Past Present & Future

obviously! i don’t subscribe to a notion of one idea of ‘correct’ anyway im one of those types you black-and white types hate! you should see my comment on one of the guardian blogs re: ‘trained’ philosophers. I’m quite the anti-institutionalist myself - however i’m open-minded.

seek knowledge through any means possible! find out what ideas are out there and how people think - whether that involves wacky discussions with folks like yourself on the net- or toddling off to public lectures at my alma mater. Or chats down the pub and the coffeehouse and reading random books in old libraries, or the back of a cornflakes packet.

what fun.yum.

By sonia on Nov 25, 2005

ah come now. things aren’t so black and white! A code for virtue - certainly i have. you’re witnessing it! he heh. i like to make people think about things. aren’t i doing that? thinking is a good thing!

By sonia on Nov 26, 2005

By sonia on Nov 27, 2005

here we go again..welcome back Ven! how’s the phd coming along?

By sonia on Nov 28, 2005

yeah Sunny wasn’t talking about utopia though. he was just talking about common sense and a desire to promote fair play. i don’t think you can disagree with that can you?

I agree re: utopia and orwellian nightmares. orwell was pretty astute - it would apply certainly to why the soviet ‘communism’ model didn’t work - and aslo it explains why lots of things aren’t working in the world today!

the only thing left to disagree about then is the extent of what is working in the world today and what isn’t. lots of things aren’t possibly i would say you’re being over-optimistic. .. And i don’t think i’ve ever suggested some ’solution’ which i then thought would lead to everything being fine.

and i would say that some of your thinking about the US was rather utopian actually Ven - you know thats precisely the problem with the ‘american dream’ or the idea that iraq is going to be ‘okay’ - just give it time… Obviously your Orwell example is the best thing to mention at this juncture - i couldn’t have done better myself!

i think its just a matter of seeing things a little more clearly for what they are. and that applies to ‘both’ sides - since people keep thinking in terms of two sides. even without the Utopian issue, i was never a Marxist as i think the theories were at heart -economically deterministic. And a lot of ‘capitalists’ are tarred with the same brush - they’re economic determinists… and i dont go for any kind of determinism as i think its unrealistic! a bit like indian capitalist who is wholly unrealistic. ( however that doesn’t mean there weren’t other significant ideas in Marx’s writings which are useful constructs)

perhaps i could be the most dystopic of the lot of you. war is pretty foul stuff and it can have that effect. If you let it..which im trying hard not to ! ( not that most of these wussy types who’ve never been in a firing line help much..)

in fact i will come out and say what i have been thinking since i was 14 years old and introduced to an economics class: ‘free markets’ ??? what the fuck is ‘free’ about so called ‘free markets’???? Absolutely nothing. ThAt is the MOSt utopian concept i have ever heard. I’m sorry for you ‘free marketeers’ out there - you’re simply not understanding the concept of ‘free’. ( or refusing to face reality or you just don’t understand anything much about the ’social’ realm. Free would imply freedom from ( certainly) institutional control and sorry - i don’t see how you can say the WTO is not an institution, and i don’t see how any idiot can say there are ‘no’ controls. ooh we hear the usual nonsense about ‘laissez-faire’ but what people don’t see - Again - is even in a ‘laissez-faire’ economy you have social and institutional structures and control which you have to adhere to if you want to operate and make some money.

duh - i should have thought that was obvious to everyone but economists since most of them are a brainwashed crew. Perfect markets, perfect competition - repeated like a monotonous mantra. I’m sorry - but how ‘utopian’ and unrealistic is that?

See that is the fundamental problem of economics - its robotic and takes ABSOLUTELY no account for human and social behaviour. i have never met an economist who has been able to combat my points here. They simply go back to the point - ‘oh but its an abstraction’. Now that would be fine - if we left it at that - but ooh no silly stupid governments and people who don’t understand that take it for granted that its reality - and then boom - after a while who questions these things?

By sonia on Nov 29, 2005

anyway Ven Marx died in 1883 long before the Russian revolution so he didn’t actually attempt ‘utopia’.

By sonia on Nov 29, 2005

yup most people don’t really understand the concept of determinism. a large part of the left certainly don’t. i guess its because most people don’t really think about the nature of ideas.. why would you unless you were interested in the nature of ‘knowledge’ etc.

By sonia on Nov 29, 2005

humans aren’t perfect - did you not read anything i said up above? either you dont really read posts -skim through and quickly rush and say what you really want to say..or sth’s wrong with your eyesight buddy..i said in case you didn’t see - i’ve lived through a fucking WAR!!! for getting a picture of human ‘civilization’ it don’t get better than that mate. and you’re telling me ‘i must agree humans aren’t perfect’ - too bloody right they aren’t perfect- ha ha…ooh no not by a long shot! they’re the stupidest scumbags on the face of the earth - you don’t find many animals that go in for intraspecies combat like we do.

