My initial response in defence of traditional, self serving, greedy economics is I do not know, and can not imagine what can take its place. I guess it is time to start thinking. Perhaps something similar to what Muhammad Yunus proposes in Banker to the Poor a sort of “social Entrepreneur”. Imperfect as I agree as it is, greed has feed many less fortunate as those who are greedy have employed those who are needy.

The parable of the talents comes to mind, which makes me think the heart of the greedy needs to change.

If civilization by definition establishes a permanent and dynamic transformation of the environment by man for the formation of permanent settlement then wouldn’t unrestricted nomadic labor seeking destroy the purpose of civilization i.e. permanent settlement and environmental transformation for greater effect to man’s cultural and material existence i.e. the process of economy?

If free markets are so unstable like natural environments prior to make human existence intolerable in that area rightly causing nomadism then for what purpose is it to man to recreate the jungle via “creative destruction” in civilization?

Man is born ill-equipped compared to beast to handle the “natural environments” having neither the brute strength, fang, talon or claw that beast posses therefore his success must comes from elsewhere i.e. his Imago viva Dei to which the capacity of his mind derives and placing in immortality by the cultural effect shared by humans even after his death.

The point of noting relationship is to point out the proper relationship of man to Earth is to transform his environment and maintain his existence via using and developing his mind.

Therefore because economy is the process of the mind of man transforming environment condition to create conditions to the maintenance of his presence in a area to say “Laissez-faire” or “let it alone” when comes to the economy is essentially saying “don’t think, react like a beast.”

If economy is created by the human mind by discovering and applying physical principle to transform his environment when how can one “let it alone” when there is the process of economic breakdown or how does an one “let it alone” when building an economy?

Won’t “Laissez-faire” essentially mean the end of “economy” and the end of civilization if all “thought out” policy actions regarding economy i.e. “planned economy” are by definition destined to fail but man can only create economy by relating to world by a process thought and conscious application of plans based on those thoughts?

The fact is that what is today called economics is anti-economics and merely stating “let it alone” because you commoners might get in the way if you commoners are granted political power in the task forming the economy you have to live with and we oligarchs of the free market know the truth is that all we have to do look out for ourselves and it will all workout (wink wink).

I can’t resist posting a link to a video dealing with the problems of Cartesian thinking and economics based on the those assumptions.

Here are the urls “http://larouchepac.com/node/9848″ and “http://larouchepac.com/media/2364″ don’t blame me for the fact you brought up Descartes.

I prattle on about the interesting parallels of a “discursive human and the discursive form of government of the lapsed-republic of the United States” and forget, all too often …..to stress the humble act of listening.

Traditionalism may be, as Robin charges, a mere instance of nostalgia. But if so, it is at least a nostalgia for the past. Marxism is a nostalgia for the future. And this is dangerous. The actual effect is that the Marxist ruler is always sacrificing justice in the present moment for justice in the glorious future. Thus the gulag is always justified because (as the traditionalist knows) manana never comes.

Still, there have been many attempts to implement Marxism/Miseanism. And they all end the same way. Now, when a thing is tried many times under many different circumstances, yet always ends the same way, we may take it that it the way it must end. Certainly, the burden of proof is on the Marxist or the Misean, not on the person who merely points to their history. I do not contend that the end we always see was any part of Marx’s intentions. Yet, when we deal with imperfect theories, the unintended consequences will outweigh the intended ones. The burden must be on the Marxist or the Misean to show us that a more faithful Marxism will result in a more compassionate communism. But as it is, we have no reason to suspect this would be true. Robin will have to present some pretty convincing evidence.

I have good reason to doubt that our friend Puck can give us such evidence. My doubts arise from his method of argumentation on marriage, which seem to me to be an exercise in ideology rather than in history. What impresses one when looking at the history of this institution is its relative and remarkable stability over the long span of history and the wide variety of cultures. I don’t know of any instances of transvestite marriage that are recognized in law, and if there were, they weren’t for very long. More evident is that no matter how different the time and place, the core of marriage remains pretty much the same. While there may be infinite cultural variety, there is nevertheless a stable theme repeated over and over again.

