Howdy, Gringo! (VI)

Howdy, dear gringos and gringas...

In the next month I will publish a little article about the contradictions and absurdities of the Marxian system. I believe I have brought light to a new contribution to the consequences of regarding the Marxist's arguments as valid. (Okay, I am not an expert, maybe someone had already talked about that.)

If you look to my previous entries, you can find some interesting books in English. Gabriel Kolko, Hayek, Israel Kirzner, are some of the authors. The last one I digitalized was The Economics Of Time and Ignorance. Enjoy and spread the message, fuck intelectual "property"!

Now, I will give you some more of Proudhon...

Proudhon speaks ahead about value, equality, and the scope of economic science. There is also a nice passage about what some has called “anarchism by approximations” (a continual process of approximations I would add):

“All true thought, as we observed, is put in a time and in two moments. Since these moments are the negation of the other and that both should not disappear except under a superior idea, it follows that the antinomy is the proper law of life and progress, the principle of perpetual movement. With effect, if one thing, due to the power of evolution that lies on it, repairs itself precisely of everything that it loses, it follows that this thing is indestructible and the movement that sustains it is eternal. In the social economy, what concurrence is unceasingly busy doing, monopoly is unceasingly busy undoing; what property attributes itself, society takes it away from it; and from this, results the continual movement, the indefectible life of mankind. If one of the two antagonist forces is locked, if individual activity, for an example, succumbs under social authority, the organization degenerates into communism and ends up at nothing. If, by the contrary, individual initiative lacks a counterweight, the collective organism corrupts itself and civilization drags itself into a caste regime, of misery and inequity.”

The exerpts ahead are from the conclusion of the book quoted...

Version in English: http://www.4shared.com/file/78952009/54ea6b9c/Proudhon_-_Philosphy_Of_Misery_Tome_II__Excerpts_.html

Crappy Version:

Proudhon - Philosophy of Misery, Tome II, pages 395-402 (French Version at Google Books)

Translated from Portuguese by Rafael Hotz

(...)

What is the cause, then, of this delay of social truth that only maintains the economist deception and gives credit to the exploitations of the pretense reformers? The cause, in my view, is in the separation, old already, of philosophy and political economy.

Philosophy, this is, metaphysics, or if you prefer, logic, is the algebra of society; political economy is the realization of this algebra. It was this that was unperceived by Jean-Baptist Say and neither by Bentham, neither by all those who, under the denominations of economists and utilitarians, provoked a schism on moral and have mutinied almost at the same time against politics and philosophy. And, however, what surest control could philosophy, the theory of reason, desire than labor, this is, the exercise of reason? And reciprocally, what surest control economic science desire than the formulas of philosophy? It is not far away the time, this is my dearest hope, in which the masters on political and moral sciences are going to be at the workshop and at the balconies, as today our most skilled constructors are all man formed by long and toilsome learning…

But under what condition could a science exist?

In the condition of recognizing its field of observation and its limits, of determining its object, of organizing its method. About this point, the economist expresses himself as the philosopher; Dunoyer´s words just quoted above seem literally extracted from the preface of Jouffroy to Reid´s translation.

The field of observation of philosophy is the self [*1]; the field of observation of economic science is the society, that is, still yet the self. Want to know man, study society; want to know society, study man. Man and society serve themselves reciprocally as subject and object; the parallelism, the synonymy of both sciences is complete.

But what is this collective and individual self? What is this field of observation, where a so strange phenomenon occurs? To discover it, let’s see the analogous.

At all things that we reason about seem to exist, to succeed or adjust in three transcendental capacities, outside which we do not imagine and conceive absolutely nothing: they are space, time, and intelligence.

By the same way that every material object is conceived by ourselves necessarily in space, by the same way that the phenomena connected with one another by a relation of causality seem to us to take place in time, our purely abstract representations are related by us to a particular receptacle that we denote intellect or intelligence.

Intelligence is in its specie an infinite capacity, as space and eternity. There, worlds agitate, innumerable organisms with complicated laws, with variable effects and contretemps; equal by their magnificence and harmony to the world sown by the creator through the space, the organisms that shine and extinguish in duration. Politics and political economy, jurisprudence, philosophy, theology, poetry, languages, habits, literature, arts; the field of observation of the self is more vast, fecund and richer by itself than the double field of observation of nature, space and time.

The self, hence, just like time and space, is infinite. The man, and what is a product of man, constitutes, altogether with beings that are launched through the space and with the phenomena that succeeds in time, God´s triple manifestation. This three infinites, infinite expressions of the infinite, penetrate and mutually sustain themselves, inseparable and irreducible; the space or extension are not conceived without the movement, which implies the idea of force, this is, a spontaneity, a self.

