Re: Storical materialism

[Doyle Saylor <doylesaylor@xxxxxxx>]

Greetings Economists,
On Feb 23, 2007, at 8:25 AM, Charles Brown wrote:

> CB; Interesting idea, but isn't the class struggle in the "materialism"
> part, not the "historical" part ? The "historical" part already
> includes or
> _is_ sort of "storical". If you use "materialism" , you are positing
> class
> struggle as a foundation of historical explanation.   Maybe
> "Hypothetical
> materialism".
Doyle;
Yes but but but, Charles storical whether it is a neologism or not,
clearly means influence by writing a story.  Materialism is not
linearized in the sense of narration, and if socialist are going to
understand how to connect the masses, the knowledge of that is not
linear.

There is a paradox in all this.  Writing records speech sounds by which
it has it's successes.  So does a movie with sound capture the linear
string of speech.  But knowing is not linear, the brain doesn't store
strings, it associates multiple sources of knowledge all over the
brain.  Speech itself represents those multiple regions of knowledge,
but not very accurately to what people do as they think.

I challenge the narrative characterizations of knowledge.  That reifies
writing systems as thought like.  Human connection rests upon knowledge
that is often not well represented by language.  Yet the tools of
information production offer ways to scale up connection to many more
than face to face allows, and over comes the loss of knowledge that
linearization of writing systems cause.  Socialist need to better
understand the limits of speech or language, and especially not ascribe
writing like characteristics to language in order to better understand
connecting a socialist society together.
thanks,
Doyle