Puck argues from what is called the “Pango-Pango” exception. That is, for every relatively stable cultural institution, one can always say “Ah but the Pango-Pango tribe does thus and such!” One can pretty nearly always find a Pango-Pango exception–or claim to have found one–but the very rarity of the exception proves the stability of the rule.

The denial–and ideological rewrite–of history has another effect. Puck sneers at the idea of repentance. But in truth, the person or ideology with no history has no reason to repent. Several years ago, Pope John Paul II held a liturgical service apologizing for this and that in Catholic history. Some were outraged, but I was not, for this recognition of errors is crucial to right thinking. But the Marxist who does not connect Stalin or Pol Pot to his own history has no reason to revise his thinking and to re-examine his premises. (Note, this is not actually true, or quite as true, for the Marxians, who sort of repent in advance.)

History is the only real test of ideas that we have. We cannot put social systems in a test tube; we can only look at how they actually worked. The traditionalist is more like the scientist than is the pure theorist, that is, the pure ideologue. He is at least looking at something that actually was and about which we can have an actual debate. But the ideologue can only refer to his own premises, and his only real debate is whether one is being completely true to the premises. Which is why purely ideological debates always sound the way they do, and why their course is always predictable. Whoever holds power in the party will dictate the interpretation of the premises. The rest will go to the wall, if they are lucky, or to the gulag, if they are not.

Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot, Kim Jong-il, Castro and now Chavez. I really would like to know. After all, Marx made one of the most cogent analytical statements about late stage capitalism and this current American socio-economic crisis when he referred to labor becoming a pejorative in systems such as ours. When labor becomes a pejorative, much of the rest of human existence follows likewise. We are creatures of labor and when it is seen as either crude, demeaning or something to be transferred to machinery, we might as well cash out.

The romantic impulses of those who point positively at certain historic modes are not devoid of value. i do not believe you are asserting this but it is an implication of your group-imprecation. We have been through a period of “reality-inventors” who disdained history and it has resulted in one of the more idiotic interludes in the history of the lapsed republic. Personally, I look toward a future that is informed by history and not simply a re-creator’s version of edited history. It would seem to be the only prudent way forward. Scale and Density alone make much of history a place impossible to recreate even if one were so inclined.

R.G. , you have comprehensively stated what and who you are against….now, what are you for?

Actually, I was responding to one of the conclusions of the presentation here and followed it up with what I sensed was the general tenor here at Front Porch. And if the presentation of Marglin here is weak, that’s not really my fault.

The author says the following: “For Marglin, the legitimacy of what he terms “experiential knowledge” is denied by the modern economist. Experiential knowledge is knowledge based on intuition, authority, tradition, and the like.” If that’s the case, then Marglin’s advance is rather irrational, especially if it is being poised against science, reason, etc. That’s a rather banal false dichotomy. Further, if Marglin’s defense is merely a traditionalist argument against capitalism, as seems to be the presentation here, then I’m not sure what’s so Marxist about his work. It seems more akin to the utopian socialists that Marx rightly criticized, including Owen and Proudhon. But if Marglin is no traditionalist, and his wedding of Keynesianism and Marxism is somehow revelatory, then fair enough. The confusion being brought about here is merely symptomatic, then, of wider confusions entertained by many of the contributors. I have no illusions of a wedding of Keynesianism and Marxism. There are many of that stripe and people like Rick Wolff, Harry Cleaver, David Harvey and Nick Beams have provided ample criticisms of such reformist Marxisms.

. And the substance of it was mainly that we were old. Well, that is certainly a charge that can be laid at the feet of Marglin and myself, but not at Mark’s and Jason’s, among others. And even we old guys would like to hear a stronger argument than that our hair is white.

I’m not sure where you’re getting this from. I haven’t even remotely asserted that being old is necessary and sufficient to being wrong. Neither have I suggested that being old is the problem with many of the articles here. Far from it.

But that’s all I got from your post: you dislike the paleo because it is paleo. But it is not an argument that works against an article that is, in fact, praising a book by a Marxist, or at least a Marxian.

