aren’t.

I guess I have a lot of sympathy with Zamfir and some others above that it’s not clear to me that philosophy is going to be the right tool to understand this sort of thing, at least not without a lot of other training. (You’ve got a lot of other training, Ingrid, if I recall correctly, so you’re probably better suited to understand it than most philosophers!) In some of the areas where I have non-philosophical training or do non-philosophical work I tend to find that the discussions by philosophers without special training is usually too abstract to be of practical use. That’s not to say it’s of no use- it’s often very useful for figuring out large-scale goals, clarifying positions, working out basic assumptions, etc., but when it comes down to more specific issues then one needs a lot of special training, or at least to have done a lot of special study. To tie this back in to the question, we might wonder if the current crisis shows us that, say, with the globalization of financial markets we need fundamentally different systems of norms and regulations, or whether this is just a particularly bad result of old things we knew going wrong, a failure to require sufficient capitalization, allowing non-transparent transactions, etc. What to do next depends on which position (there are probably others!) we should take. But I don’t see how philosophy helps very much with those questions, at least not without enough special training tha one isn’t opperating primarily at the level of philosopher anymore. Does that seem wrong to you?

Chris, I think you’re right that political philosophers tend to underestimate difficulties in implementing ideas. Do you mean more than that? If so, what? That doesn’t seem a special problem with Rawlsians to me, though maybe I’m wrong. Do you have any suggestions as to who you think has a somewhat better approach?

The events of the last weeks have made me wonder about the agenda of contemporary analytical political philosophy.

Indeed. And not a moment too soon, either.

Seriously, though…. I wish I did have a serious comment.

Matt, I think there is a special problem for Rawlsians because of their institutional focus. Since they help themselves to the assumption that outcomes are a more or less predictable function of institutional choice (where institutions are, more or less rule-defined entities) , they look (to me) to be in trouble if that isn’t so, since their attempt to straddle the gap between procedural approaches to justice and outcome-oriented ones get undermined.

Chris- do Rawlsians have to think that “outcomes are a more or less predictable function of institutional choice”? I don’t doubt that many have thought that but I don’t see that they have to. Why can’t they say, “well, it turns out that politics and achieving justice in the real world is hard. We’ll have to keep working and tinkering to do the best we can.” The fact that achieving justice is hard is a problem for all views, though, it seems to me. I certainly don’t see how, say, a view like Cohen’s that doesn’t focus on institutions is any better, especially since it seems to offer no practical guidance at all as far as I can tell, and certainly faces just as serious issues about unintended effects and difficulties in implementation. It does seem plausible that philosophers ought to be more serious about how hard it might be in practice to achieve justice, but this again seems to apply to everyone.

Perhaps I was a bit unfair. I concede that an APP might well be the first person that you would turn to if you had a particular question about certain aspects of distributive justice, political obligation and other normative issues in political theory. APPs have seen political philosophy as an application of applied moral philosophy and have framed their questions and answers accordingly. As a result their answers are generally universal/ahistorical and grounded in ideal theory. This may or may not be a problem depending on your particular views. It certainly provides a great deal of precision, rigour and generality.

But if you want APPs to focus on macro-social phenomenon, it might be a bit much to ask, because the tools seem to me to be unsuited for the job. As suggested above, there is a difficulty in translating the ideal theory to reality when the effects of institutions don’t have predictable effects. Macro-social phenomena are generally messy, vague and unpredictable – making it difficult to be as rigorous and precise as analytic philosophers would like. Working on technical issues, APPs are less likely to spend time examining macro-social trends – unlike political economists and sociologists amongst others. They therefore don’t have much to say about, say, risk society, multitude and empire, the role of fear in US politics after 9/11, gendered constructions of homo oeconomicus, or the clash of fundamentalisms. Many would regard these issues as ‘unclarifiably unclear’ and I’d certainly agree with them in a few (most?) instances. But there is a trade off between clarity and rigour on the one hand, and relevance and insight on the other. APPs have decided to base their professional standards around the latter, meaning that they won’t have much to say about the credit crunch that isn’t heavily hedged and laden with caveats.

