Re: Mark Jones Still Wrong

["Craven, Jim" <JCraven@xxxxxxxxx>]

Sabri Oncu wrote:

My point, precisely! All I suggest is picking up another symbol, out 
of my respect to his "virtual" memory.

Louis wrote:

To the contrary. Mark was even more contentious than me. I'd like to
think that he is sitting up on some cloud somewhere getting a chuckle
over how he still generates such controversy.


Response Jim C: I guess what distresses me most about some of these
posts, as someone who carried on extensive off-list and very personal
commuications with Mark--that always shook my mind and soul to the
core--is that many have underestimated just how deep Mark's thinking
was. Although he he eschewed Mathusianism and neo-Malthusianism, and
understood the reactionary nature and uses of these doctrines, he also
understood that no resources are infinite and that ultimately the
petrol-based economies would come up against finite resources--an issue
that the left should not ignore in mechanical reaction to
neo-Malthusianism and their exaggerated and mechanical
projections/extrapolations.

Mark understood very well that cartels like OPEC can and do manage and
manipulate magnitudes and overall elasticities of supply with effects on
magnitudes/overall elasticities of demand (altering perceptions of
necessity of the product, available effective and affordable substitutes
for the product, time frames for effective decision making and even
percentages of total costs and expenditures represented by
costs/expenditures on the product.) He also understood that real-world
co-determinancies between supply and demand magnitudes and overall
elasticities blow the neoclassical bullshit and paradigm out of the
water--with morphostatically-determined discrete partial equilibrium
prices and quantities (and even the concepts of partial or general
equilibrium) being reduced to pure bourgeois ideology, tautology and
fantasy.

When I think of Mark, I am reminded of two particular quotes from Marx:

"The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the
point, however, is to change it."

"If the construction of the future and its completion for all time is
not our task, all the more certain is what we must accomplish in the
present: I mean the ruthless criticism of everything that exists; the
criticism being ruthless in the sense that it neither fears its own
results nor fears conflict with the powers that be."

Those who characterize what Mark truly believed and the basis upon which
he believed it, might consider that they may indeed be caricaturing
rather than properly characterizing what Mark wrote and meant.

Not a day goes by that I do not think about and miss Mark Jones and his
powerful voice.

Jim C