Dear Scot,

Do you perhaps have in mind Fromm's "Man *for* himself"? (Rather than,
say, Gordon Childe's "Man Makes Himself".)

Be that as it may, my point is that Marx was a champion of "human
self-determination and self-realization" in the sense that that was what
he hoped society would one day make possible.

To put it another way, alienation and other psychological consequences of
class society are the reasons that Marx urges us to fight capitalism.


Best wishes,

Julian 





On 15/01/2014 18:22, "Scot Stradley" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>I think it is strange to refer to Marx as "a champion of human
>self-determination and self-realization.  I know this sounds like Fromm's
>Man Makes Himself,
>but this is not a correct interpretation of Marx.  Human psychology is
>class psychology and there is no escaping the limits of class ideology.
>
>
>
>Scot A. Stradley, Ph.D.
>Professor of Finance
>Offutt School of Business
>Concordia College
>Moorhead, MN 56562
>
>________________________________________
>From: Societies for the History of Economics [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of
>Raphaelle Schwarzberg [[log in to unmask]]
>Sent: Sunday, January 12, 2014 5:14 AM
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: [SHOE] HPPE Seminar 15 January ­ Julian Wells on ³Clockwork ,
>blind machines wound up²? Marx and the (econo-) ph ysicists¹
>
>HPPE Seminar 15 January ­ Julian Wells on ³Clockwork, blind machines
>wound up²? Marx and the (econo-) physicists¹
>
>Dear all,
>
>Next Wednesday, on January 15th, Julian Wells will be presenting at the
>HPPE seminar on the topic Œ³Clockwork, blind machines wound up²? Marx and
>the (econo-) physicists¹.
>The seminar takes place in the East Building EAS.E168 at 1 p.m. at the
>London School of Economics. Everyone is welcome.
>
>Abstract:
>I have two objectives in this contribution. First, to show that Marx is a
>precursor of a particular current trend in heterodox economics, and
>secondly but more fundamentally, to show how Marx, as a champion of human
>self-determination and self-realisation, thought nonetheless that in our
>pre-historic human epoch there were law-like social regularities on which
>to ground social science.
>In my title I bracket off ³econo² for two reasons:
>1. to emphasise that among the econophysicists there are, besides the
>economists, actual
>physicists
>2. because I shall show that Marx discussed physicists doing physics,
>albeit in classical antiquity rather than in his own day.
>To Marx, the capitalist economy was a dystopia under the rule of
>\Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham"; freedom, because alienated
>agents are constrained only by their own free will, and Bentham ³because
>each looks only to himself² (Capital, vol.I, Ch.6). A physicist might
>translate this, verbally and conceptually, into the observation that the
>economy consists of a vast mass of uncoordinated atoms, and begin to
>think about the statistical mechanics pioneered by Maxwell and Boltzmann.
>Precisely this step occurred to two marxist scientists, the
>mathematicians Emmanuel Farjoun and Moshé Machover, who implemented it in
>their 1983 book Laws of Chaos. They addressed various issues in marxist
>economics, that I do not need to detail here, by recasting the relevant
>variables as random ones and considering what their distributional
>properties might be.
>However, they did not coin the ³econophysics² label. That was done, and
>the approach popularised beyond the regrettably small circle of those who
>read Farjoun and Machover, in 1992 [check] by the group around H. Eugene
>Stanley at Boston University. Thus there is now a growing literature
>investigating empirical distributions in economics and attempting to
>theorise possible generating processes.
>The end-point of the present paper will thus be Marx's mature political
>economy as precursor of this literature. The starting-point lies among
>his very earliest productions - a word I use advisedly, since we shall in
>fact begin by considering his unfinished verse tragedy Oulanem, the work
>from which our title quote is drawn.
>Along the way we will refute the notion that Marx's political economy is
>determinist, in any sense, and we will also question the suggestion of an
>epistemological break separating his early writing and his mature work.
>
>Julian Wells is Senior Lecturer in Economics at Kingston University.
>
>More information about the seminar is available at :
>http://www.lse.ac.uk/economicHistory/seminars/HPPE/HPPEMT2013.aspx or by
>contacting Gerardo Serra ([log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>) or
>Raphaelle Schwarzberg
>([log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>).
>
>Best wishes,
>Gerardo Serra and Raphaelle Schwarzberg
>
>Please access the attached hyperlink for an important electronic
>communications disclaimer: http://lse.ac.uk/emailDisclaimer
>
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