Just reminded me, I must go and read some Marx, I know some of his theories, but second-hand. I was thinking this way before the crash.

I might throw in some Mr Smith and Mills.

The rest of this post/comments scare me like when I go swimming and get out of my depth; although I can see one thing – that the grand-old ‘grand unified theory’ of analysis doesn’t really cut it when talking about very complex systems as HH said – what I suppose it could explain people’s thoughts though, being less complex cogs in a more complex system, the motivations aren’t that complex, like the people rushing to get their money from the banks.

And why have some philosophers divorced themselves in part from the real world, in the chase of the analysis of knowledge and ‘how we learn’? And purely abstract analysis? I do wonder if that Wittgenstein has a lot to answer for…

Matt,

I’ve just sent you something I wrote on these issues a while back …

Meanwhile … Obviously you are right to say that institutions in the narrow sense have a great deal to do with the present crisis. But there’s a big leap (that Rawlsians often make – I’m thinking Pogge here) from the claim that we can trace outcomes to explanations after the event, and the claim that we can choose institutions antecedently with a view to generating particular outcomes.

The claim I made about false social theory was intended to be a conditional one. Obviously, institutions in the rules-with-incentives sense play a big role in what happens. The problem is that (I think) Rawlsians assume that they play a bigger role than they probably do.

As for your last para, about “an extremely stupid view”. Well I’m very happy to worry and tinker with institutions, but I’m probably less resistant, in the real and imperfect world, to a bit of brute after-the-fact redistribution (windfall taxes anyone?) than some others are.

Ingrid writes:

“…it’s not implausible to say that the foundations of capitalism are shaking. Yet I find little help in contemporary analytical political philosophy to help me understand what’s going on. …I have never found the ‘critical’ literatures they read very helpful – too rhetorical, too sweeping, insufficient analytical for my taste. Too much at the level of critique and deconstruction. …So what if we would start by collectively constructing a reading list on these issues for those who prefer to reason within the analytical tradition?”

Especially given that Marx has already been mentioned more than once, I’m left scratching my head and wondering why nobody has mentioned the writings in recent decades by the non-bullshit Marxists, as represented, for example, in the essays collected in the book Analytical Marxism that Roemer edited. Doesn’t this obviously fit the bill?

I’m happy to agree, Chris, that Pogge often makes unreasonable claims about how institutions work, but this seems to me to be a pathology of his, and a lack of care for detailed work, rather than a deeper problem with an institutional view. (Matias Risse’s criticism of Pogge is especially useful here, I think.)

Analytical vs Historical. The problem is the Cartesian view of history.
Theorists see values as constitutive, and liberal and neoliberal policies as resulting from preferences and prejudices. “Reason” is no more or less than the formal and logical (non-contradictory) structures built upon those prejudices.

A historian of the academy might recognize that the old division between the desire for wisdom and the desire for gold, the old dynamic tension, has collapsed over the past 50 years or so, so that the honest study of greed has become its moral defense. The theory of individualism and self-interest has become such a part of our intellectual political discourse that it’s assumed now that no future president would, or should be expected to, reverse the course of the increasing power of the executive. The “scientific” study of individualism has resulted in a theory of the individual and of undivided consciousness that is more based in ideology than logic. But we have created our own reality: geek heaven.

A soldier serving in the army of a democracy must act, must be responsible and follow the moral codes both of an authoritarian order and a free one. He must live, experience and understand the world as both a soldier and free citizen. That not unified consciousness, that’s consciousness divided against itself as ideal and as principle.

Cartesian, anti-historical, anti–Freudian, anti-Marxist, anti-empirical (if empiricism goes against assumptions of atomistic individualism); denying the existence of any forms of cultural determinism simply out of fear [determinism for thee but not for me] anti-narrative (formal), pro-crystalline (formal); operating on the assumption that expertise is wisdom and that judgement is calculation and that if you never really have to grow up. The intellectualism of neotenous self-absorption.