Again, I’m not sure I was claiming something so tautologous. I was suggesting, instead, that the traditionalism and the paleoconservatism is bound up with a nostalgia for an imaginary past: a past shorn of all the pre-capitalist social relations while still maintaining some of those pre-capitalist social harmonies. But you can’t have it both ways. Pre-capitalist social relations for the most part have been rife with social inequities as I pointed out in my previous reply.

As far as Marglin goes, again, either the author here is not clear on Marglin’s views or Marglin’s views themselves are reactionary. I’m not sure. I haven’t actually read his work. But I am not at fault if the presentation is unclear on this matter. Further, if the views attributed to Marglin are reactionary, then I have a hard time believing otherwise. And I suspect they’re symptomatic of many of the ideological confusions latent here.

True, no doubt, but I suspect that they were as real as Marxism or Capitalism can get. Both Marx and Mises promised a withering away of the state; both delivered gargantuan states of unparalleled power, cruelty, and violence. One has delivered states that have mostly fallen; the other has delivered states that are mostly falling.

I’m not sure any of this follows from Marx’s views or “promises.” Marx’s views were as much prescriptive as they were historically-imbued. Suggesting that Marx merely “predicted” a withering of the state and “delivered gargantuan states of unparalleled power, cruelty, and violence” is both incoherent (Marx didn’t deliver anything of that sort) and fails to follow from anything Marx said. If you have any genuine evidence that suggests that what Marx points out in The Critique of the Gotha Program, the Grundrisse, Capital, The German Ideology, or otherwise, and what actually occurred in Stalinist Russia, I’m all ears. But “socialism in one country” hardly follows from anything Marx pointed out, at least not in anything I’ve read by Marx. Marx was above all an internationalist and never came so close to anything as vulgar as Stalinism.

As to “homosexual marriage,” you argued with somebody in your head, not on this board, since non of us advanced the arguments you countered. In fact, you brought up the subject, not us.

Actually, I was addressing much of what passed for here. And I had in mostly what James Mathew Wilson was advancing as a comment:

“Marriage is a natural consequence of the familial structure of human life. It springs into being because of, and never wholly transcends, the life process of procreation and interdependence as well as the no less natural (though less wholly biological or material) process of cultivation, culture, inheritance, and tradition”

Again, I’ve pointed out why much of this appears to be naturalized when the very function of the family as construed as such has been ideological, mystifying and fails to take into account the variety of historical arrangements of the family. There’s nothing natural about a heterosexual marriage. Indeed one could possibly think of a transvestite-female(s) relationship that would meet such a criteria, but I wonder if that would be objected to. Or:

“A husband and wife, in their nature, i.e. in their essence, have the potential to join these three orientations together, which is why, again, marriage ever came into being as a fact of civilization.”

Yet, marriage as we know it came about as an economic function to maintain certain social relations above all. Etc. Etc. I’ve pointed this out earlier. So, in no ways is a homosexual marriage silly — if it can just as much meet many of the ideological criteria meted out by the very ideologues that do not want to see it occur.

“And Christians are not unmindful of the problematic nature of their own history because, unlike historical materialists, we actually study history”

No kidding? I’m sure that’s why so many irrationalisms and mystifying notions come out of the Christian tradition — blatantly overlooking history and the grubby details right under their nose.

But Christians have this thing called “repentance.”

Oh? What does this have to do with anything? Again, see above.

Some think it is an aid to the clarity of the soul. Be that as it may, it is certainly an aid to the clarity of the mind; only a confessing mind can be a reformed mind.

I’m not even sure what all this adds up to. What’s your point? Reform of the mind? Clarity of the…uh…”soul”? I’m sure all this certainly has enabled many Christians to rise up beyond their blatant hypocrisies, inconsistencies, attempts at social control, conquest, etc. And yet an idle, subjective repentance is offered…for the soul. Which usually does not make its appearance on the scene, even as a mens sana in corpore sano.

We are not antiquarians, pining for a past, but traditionalists, using the past to critique the present (or the prevalent) and fashion the future.

