k-punk said:
Hmm, this anthropologization might work if human beings hadn't had preferences and faced scarcity since they emerged on earth. The mechanism of general equivalence that is capitalism is, however, a relatively new development in human affairs.
Yes, humans have had preferences and faced scarcity since they emerged on earth. that's what i'm saying. the introduction of money does not change that. money is a form of communication technology that facilitates communication preference decisions and expectations about future contingents. the novel thing about the emergence of money, which happened prior to what you call capitalism, is that it drastically increases the reach of exchange and the probability of acceptance of an exchange. prior to money goods were bartered. just as with money, that involved comparing and exchanging uncomparables.
what's new is that everyone acceptes money in exchange for a good now. i no longer have to find a butcher who's willing to take my toothbrush for his sausage, which may be difficult, i only have to find a butcher who takes my money. that's much easier.
k-punk said:
I'm totally confused by this; what are you saying, that there is nothing special about money at all, that it can be explained away naturalistically as a quasi-organic expression of innate needs and tendencies?
we can always reduce to lower explantory levels, like needs and communications or atoms. that's not always very useful because reductions become too complex. what i said was this:money is a communication tool allowing more efficient communication about expectations future contingent distributions of need and scarcity. that's what's special about money. there are other communication media the sense of modern sociology. but universal exchange is not what distinguishes monetary economies from bartering.
k-punk said:
The claim 'universal comparability has nothing to do with money' is bizarre ... WHAT is the medium of equivalence prior to money?
the goods themselves: i give you a magic sword if you give me your daughter. i eat pizza or i eat honey ...
k-punk said:
Then, suddenly, we're into markets --- there is no necessary relationship between markets and capital, markets having existed for thousands of years before the arrival of capital.
sorry, the market thing was just an additional point that i found interesting to say, but it
was not really relevant to the rest of the text.
k-punk said:
And of course the representational account of elections, focus groups etc misses the elementary fact that these phenomena do not merely represent, they produce changes in the very behaviour they supposedly record.
as does the market, and science. this explicit self-reference is one of the key features of modernity. the self-reference involved in for example the derivatives market where you
buy and sell essentially insurance policies on prices is but an example of this, and hardly something specific to the modern monetary system.
k-punk said:
Hmmm, this would be fine, except: how do yawns induce human beings to reproduce themselves?
it is in fact unknown how yawning works. and i'm not sure capitalism can take all
the blame for reproduction of humans, sex has been around for a bit.
k-punk said:
Yeh but see it wasn't an attempt to find out what's specific about capitalism, it was an answer to the question 'does capitalism have agency?'
agency is an ascription. so yes, many people describe capitalism as having
agency. hence it has. i'm not sure that is a fruitful way of analysis though,
analying the concept of agency itself is interesting, and the distribution of
agency ascriptions.
k-punk said:
Is it now? Produce the definition then. Scarcity management is common to all human societies so I can't see how that's going to cut it.
and i have denied this where? what i have been saying is that the modern economy is a specific way of doing this.
k-punk said:
Communication media have changed massively over the five hundred years since capitalism started. The risk point is more promising, but I'm not convinced it can define capitalism, rather it's one of the effects/ consequences of a capitalist economy.
money has not in fact changed, only it's scope -- a bit. risk is a consquence of lack of predictability of the future, what has changed is how we deal with it. and yes, the modern economy introduces new forms, like inflation, deflation. it is not plausible to me however, how other forms of economic organisation would do substantially better. they would push the risk in other shapes. you are welcome to propose novel risk management schemes.
i would love to hear about it. jsut whinging about the (well-known) problems of the current economic scene is not very productive