We need theoreticians who know how to count and analysts who read history, in this case: economic history.

Nothing less than the heroic model of philosophy is endangered in the modern era. 90% of the traffic on CT is the discussion of wisdom as revealed by “greats.” Are you a Rawlsian, or a Platonist, or a Rortyite? What does Aristotle, Kant, or Marx have to say?

The terribly threatening whisper from the future is that a single man’s mind cannot encompass exceedingly large and complex phenomena and render them tractable with a few terse truths. New structures of intellectual collaboration, probably augmented by machine intelligence, will be needed to climb higher in the difficult terrain of understanding modern global economic and social structures. Once the initial fear of letting go of the greats recedes, it is rather exciting to contemplate becoming part of a superorganism. Teilhard de Chardin understood this long before anyone else. It is all in the “Phenomenon of Man.”

“Rawls wrote A Theory of Justice towards the end of the postwar boom. At that time, many people had a high degree of confidence in the extent to which national economies could be controlled and planned.
Keynsian macroeconomic techniques suggested that governments could use public expenditure and the management of interest and exchange rates to even out the business cycle. It is fair to say that experience since the late 1970s has dented the belief that we can use such tools to control something as complex as a market economy with any degree of accuracy.”

I think this is a very important point. Systems in capitalism tend to be evolutionary (yes this is a fun time to note how right-wingers tend not to believe that useful emergent systems can come from biological evolution while left-wingers tend to suspect that useful emergent systems cannot come from any non-biological evolution). Rather than controlling they system, the best government can do is apply evolutionary pressure in various directions. But that doesn’t dictate the outcomes.

Biological analogy: say the temperature in some region gets too hot in the middle of the day for the current species to do well. Will the plants change to release water more slowly? Will the animals become more heat resistant? Will they keep essentially the same physcially but instead change their movement habits more toward the night? Will they move underground? Will they congregate more around water? Will some die off? Will others change so much as to be almost unrecognizeable? A scientist could tell you that there will be adaptive change, but unless he actually controls the breeding, and often not even then, he can’t tell you exactly what the changes will be except in retrospect.

Political philosophers tend to act as if they can build the whole thing like a clock, while the reality is that the most they can do is tinker with the thermostat and maybe add a little water.

In the back and forth between Chris and Matt, I noticed a discrepancy worth commenting on. Chris seems to be more focused on distributional concerns. Those are obviously important, but average wealth is pretty important, too. I don’t think this particular crisis is demonstrating any truths regarding distributional concerns. I think the last 25 years in the United States have indicated that there is something wrong the democratic institutions in the United States with regards to achieving just outcomes in economic distributions. But the political experience in Europe over the same time period suggests that these problems may be particular to the traditions and history of the US. On the other hand, the ability of our institutions to produce economic wealth has been called into question on both sides of the Atlantic. If anything, I would view this as a gap in Rawl’s analysis, but that gap is more or less intended. If the Marxist critique of capitalism proves to be accurate, Rawlsians can adopt Marx over capitalism as there go to economic order easily enough. I don’t think the current crisis goes that far, though. Even with a significant downturn, capitalism has still accomplished more than communism ever did. Marx’s cyclic economic critiques seem very relevant today, but still not quite right, in my opinion. I am more concerned about whether the political institutions we have at our disposal are up to the task of creating the financial institutions we need to fix capitalism.

Tracy W: More focus on normative questions.

I would ask us to think about how choices are set up here.

The APP – versus – ” ‘critical’ ” divide sweeps way too much into the latter category. Analytic philosophy has merits, but too many if its adherents think of it as a tribal identification solidified via truculence toward non-analytic traditions, of all kinds — you can see the politeness rapidly break down in the substitution of “bullshit” for “critical” above. The final sentence of the original post, about “those who prefer…” is weird, because it assumes that the conversation will be restricted to people who accept certain unstated conventions. Why shut the door like this?