I’m not sure I see the difference really, in content or in form, between an antiquarian and a traditionalist. The traditionalist holds on to antiquated and fantasized forms of the past without any critical views from the present and he seeks to validate such views for the present. Again, see my earlier points with regard to all sorts of nostalgia-mongering for past social relations. We can only adequately look back to the past if we are sensitive and critical to its many grievances and barbarisms. And the past is rife with such problems, predicated off unequal social relations. So, if there is anything we can learn from the past, it is how we can get beyond those fetters.

Christianity is not about an ideology, but about a sacrament. Or at least, sacramental Christianity is. Some newer forms have newer notions, which are actually accommodations to modern individualism, an individualism which requires no priest or sacrament, other than literacy, and only a contractual relationship with their various communities. But that is not what we are speaking about here. Or at least, it is not what I am speaking about.

Sounds like you’re clinging to the antiquarian past — a feudal past, when it made sense to talk about parishes, peasantry, serfdom and bondage. Unless you want to prescribe a monkish life of the sort lived by a St. Francis or a Thomas Merton or seek out an egalitarian fantasy of the Shire. Which I suppose you could do. Although, I don’t think such quietism and fantasy is the answer for most of us.

As to your second post, where is begin? It is difficult because arguing with Marxists is like arguing with Austrians: When you point out that their systems didn’t work, they both say, “But that wasn’t real Marxism/Capitalism.” True, no doubt, but I suspect that they were as real as Marxism or Capitalism can get. Both Marx and Mises promised a withering away of the state; both delivered gargantuan states of unparalleled power, cruelty, and violence. One has delivered states that have mostly fallen; the other has delivered states that are mostly falling.

At least, however, you are entirely correct about my ideological weaknesses, mainly because I despise all ideology. Christianity is not about an ideology, but about a sacrament. Or at least, sacramental Christianity is. Some newer forms have newer notions, which are actually accommodations to modern individualism, an individualism which requires no priest or sacrament, other than literacy, and only a contractual relationship with their various communities. But that is not what we are speaking about here. Or at least, it is not what I am speaking about.

I make no scruples about appealing to “originality” as I tend to disdain the cult of originality myself. I even like Aristotle a lot, actually (and consider him one of the few philosophers worth studying). In fact as far as philosophy goes, I tend to dislike most philosophers of the 20th century and prefer to stick to those old farts of the 19th century and before. But I digress. My only point was that I see little worth in nostalgia-mongering and yearning for the past if there is no understanding that a fruitful critique of the prevalent concerns the Whole (as Plato maintained), understands history properly and sensitively, and begins with the present — after all, where else can we begin?

Only with these considerations in mind can we even begin to carve out a future from the temporal unities of the past and the present and seek out the full potential of our species-being, of which our substance is both social and individual — and dependent on nature. That’s the sort of coherence that can begin any serious and fruitful critique of the prevalent. I, however, see little evidence that there is any coherence of that sort to any of the scattered and confused harangues that pass for critiques here. Much of it is just a lot of recycled abstractions (argued for in more coherent ways in the past) that are hardly useful to the present.

But not to be too puckish about it, I can ask Mr. Goodfellow why he is so concerned with the “barbarisms” of what he calls “authoritarianism” when we have just passed through the most secular AND the most violent century in human history.

Have I suggested otherwise? Just because something with a secular face is deeply problematic, it doesn’t obviously lend credence to religious institutions and their ideological mystifications. Indeed, what’s distinct about our era (our era of capitalism which probably dates back to the 16th century, at least in its embryonic and primitive form) is that it has resulted in some of the most violent barbarisms possible, whether in secular or religious manifestations (and prying the two apart is hardly as easy as you seem to imply). Capitalist social relations were predicated off genocide, slave-labor, wage-slavery and the eventual thoroughgoing commodification of all social relations by a minority of elites who have managed to ascend to the capitalist classes. Much of this was patently condoned by various religious institutions and figures, allowing their coffers to ring, coyly batting an eye.