The ideas of the things that present themselves to us in time form pictures to our imagination; the ideas that with which we finally put the objects in time develop in histories; finally, the ideas or relations that does not fall neither into the category of time and space and that belong to the intellect, coordinate themselves into systems.

Picture, history, system, are, hence, three analogous expressions, or even better, homologous, by means of which we can understand that certain number of ideas present themselves to our spirit as a symmetric and perfect whole. It is because of this that this expressions can, in certain cases, be taken one by another, as we have done at the beginning of this work, when we have presented it as a history of political economy, not more accordingly to the date of the discoveries, but to the order of the theories.

Hence, we conceive, and are unable to not conceive, a capacity to the things of pure thought, or, as says Kant, to the numbers, by the same way that we conceive two other capacities to the sensible things or phenomena.

But the space and time are not something unreal; they are two impressed forms in the self by external perception. Likewise, intelligence is not something real; it is a form that the self imposes to itself, by analogy, by occasion of the ideas that experience suggests to it.

Concerning the order of acquisition of this ideas, intuitions or images, it seems to us that that we started by those whose kinds or realities are comprehended in space; that we keep catching the ideas that time sets in motion, to expose in this manner, at their flying; that ultimately, we find out suddenly, with the help of sensible perceptions, the ideas or concepts, without exterior model, that appear to us in this ghost of capacity that we denominate our intelligence. This is the progress of our knowing; we part from the sensible to rise ourselves in the abstract; the ladder of our reason has its feet on earth, crosses and gets lost in the depths of the spirit.

We shall now invert this series and imagine creation as a fall from the ideas of the intelligence’s superior sphere into the inferior spheres of time and space, a fall during which, originally pure, will have taken a body or substrate that realizes and expresses them. In this point of view, all wrong things, nature’s phenomena and mankind’s manifestations will appear to us as a projection of the spirit, immaterial and immutable, in a plan sometimes fix and straight, space, sometimes inclined and mobile, time.

It follows from this that ideas, equal between themselves, contemporaneous and coordinated in spirit, seem confusedly launched, dispersed, localized, subordinated and consecutive in mankind and in nature, forming pictures and histories without similarity with primitive destiny; and all human science consists in finding out in this mess the abstract system of eternal thought. It is by means of a restoration of this genre that the naturalists found the systems of the organized and unorganized beings; it is by the same procedure that we try to reestablish the series of social economy, that society made us see it isolated, incoherent, anarchic. The subject that we study is truly the natural history of labor, accordingly to the excerpts reaped by the economists; and the system that resulted from our analysis is true by the same way that the systems of the plants discovered by Lineu and Jussieu and the system of the animals discovered by Cuvier.

The human self manifested by labor, this is, consequently, the field of exploration of political economy, philosophy’s concrete form. The identity of these two sciences or, to speak better, these two skepticisms, was revealed to us throughout the course of this book. So the formation of the series appeared to us in the division of labor as a division of the elementary categories; later, we saw liberty spring from the action of man in nature and, as a consequence of liberty, the production of all relations of the man with society and with himself. As a result, economic science meant to us at once an ontology, a logic, a psychology, a theology, a policy, an aesthetic, a simbology and a moral…

Recognized the field of science and its expected delimitation, we had to recognize its method. Well, the method of economic science is also the same method of philosophy: the organization of labor, in my view, is not another thing than the organization of the common sense.

Among the laws that constitute this organization, we observe antinomy.

All true thought, as we observed, is put in a time and in two moments. Since these moments are the negation of the other and that both should not disappear except under a superior idea, it follows that the antinomy is the proper law of life and progress, the principle of perpetual movement. With effect, if one thing, due to the power of evolution that lies on it, repairs itself precisely of everything that it loses, it follows that this thing is indestructible and the movement that sustains it is eternal. In the social economy, what concurrence is unceasingly busy doing, monopoly is unceasingly busy undoing; what property attributes itself, society takes it away from it; and from this, results the continual movement, the indefectible life of mankind. If one of the two antagonist forces is locked, if individual activity, for an example, succumbs under social authority, the organization degenerates into communism and ends up at nothing. If, by the contrary, individual initiative lacks a counterweight, the collective organism corrupts itself and civilization drags itself into a caste regime, of misery and inequity.

The antinomy is the principle of attraction and of movement, the reason of equilibrium; it is her that produces the passion and that decomposes every harmony and agreement…

It comes in sequence the law of progression and of series, the melody of the beings, law of the sublime and of the beautiful. Take away the antinomy, and the progress of the beings is inexplicable, because, where is the force that generates this progress? Take away the series, and the world ain’t nothing but a mixture of sterile oppositions, an universal ebullition, without finality and idea.