Heterodox economists will be familiar with the same kind of refusal to engage among orthodox economists. So again, this seems an odd moment to be policing the boundaries of conversations.

The term “capitalism” is being asked to do far too much work in this discussion. It functions both as something that’s assumed to have a particular internal logic whatever that is, and to a way of pointing to the current state of affairs in the world. (A tendency to think of the social world as simpler and more legible than it is is a common problem in philosophical discussions of economy of all kinds.) This move also forgets a basic insight of feminist economics, which is that the real, material world we inhabit is much more institutionally-complex than simple notions of “capitalism” or markets or money would suggest.

I would suggest (a) if we’re paying attention to Marx, read the 2nd and 3rd volumes of capital in which a more fluid, financial economy comes into view (b) pay much more attention to Austrian Economics, especially those (e.g. Lachmann, Lavoie) who are interested in interpretation, (c) take another look at Post Keynesian economics, which has a modest philosophical tradition of its own, and which has, in writers like Davidson and Minsky not to mention Keynes, by far the richest set of theories for what is going on in the world right now.

This crisis marks another point in the transition from an ideology of capitalism and individualism as utopia to a sense of capitalism, and markets in general, as another aspect of social life. Academic intellectuals are not leading in this- indeed they’re lagging behind. Academic libertarianism is the new scientific Marxism.

What’s being built still slowly but now visibly is a culture founded in and respectful of -because constituted by- divided consciousness. Theses days you’ll find a better description and analysis of American daily life on HBO than on a university campus, where proud utilitarian “philosophers” like Lyndsay Beyerstein walk around wearing Johnny Cash T-Shits without paying the slightest attention to the fact that they’re celebrating someone who represents the opposite of everything they claim to represent. I shouldn’t even have to add that I’m not talking about religion, but I have to assume I have no choice.
—-

The answer to the immediate crisis seems to be Sweden 1992, but no one seems to have the guts -Not DeLong, not Krugman- to call for shoving that down Republicans’ throats and taking responsibility for the result. What we get is to bi-partisan bullshit that won’t work so the blame is divided equally between the two parties. Literally that’s the argument: Only if we can’t come together to do something that won’t work should we consider something that might Read DeLong. Read Roubini
” the claim by the Fed and Treasury that spending $700 billion of public money is the best way to recapitalize banks has absolutely no factual basis or justification.”

Tell me now who puts party before country?

Ingrid,

I agree that there’s very little work of analytical Marxism that’s been published during the past fifteen or so years. It seems that this research project rapidly fizzled out shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

I guess, however, that I’m reluctant to categorize the analytical Marxist literature as ‘old’. (This may have something to do with the fact that it was brand new during my graduate student days, and if it’s now old, then so, I suppose, am I.)

I think the non-bullshit Marxists did try — for a brief period in the relatively recent past — to do pretty much exactly what you were lamenting the absence of in your post.

As far as I can tell, there’s very little ideal theory in their writings. There’s a fair amount of attention to the prospects of a transition from actually existing capitalism to socialism and, by contast, very little spelling out of how things would be in socialist heaven. Here they mirror Marx.

Since you say, in your most recent post, that “I had actually orginially inserted the ‘analytical marxists’ as an example in the post, but took them out since I felt that this was ‘old’ literature”, I’m now puzzled by the following line in your original post: “I suspect there is quite some (older?) literature out there, but that it just hasn’t been very fashionable in recent years.” Shouldn’t this have been more than a suspicion, given your outdating of analytical Marxism?

Picking up on the “rhetorical” question of Dan bednarz: We need to look to Marx, while recognizing that Marx was insufficiently materialist in his analyses. (Sebastiano Timpanaro was arguing for a more materialist Marxism in On Materialism, back in 1975.) In other words, we need to understand the ecological limits and possibilities of capitalism. We need to examine what ecology and systems theory can tell us about energy flows and the viability of complex societies. In other words, we need to start taking Engels and his dialectics of nature seriously.

Sorry that should be 1985-2005

‘But there is a trade off between clarity and rigour on the one hand, and relevance and insight on the other.’