Indeed, only need look inward within America to see the violent stain of the confluence of religion, the Southern Aristocracy, chattel slavery, and the broader capitalist social relations that heightened its enormities. Furthermore, as far as pre-capitalist history is concerned, many of the mystificatory and oppressive conditions of various religions have been serviced for social control by way of private property and the controls of productive surpluses of the ruling classes (whether we’re talking about tributary forms of social relations, feudal, or otherwise). Religions, for the most part, have been employed ideologically to mute the masses into dull servitude for, well, a mess of pottage; one need only look to the Anabaptist rebellions that Luther dismissed after positing every man a priest. Yet, with few exceptions, viz., in the practitioners of liberation theology and ecology, this has largely been the case.

This leads me to this:

I am happy to plead “guilty” to nearly all of Robin’s charges, except for being a Malthusian. Of course, I’m not sure what a crypto-racist is; it seems to me that one is concerned with race or one isn’t. I am not particularly concerned with that topic, but I guess I am “homophobic” if that is a description of anybody who thinks “gay” marriage is just silly.

Of course, none of this is surprising. That Marx and Engels were able to point out many of the problems inherent in the ideology of the “traditional family” is worth remembering. They appealed to anthropological and historical research done on various social arrangements of the family across history, and noted the ideological and fetishized function of the family under a recorded history of class relations predicated off private property and social control, pace the first agricultural revolution. Many of the so-called traditional families were mere ideological molds cast to fit the social relations under the modes of production in ancient and feudal societies where a division of labor emerged most sharply in order to maintain the rule of those who controlled the productive surpluses.

Consequently, many of the givens of the “traditional family” became second nature, i.e. “naturalized.” But the ideologues of the ruling classes have merely asserted these historical relations as eternal verities of nature when this has hardly been the case. One need only look to pre-agrarian hunter-gatherer societies to see that none of this was “natural.” Or one could look at many of the divergent social formations of families even in the various post-agrarian societies. The traditional European outlook on marriage, shaped by Christian history, has also been fraught by tensions internally — whether of economic stripes or otherwise. Further, the notion that a marriage is “traditionally” a creative and sacrosanct publicly-guaranteed relation between one man and one woman is rather ideologically bankrupt. All this of course also fails to take into account polygamous and “non-traditional” families that have existed and continue to exist normatively. So, no, the idea of gay marriage is hardly “silly” as you suggest. That’s a rather historically and socially-clueless claim to make — given, also, that fight for gay marriage at present is a fight for many legal rights that are not afforded to gay couples. Unless you want to appeal to some vague mystificatory reasons for why gay marriage is silly, I’m at a loss to see why it is.

But all this, again, isn’t surprising. There’s so many muddled, incoherent and reactionary ideas floating around here.

I guess that makes me pretty “ideologically” confused. But on the other hand, the ones who seemed to be most concerned with ideological purity were the communists, the Fascists, and the neoconservatives, no?

Well, many paleoconservatives have been ideological purists while entertaining simultaneously contradictory impulses. So, being ideologically pure is not necessarily coextensive with ideological consistency and clarity.

But let’s not be disingenuous. I’m not sure anyone can escape ideology. The important point, however, is to ascertain what ideology is interested in broadly seeing the liberation of all people and, I might add, in seeing an end to the destruction of nature. (One need only look to John Bellamy Foster’s recent book on Marx’s Ecology and Ecology against Capitalism to get a sense of this.) Ideologically, many of the viewpoints held here are not co-extensive, historically or otherwise, with the liberation of all. Many of the colluding ideologies finding their voice here are either remnants of feudal and ancient social relations (predicated off social control and inequality), or they are ideologies that have traditionally bolstered the capitalist classes.

Indeed, 20th century Fascism, a truly unique phenomenon, was predicated off rural ideologies, appeals to small communities, while simultaneously keeping the machinery of state capitalism in high gear. There were many things learned by the fascists, also, from American segregation and Jim Crow laws. There was much in the mystical and heroic appeals to racial purity in the National Socialist and Volkisch movement that learned from American Fordism and the crushing of the working classes. Similarly with the Black Shirts and the Italian Fascists. One need only look to Giovanni Gentile’s ghostwriting of Mussolini’s speaches and see Ezra Pound’s (a paleoconservative if ever there was one) lingering fascination with fascist order. As Walter Benjamin once put it, “If you don’t want to talk about capitalism, don’t talk to me about fascism.”