Even that this speculations, for us pure truth, seemed doubtful, the application that we did from them would also be of an extreme utility. It would be really convenient to reflect about it. There are not only a single moment in life that the same man affirms and denies at a time the very principles and the same theories, with a bigger or smaller good faith, without doubt, but also with always plausible reasons that, without totally appeasing the conscience, are enough to make the passion triumph and cast doubt on the spirit. Hence leave aside, if this is the intention, the logic, but is does not mean a thing to have clarified the double face of the things, to have learned to mistrust the reasoning, to know how as much a man has more correction in the ideas and accuracy in the heart, more he bears the risk of being fool and absurd? All our political, religious, economic, etc., misunderstandings, come from the contradiction inherent to the things; and this is also the source from where flows under society the corruption of the principles, the venality of consciences, the charlatanism of professions of faith, the hypocrisy of opinions…

What is at the present, the object of economic science?

The very method indicates it. The antinomy is the principle of attraction and equilibrium on nature; the antinomy is, then, the principle of progress and of equilibrium on mankind and the object of economic science is justice.

Considered in its relations purely objectives, the only ones that occupy social economy, justice has for its expression value. Well, what is value? It is realized labor.

“The real price of every thing, says Adam Smith, what every thing really costs to the man who wants to acquire it, is the toil and trouble of acquiring it. What every thing is really worth to the man who has acquired it, and who wants to dispose of it or exchange it for something else, is the toil and trouble which it can save to himself, and which it can impose upon other people. What is bought with money or with goods is purchased by labor, as much as what we acquire by the toil of our own body. That money or those goods indeed save us this toil. They contain the value of a certain quantity of labor which we exchange for what is supposed at the time to contain the value of an equal quantity. Labor was the first price, the original purchase-money that was paid for all things. It was not by gold or by silver, but by labor, that all the wealth of the world was originally purchased; and its value, to those who possess it, and who want to exchange it for some new productions, is precisely equal to the quantity of labor which it can enable them to purchase or command.”

But if value is the realization of labor, it is at the same time the principle of comparison of the products between themselves; from this elapses the theory of proportionality that dominates all economic science and which Adam Smith would have reached if there was at the spirit of his time the intention of proceeding, with the help of logic, in the inquiry of a system of experiences.

But how does it manifest in society, in other terms, how is the proportionality of the values established? Jean-Baptist Say has said: by an oscillatory movement between use value and exchange value.

And here it appears in political economy, concerning labor, its owner and a lot of times its executioner, the arbitral principle.

At science departure, labor, lacking a method, without a comprehension of value, just mumbling its first attempts, appeals to the free will to constitute wealth and set the prices of the things. From this moment on the two powers begin to struggle and the big work of social organization is inaugurated. Indeed, labor and free will is what later on we call labor and capital, wages and privilege, concurrence and monopoly, community and property, plebe and novelty, State and citizen, association and individualism. For anyone who has received the first notions of logic, it is evident that all this oppositions, externally renascent, must be eternally solved; well, it is what the economists does not want to understand, for whom the arbitral principle inherent to value seems absentee to all determination; and it is, with the horror of philosophy, what causes the so dismal delay to the society of economic science.

“It also would be absurd, says Mac-Culloch, to speak of a height and of a absolute profundity as of a absolute value.”

The economists say all the same thing and it can be judged by this example how they are far from understanding the nature of value and as much as the sense of the words that they are served. The expression absolute brings the idea of integrality, of perfection or plenitude, and hence, of precision and adequacy. An absolute majority is a just majority (half plus one), is not an indefinite majority. By the same way, absolute value is the precise value, deduced from the exact comparison of the products among themselves; there is nothing in the world of so simple. But from this results this capital consequence, or in another words, seen that value measure with one another, they should not oscillate at random; this is the supreme desire of society, this is the meaning political economy itself that is not other thing, at its aggregate, than the picture of the contradictions whose synthesis infallibly produces the true value.

Like this, society establishes itself little by little by a kind of oscillation between necessity and the arbitrary, and justice constitutes itself by theft. Equality is not produced in society as in an inflexible level; just like all great laws of nature, it is an abstract point, beneath and beyond the fact oscillates unceasingly, describing arcs somewhat smaller or bigger. Equality is the supreme law of society, but it is not a fixed form, it is the average of an infinity of equations. It was this way that equality appeared since the first age of the economic evolution, the division of labor; and like this has manifested constantly since the legislation of providence.

(...)

Translator's Notes:

[*1] I decided to translate the term as “self”, since “individual” does not reflect the personal conscience implicit at Proudhon´s metaphor. The term in the French version is “moi”. In the Portuguese one, from which I have translated the text, the term used was “eu”, that translated literally to English would be “I”.