That’s a nicely turned aphorism, but it can’t be quite right. If something’s unclear, how can you tell whether its relevant, or what it might be relevant to?

And why have some philosophers divorced themselves in part from the real world?.. I do wonder if that Wittgenstein has a lot to answer for…

Hard to lay this particular pathology at the dotty Austrian’s door, unless you think that his encouragement to ‘get back to the rough ground’ is where the rot really sets in.

There is a lively field of inquiry devoted to understanding the economic behavior of human beings. It is called “economics”. If your aim is to understand human economic behavior, individually or socially, locally or globally, that is where you begin. And like any other area of systematic inquiry, a sustained encounter with economics gives rise to a host of difficult abstract, methodological and conceptual questions about the foundational concepts and principles employed in the field of economics, and also about the concepts and principles that economics shares with other fields of inquiry. This is true whether the particualr forms of economic thought that appeal to you are classical, orthodox or heterodox.

Economics also has a normative, evaluative dimension that produces or draws on substantive claims about rationality: about rational ways of organizing one’s values, about rational means of organizing and conducting inquiry, about rational balancing one’s mental states and about rational standards of decision-making, deliberation etc. There are many areas of philosophy that are closely allied with both the descriptive and evaluative dimensions of economics, and the fields cross-pollinate each other. This is actually a very lively area of research. Many of those on the more philosophical side of the line would be seen as analytic philosophers by most definitions. Their work can be found in philosophical and interdisciplinary journals that publish articles in the fields of decision theory, value theory, moral philosophy and other areas of thought related to practical reason.

Much of the work in cognitive and connative psychology also has strong participation from analytic philosophers, and is clearly relevant to political thinking. Analytic philosophers are just as involved as philosophers ever have been in the broader inquiry devoted to understanding human nature.

As someone who was once a professional analytic philosopher, and is still a devoted amateur, and as someone who also spends a lot of time thinking about politics too, I have to say that I have found my philosophical research to be directly relevant to my political thinking in countless ways. I draw in some way on my philosophical thinking in just about everything I write, including blog posts. However, I admit have never taken much of an interest in the institutionalized contemporary sub-field sometimes called “analytic political philosophy”, which seems dominated by certain star thinkers, and certain questions and inquiries that have never strongly attracted my attention.

For one thing, there is a bit too much emphasis for my taste on normative evaluation, and not enough on descriptive understanding. Many people in political philosophy always seem to me to want to jump right away to questions about what is right, and don’t do nearly enough preliminary thinking about the way things actually are, and why they are the way they are. They sometimes indeed seem to make a point about advancing normative prescriptions that are supposed to apply to all rational beings, or relate mainly to strange ideal societies that are inhumanly remote from our own. Philosophy always has been, and always will be concerned with testing its ideas by reference to hypothetical circumstances, abstracted in certain ways from the messy real world so as to bring out certain features that are the focus of the philosopher’s attention. But moral and political thinking in action are applications of practical reason to complex actual circumstances filled with actual human beings. Much contemporary political philosophy seems to me not just abstract, but removed and unconcerned with human nature as it is actually found – and therefore irrelevant to our political lives.

My own normative thinking is fundamentally rooted in the utilitarian tradition, and I think of normative political thinking as just a particular employment of practical reason, applied to current circumstances, considering immediate, short-term and long-term goals, entertaining proposed plans and actions that might be initiated in those circumstances, reasoning causally about the streams of consequences issuing from those plans and actions, and evaluating and hierarchically organizing the plans and actions on that the basis of those consequences, and different kinds of values we can apply to different outcomes. Much of contemporary political philosophy is wedded to Kantian, constructivist, right-oriented or contractarian ways of thinking about politics that are alien to me.