As far as 20th century “Communism”, much of it functioned like state capitalism too. None of this was truly…socialistic or communistic… in its goals, methods and critiques. George Orwell is one of the most famous critics of English and Russian Stalinism and has pointed out as much. Much of what passes for criticisms of “communism” in the 20th century consist of historically-clueless canards.

As far as the neo-cons, well, let’s just look to see where some of them got many of their ideas from. Donald Rumsfeld took much from the Chicago School of conservatives, viz., Allan Bloom, who was a pupil of Leo Strauss, who took much from Eric Vogelin. That the author of the recent post on “Gnostic Economies” doesn’t see this historical pedigree here isn’t surprising either. Voegelin was a sort of conservative hysteric, tying everything modern to Gnostic heresies (of course). Embarrassingly, the author can’t even formulate a cogent response to Marx — who apparently hated creation, life and the flesh (duh!). But I guess all this constitutes a devastating critique — with nary a passage even referred to back up such assertions, of course.

At any rate, there’s much on this site that’s worth picking apart, but I’m not entirely sure it’s worth the time and the effort.

But not to be too puckish about it, I can ask Mr. Goodfellow why he is so concerned with the “barbarisms” of what he calls “authoritarianism” when we have just passed through the most secular AND the most violent century in human history. Of course, this is not news; such secularism throughout history has always led to violence on a grand scale. Even the so-called “wars of religion” of the 17th century were not about religion at all, but about the desire of the secular arm for the wealth of the Church. The secularists won, of course, but they have been blaming religion for all of their failures ever since their victory. Further, I wonder why a “proper critique of the prevalent” must exclude (a priori) that which prevailed before the prevalent?

And to truly scandalize Robin, I admit that everything I say is derivative. In fact, I insist on it. I rather distrust any “original” ideas I might have, and thank goodness, I rarely have any. But when something occurs to me that appears to be original, I get nervous and immediately cast around to find out if it can be connected to some older and better thinker than myself. It is not “originality” but connectedness that I trust. And if I can connect it to Aristotle (or Aquinas) so much the better. I am truly an “Aristotle-yearner,” as you say. I think the only useful “originality” is that which finds new ways to apply old and tested ideas to current conditions

I guess that makes me pretty “ideologically” confused. But on the other hand, the ones who seemed to be most concerned with ideological purity were the communists, the Fascists, and the neoconservatives, no?

Others have markedly critiqued Descartes, etc. in a far more interesting way. Others have also critiqued the functions of capitalism and the aporiae of the Enlightenment and modernity in more progressive and fruitful ways — without appealing to vague, crypto-racist, homophobic and theological vocabularies. All you’re gathering here is host of ideologically-confused and aimless ecologists, agrarians, paleo-conservatives, Malthusians, Burkeans, Aristotle-yearners, et al. under the incoherent banners of “community” and the “front porch.” But let’s keep in mind the hubris of authority as well — with history having shown us that nostalgia-mongering of this sort hardly merits such yearning. Recorded history reveals instead a series of documents of barbarisms under the ideologies of “tradition”, “authority” and “community.” We can fly past the contradictory nets of capitalism, ecological destruction, the Iron Cage, etc. in far more rational and coherent ways. But I’m not sure what’s being argued for here in any way assumes a proper critique of the prevalent.

For more than a year I have been struggling with little success to put words to my great fears about the pernicious evils of Growth Economics – i.e. the overwhelmingly dominant religion of our time.

What a joy to find that you and other fine writers here at FPR are expressing these ideas with such great insight and eloquence.

THANK YOU!

Mises thought Hayek a “socialist” because he departed from the true religion of methodological individualist; he thought that the slightest departure was the slippery slope to socialism.

And he was right.