Re: -Reply -Reply

[ecwfm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (bill mitchell)]

>Laura Ebert says:

>Economics is about how resources are to be produced and distributed
>for HUMAN SURVIVAL - cause unlike (to a matter of degree) animals that
>is how our species reproduces itself.  Economics is not about MONEY
>OR PROFIT, ULTIMATELY, but about the reproduction of the human
>species.

well maybe that is what _economies_ should be structured for and to serve
the goal of, Laura, but i am not sure that _economics_ is about that.

i thought economics is about understanding the way the economy works. not
the economy we would like to live in, nor feudalism, nor slavery or barter
or whatever. so for us it is about understanding and explaining the nature
of capitalist exchange and accumulation. that task really focuses on how
humans who own capital connive (as a class) to get the other (overwhelming
majority) humans who do not own capital to generate surplus and ensure that
the initial money capital works through the circulation process to come out
a bigger lump of money capital. so profit and money are very central to this.

one might even go so far as to say that from the capitalist perspective, the
"humanness" (spelling? - i am not inventing words like disambiguate!) of the
owners of labour power is a disturbing complication in the circulation of
capital. and indeed, the labour process is about making the individuality of
the workers accord in more or less brutal and alienating ways with the
dictates and aims of capital. so i don't think economics is about human
survical at all. it is about capitalist accumulation and the ways in which
this is interupted.

if only we did concentrate on humans as the goal of the system in tandem
with the natural world. if we studied a system like that we would not be
studying the system we live in  - not even remotely.

kind regards
bill
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