I have also personally never had a strong interest in the topic of justice. I suppose you could even say I am a skeptic about justice, just as I am about moral “rights” of certain kinds. But that topic seems to dominate the agenda in analytic political philosophy, whether we are talking about Nozick, Rawls or Cohen. While I do favor a much more egalitarian society, my thinking in that area is mainly based on utilitarian considerations about the benefits of balancing social power, about the most rational ways of compensating and organizing work so as to produce the most overall value for a society, about diminishing utility at the social margins, and about sustaining the social foundations of democracy. The benefits of different forms of democracy are for me less a matter of justice and rights than a question of building a sustainable and well-functioning political community, in which distributed knowledge and interests are efficiently channeled from local settings into rational social action that satisfies human needs in the most beneficial overall pattern, and that minimizes debilitating social discord so that the society can continue to progress without large unnecessary expenditures of wasted human energy.

I guess, Dan, you might say you are far more concerned about sustainability than ideals. When you consider the state of society for most of human history, this approach begins to look a lot more desirable. Kant might have some objections, though.

I’m sorry you take offense, Ingrid.

I’m suggesting (a) that your initial question about how to “analyse capitalism” is not well-formed in that it assumes too much about “capitalism” as an object of analysis. This would seem to me to be the kind of question that could be thought about within an analytic framework. Second, I suggest that there are *multiple* other areas of heterodox economics relevant to the questions your initial posting raises, among them normative questions. Keynes, for Christ’s sake, was a student of G.E. Moore and a close associate of Russell and Wittgenstein and there’s a lit in Post Keynesian economics that follows some of that up. I tend to think there’s a lot of relevant work in Institutional and Austrian economics, but since I don’t pass every idea I come across through the filter of whether it fits APP, who knows if it will interest you. Finally, your initial post contains, in its second para, what looks like a recognition that there might be material worth reading in other philosophical traditions. And yet within a few posts you echo, without apparent irony, language about bullshit Marxists. (If you are so ready to take offense, think twice about giving it!) It’s probably useless to pursue this, since once one is outside a charmed circle of discourse one can’t argue one’s way in, but I’m always struck by how the act of establishing a conversation among certain analytic philosophers entails pushing off against non-analytics.

I am not an analytical philospher; I am not a philosopher of any sort by training. What little acquaintance with philosophy I have is largely from reading CT, which is a bit like trying to do topology based on knowing addition.

That said, here are my guesses at the areas where analytical philosophy might interact with looking at the ongoing economic turmoil.

Modern political-economic thought is based heavily on two arguments.

Hayek’s argument that centralized decision-making scales badly due to knowledge-aggregation problems, and Friedman’s argument that Freedom critically includes the freedom to trade with willing, informed partners.

Decision theory might help in determining in what circumstances Hayek’s argument holds.

The most-likely candidate seems to me to look carefully at how Freedom is defined. Defining Freedom as “you may act as you choose” is not universal; the argument that only the freedom to do what is beneficial to you is true freedom has deep roots in the natural law tradition, as well as in some more modern schools of thought. (Augustine’s “Without Thee, what am I but a guide to my own destruction?” would be a classic statement of freedom as something othe rhtan lack of constraint.)

I cannot see philosophy, of any sort, as being a good choice of tool for institutional design. It can be very useful for setting goals and constraints, but institutional design is probably going to require specific kinds of knowledge that will be based in economics and political theory.

DeLong is going back and forth. Now he’s going back, or at least linking to Dean Baker.
Interestingly the first reference to Sweden I read was on DeLong’s page. With Baker adding in comments: “I’m with the DeLong plan!!!!!!”
Baker at least has been a consistent supporter.

And one more time on the general subject: The failures of Marxism, like the failures of all other philosophical/linguistic systems, begin with a failure of imagination, and a surfeit of students trying to think what the master thought, rather to how. That’s how ideas and observations become reified as ideologies.
You can’t systematize human perception, and you can’t systematize human interaction and continue in a republican form of government. Seeing life as a series of problems to be solved, results in a deeply simplistic and deeply unpleasant, authoritarian philosophy of governance. It’s also the foundation of modern liberalism. Seeing life as a series of aporias and dilemmas to be faced by each of us, alone and with our friends and our communities, this none of you have patience for. The language of liberalism is the language of generalities and generalizations, not the language of specifics. It’s the language of ideas, rather than observations., which is why any observations that might throw it off balance, about America and the world (if you’re an American) about gender (if you’re a man), about the behavior of a black presidential candidate (if you’re a white), about the relation of Islam to the European world… and on and on.
People need to be observant because systems never are. DeLong is a mass of contradictions, but not to himself. The same is true for most of you. That’s what needs ‘analysis’