By sonia on Nov 29, 2005

well i dont understand why you don’t understand determinism…i shall have to put up a post about that. anyway you can be a mathematician and abstract everything and that’s probably precisely why you can’t understand non-abstractions and real society.anyway. Goedel’s incompleteness theorem is indeed very interesting. anyway back to your original point - the LEFT will fail - i don’t know what you consider the Left anyway - so many different people have different ideas - and why you’re telling me- i’m hardly representative of the Left - ha ha. left-y maybe but there’s a wealth of nuance in the -y bit. for example i have big issues with groups like the SWP ( Socialist Workers Party) in britain - who are actually a political party and consider themselves hardcore left-wing. their discourse is absolutely dogmatic, deterministic and everything is termed in terms of ‘workers’ and non-workers. and who exactly is a non-worker to them i couldn’t quite figure out cos nowadays everyone works - the powerful and the not-so-powerful ..its not like we have this black and white division (not like even at the start of the 20th c when say in britain there were the ‘working class’ and the ‘leisured’ class who didn’t have to do any work) See in fact indian capitalist has more in common with the SWP mindset ( except on the opposite side) heh hehe. I shall write a post about me and my past experiences of the SWP here.

By sonia on Dec 1, 2005

ven you make me laugh with your obstinacy - i dont think you realize that a lot of your points in themselves there’s absolutely nothing wrong with - and i don’t disagree with. shows up a pretty dogmatic streak on your part! that’s why it amuses me about the total sum of your ‘thinking’.

i personally do believe in ‘free’ exchange - not trade the way it works now and i dont think most people think actually carefully about what is bound up in the notion of free. because obviously that’s subject to a social context - which as you point out yourself is anything but ‘free’. the problem is most people don’t realize that the simple words free trade can in themselves mean a huge range of things - what is portrayed as by the neo-liberal crew is the least free of anything. that’s simple. the other simple thing people don’t get - again when they think of regulation - is that they confuse ‘legislation’ laid down by nation-states (- i.e. governments -) with for example - social regulation. As most people clearly don’t seem to understand the nature of the societies they live in - they dont seem to get that even if you lived in a world with no ‘legislation’ i.e. that was written down, everyone knew the rules etc. it doesn’t follow that there aren’t unwritten social rules - i.e. social regulation - this is where institutions and power and structures come in.

i think all i want is for people to examine what they understand by the notion of ‘free’ properly - in the current paradigm ‘free trade’ and ‘free markets’ have come to be identified with a very particular specific understanding of ‘free’ which essentially now seems to have become synonymous with the term. i’d recommend anyone to think very carefully about it - because that’s where the fundamental problem lies. nevermind any argument beyond that - economists spend their time arguing about all sorts of issues about that - but my point is the fundamental underlying concepts have been ‘determined’ for us - these are the bases that need a good hard look at again.

By sonia on Dec 3, 2005

you’ve highlighted precisely people’s lack of understanding about this issue when you say:

“You tend to bring in the social realm into the concept of Free markets…. Which I feel is unwarrented”.

i focus on the individual..certainly what is obviously going to matter at the end of the day is what we are able to do or not do as individuals. however - the emphasis on the social is my very point is that people dont exist or trade in a vacuum - we do it in a social context. You can have trade rules - you can get rid of trade rules - but unsaid unwritten rules may still exist in a society - so e.g. you have to get to know the people you’re trading with - there will be some ’social costs’ involved - mathematically speaking - there are still equations to be taken into account.

that’s my point. I think perhaps i need to bring up Anthony Giddens’ Structuration Theory into the picture - to get people to think more clearly about the situations that come about. Do we influence institutions, or do institutions influence us? Both obviously - it’s an interaction. The net result of that interaction one can say is the realm of the social, society - constantly in flux as each agent interacts with, and subsequently changes society. So applying this to the free markets point, what i’m saying is regardless of your point of view on trade barriers or no trade barriers - that is a position on a very limited line of thinking - as there’s plenty of ‘interaction’ behind the scenes if you will…take away the rules and ‘barrier’s which actually in many cases im in favour of if and only IF it means that there is then some equality - of exchange. See - just cos there’s no ‘rules’ doesn’t mean - there is equality of exchange - because that necessarily - will depend on who you as an individual - are, what institutions you have links in - who you know, blah blah. It’s a very simple point - nothing complex. if you’re an Ambani you’ll have a different ‘interacting’ experience to some guy from a village. That certainly comes in the realm of the social.

so you see you didnt really get my point. Everything you say is valid - but clearly - to get to a situation where individuals can exchange freely - which i am a hundred per cent behind - we need to be able to examine the structures and interactions in society and how and where the power and bottlenecks are. we obviously agree on the end-game - and so do most people actually in this world - the question is we’re not going to get there if we blind ourselves to what’s happening in the world now.

so again - we need to study society and not look at economics as a separate subject but as part of the social…since by defintion if you are going to ‘exchange’ something with somebody, its -guess what - social action.

people are just really really ignorant in their understanding of the social.

By sonia on Dec 5, 2005

anyway. I am not interested in debating society type stances - oh this is the side im on, im going to come up with arguments for this side - whilst the person on the other side with come with points against my side and for theirs. Certainly not - this isn’t a competition/argument that someone’s going to ‘win’ - if that’s how people take these discussions - fine - that’s their business, however i’ve never been ‘competitive’ in that sense and i’m still not. Simply because that is an oversimplification of the issues, yes i know people will say oh we have to abstract to a certain level - well good, perhaps they do, but we already have that, im not seeking to add to that level, i’m interested in figuring out reality and life a bit more and add some new dimensions to our thinking. Cos clearly we’re all a bit stuck really otherwise..people might not admit that - but there’s a crisis in essentially the kind of thinking that has brought us all up to the point where we are now.

I daresay that’s too ‘postmodern’ for some people - again ‘postmodern’ is a label that people seek to apply when they think its too wishy-washy and not straight-line yes/no thinking or not black/white thinking but hey.

By sonia on Dec 7, 2005