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PoliticalEconomyTalk 7 - 24 Sep 2015 - Main.LizzieOShea
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META TOPICPARENT | name="PoliticalEconomy" |
When we talked today about political economy, I started thinking - I must confess, as I am prone to do - what would Marx make of this? | |
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> > | So I think you're being at once too functionalist and too idealistic, Shay. We have the productive capacity to feed everyone in the world (a gift, shall we say, of the industrial revolution, though it is a more recent capacity) and yet we fail to do that. We also now have the infrastructure in place to allow people to read and learn and think in a way that simply wasn't possible fifty years ago. And yet people can't read and write. These problems are as much a function of politics as technology. The the current capacity of technology is limited by politics. How do we transform that into a society that has food, clothing, shleter but also knowledge? Wresting control of technology from the current power brokers is a necessary step. It's not just a matter of the revolution reaching people. That sounds nice but I think you've simplified it in your own mind. How does that work? Where would it start? Would it not look like taking control of technology? Would it not look like more time to learn, less working, more health care, less profiteering from pharma? etc etc
For what it is worth - and in the interests of intellectual honesty - I do identify as a Marxist. Not dogmatically; perhaps a little instinctively, in that I can't find anyone with a more convincing set of analytical tools for understanding the world, even if we can argue endlessly about their application. So if that just makes me a thinker and a politician so be it. What I would say is that Marxist thinking, in my view, certainly is not simply concerned with materialism. It's about bread and roses.
[If anyone has a better method for formatting this, please be my guest.]
| | The production of human knowledge has two requirements. The first requirement is that human beings actually exist, else there would be no one to create knowledge. To exist, a human being must produce the means of her own subsistence. "By producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their actual material life." Karl Marx, The German Ideology Ch. 1. A human being that does not produce food, water, etc. will not exist for long and will therefore not produce knowledge. Unfortunately, too often the global economic system organizes itself around the production of useless luxuries and frivolous intermediaries for the conversion of capital into itself. This reality impedes the pace with which human beings produce their material subsistence, which in turn impedes the existence of human beings, which in turn impedes the production of human knowledge. Thus, a central priority for the advocate of human knowledge production should be the redistribution of resources, labor, and capital from frivolous production to the production of the means of subsistence - the expectation being that once humans have the means to survive, they will do so long enough to engage in creative production. |
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