To put it in vulgar terms, systems will always require managers and good management will always require the wisdom of Solomon; and Solomon lived, if he did at all, a long time ago. But system making is still in vogue, while the fostering of wisdom, or even the notion that it exists, is considered passe. I want progress. It’s not progress if I’m looking at the past!
Wisdom can’t be taught. And if something can’t be taught what good is it? And if something does not fit in the formal system I’ve developed, I’ll ignore it.
The rule of the academic industrial complex.

In calling them ‘non-bullshit Marxists’, I was just unthinkingly using their own term of self-reference. These Marxists even created a letterhead, which included a drawing roughly along these lines :

http://politicalpartypoop.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/no_bullshit.jpg

The circle with the line through it encompassed only the bullshit, however. It did not also encompass the bull. I assume that this is because they had nothing against bulls. They just didn’t like bullshit.

John, you’re fighting imaginary figures (ones that were straw-men even in the 50’s and 60’s) again. Please don’t.

capitalism and other alternative global economic systems. — Ingrid

I simply don’t understand what is meant by an “alternative global economic system” or by your use of the term “capitalism”.

Marx used the term “capitalism” to refer to a period in human economic organization, as distinct from systems which held in earlier periods and from a predicted later communist phase of organization.

In the 20th century the term “capitalism” was used both in the Marxian sense and in a sense in which it was distinguished from socialist and Soviet-style command economies.

With the collapse of Soviet-style command economies there is no longer a plausible case that a post-capitalist communist phase will develop. There is also no “alternative global economic system”.

It is now possible, and in fact crucial, to draw distinctions between different kinds of market economies. Different economies have very different ways of structuring companies and of setting up the relationships between financial firms and production firms. Different economies have different roles for the state and different ways of organizing workers. Korean capitalism is different from Chinese capitalism is different from Australian capitalism is different from Russian capitalism is different from French capitalism is different from American capitalism is different from Brazilian capitalism.

But the way you are using “capitalism”, I am not sure that it means anything. It seems to be a difference that does not make a difference. What is “non-capitalism”, in your worldview? Wouldn’t you do better to substitute the word “economics” for “capitalism”?

MQ,
Sorry, but both those quotes are from me.
“The technocratic elements of our ideologies reflect concrete material facts about the scale of our institutions ”
And we need to fight humanize those institutions.
I had another rougher, raunchier, comment up (I thought) but either it got removed, or I went on to other things and then closed the page. It doesn’t matter.
The real issue here is not knowledge or the lack of it but the inability of our political class to think or act as adults. And no amount of academic discussion will resolve that.

No offense intended.
Thanks for the good review.

Much the best analysis — empirical and normative — I’ve come across of the crisis and its antecedents is in books by Robert Kuttner (The Squandering of America), David Cay Johnston (Free Lunch), Kevin Phillips (Bad Money), and articles or blogposts by Dean Baker, Nouriel Roubini, Ralph Nader … hmm … not one academic economist or philosopher among them … ?

Colin Danby:

“And yet within a few posts you echo, without apparent irony, language about bullshit Marxists.”

Well it is Ingrid’s thread, and she’s been concessive over this. But I wouldn’t be inclined to be. The “bullshit” term here, as used by people like Cohen echoing Frankfurt, wasn’t meant to consign all non-analytics to the bullshit category. There were clearly Marxists before “analytical Marxism” whom the “analytical Marxists” didn’t think of as bullshitters. So the English historians, Lukacs, the Frankfurt School, Lenin, Trotsky all come out as making definite claims, having clear arguments etc. Hell, even Althusser gets an ok from some of the September group (specifically Erik Wright).

