It is no coincidence that Karl Marx’s criticism of the capitalist economy was rooted in a suggestion that too much information was being discarded. Marx’s entire work is based on Hegel’s philosophy, which is concerned, by and large, precisely with the discarding of information. Hegel stressed the importance of dialectic in contrast to classical logic. Dialectic is a method of logical discourse which emphasizes that entities are defined through a conflict of opposites, and one must think in opposites in order to understand things. Where classical Aristotelian logic is based on black and white opposites, dialectic stresses that one always loses knowledge when one thinks in abstract concepts. One must necessarily discard information when one creates a concept.
Marx’s criticism of capitalism was precisely an attempt to point out that the market mechanism overlooked too much -- e.g., the natural conditions for production. What Marx overlooked was that the conscious social domain has the same tendency to discard too much information and ignore the needs of man and nature.
It is important to maintain that Marx’s criticism may be correct, even though the attempts to replace the market mechanism with partly discipline only things worse.
The ever-increasing amount of state regulations in capitalist economies shows that there is problem with the way the market mechanism discards information: In the completely free market economy, there are natural and human needs that must be taken care of but are not. But these problems are as nothing compared to the problems that have arisen in economies without market mechanisms.
Communism’s weird obsession with the unwavering line in the political management of society shows that completely new concepts of policies are required before it is possible to formulate an alternative to the market mechanism.
But the most fundamental problem is perhaps that people are not transparent to themselves and are therefore unable to formulate their needs through the low bandwidth of language. ` Page 397
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Dinesh said:
Marx’s criticism of capitalism was precisely an attempt to point out that the market mechanism overlooked too much -- e.g., the natural conditions for production. What Marx overlooked was that the conscious social domain has the same tendency to discard too much information and ignore the needs of man and nature.
It is important to maintain that Marx’s criticism may be correct, even though the attempts to replace the market mechanism with partly discipline only things worse.
The ever-increasing amount of state regulations in capitalist economies shows that there is problem with the way the market mechanism discards information: In the completely free market economy, there are natural and human needs that must be taken care of but are not. But these problems are as nothing compared to the problems that have arisen in economies without market mechanisms.
Communism’s weird obsession with the unwavering line in the political management of society shows that completely new concepts of policies are required before it is possible to formulate an alternative to the market mechanism.
But the most fundamental problem is perhaps that people are not transparent to themselves and are therefore unable to formulate their needs through the low bandwidth of language. ` Page 397
Excerpt: "The User Illusion"