I found this skit by Bird and Fortune helpful:
The Subprime Morals of The Free Market Mind

I want to add something because it connects specifically to the debate over theory and analysis, academicism and the market crunch.

The above is discussion of political ideas held in the context of a very real crisis. But most admit the crisis concerns less a lack of ideas than a lack of political maturity and will. Now discussions of ideas tend to pull inward towards a specialized discourse supporting the community based around it, while a wider discussion of mores or values pulls outward towards the wider linguistic, social, and political world and a larger listening and speaking public. And in this case such a discussion also engages a better, more precise, description of events. So why the refusal to engage?

In general it’s less an issue whether a taste or preference is right or wrong, but of whether and how we choose to value the abstractions that result from a discussion. If precision is desirable it’s desirable to most as a capacity for precise description. But Precisionism is a value system of it’s own. When does one become the other?
And what is precisionism?

Out of the pieces of a broken balsa-wood model airplane kit Temple Grandin, when she was a child, constructed a, self-engineered, model helicopter with a rubber-band wind-up propeller, that rose 100 feet into the air.
Temple Grandin being, in addition to someone with a solid career and many successes in the field of animal husbandry, an autistic woman whose life and life obstacles were made famous by Oliver Sachs.
Keywords: tools, defective, precision-focused, ruin, work, peril, fraught, faulty.

Temple Grandin’s day job is as a designer of slaughterhouses.
And no, I’m not particularly interested in the opinions concerning intersubjectivity and the relation of individual to democratic society of a person who says she understands cows more than people.

The condemnation in my dismissal gets its power from the distance between a person and a cow, that’s all.

Naomi Klein’s book is right up there with Mike Davis’ work–if not more important–no?

s.e.#91:
If I’m the “you” in that then no. I’m pointing out to the pompously didactic HH that the combat binary he’s trying to establish is dimensionless and fictive, then I’m sort of defending Grandin against your aspersions, implied as they are. In neither case was I attempting to address present economic circumstances or theory. Certainly not to defend in any way the insectivization of food production.
I’m an agrarian populist with post-Christian/neo-Maoist tendencies, and Aquarian communalism’s fine by me, as are idealized, even mythic hunter-gatherer economies, and bio-regionally diverse nomadics.
My McDonald’s life-list is in the low teens, even though I was alive and scarfing burgers when it was founded by Mr Kroc et al., though not in my vicinity or my tally would be a lot higher. I’ve never willingly entered one as an adult, and I never bought anything at WalMart the one time I was in one.
Wendell Berry will have my proxy vote to use as he sees fit as long as he’s engaged in these issues.
Speaking way outside my mandate, not that you asked, the present state of things Wall Street looks an awful lot like something you’d see around the base of the tower of Babel just before the lightning hit.

If I may offer another pompously didactic observation, there is a profound distinction between ideologues and pragmatists (and no, pragmatism is not an ideology). Ideologues worship schemes and models as ends in themselves, and pragmatists adopt schemes and models as disposable means to ends. There is an unfortunate tendency for pragmatic schemes to be adopted by ideologues and turned into petrified dogmas. The “free market” worship of the Chicago School economists suffered this fate, and is in large measure the cause of much of our present difficulty.

Well, this was a good thread, but I guess we’ve reached the trolling phase of our discussion.

Karl Marx vs Adam Smith and the economic collapse. Karl Marx’s word “Capitalist” had a definition cleverly designed to nix one of the main points of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. A capitalist in Marx’s world is any owner of capital, even a small bakery shop owner.
Adam Smith’s praised the multi-competitor industries such as the bakery industry and condemed the Merchantile or Crony Capitalist system. The very name “Capitalist” to this day confuses economic discussions. While the world’s multi-competetor system has brought lower prices to billions of consumers, crony capitalist, merchantilists and monoplies are on the verge of destroying the gains. Because on part of Marx’s definition has failed us doesn’t mean the other part has.