30 April 2008
e-pisstemological break...ouch...
Somehow, depressed. And accidentally messing things up, such as exam questions for my students, which only makes it infinitely, and even bigger than infinitely, worse. Despite, or perhaps because, I found an echo-chamber in my shrivelled heart and a waking pause in my patchy, pissy sleep to get up at 5am to write a piece on the incest taboo and communism over at the weblog, as part of a new series they've started.
Lately I keep thinking I need to read more liberal/right economics stuff (ha! I really am depressed). I own Gareth Steadman-Jones' copy of Schumpeter's History of Economic Analysis, for some contingent reason, but perhaps I need to go further back...Smith, Ricardo....650AD and the invention of paper money in China? The dismal science seems a bit depressing already. Reading Michael Barratt Brown's Models in Political Economy, with its post-89 preface 'there were certain misjudgements...they concern my estimates of human capacities and the effect of these on the basically Marxist model of human society with which I was working', etc. I've never understood those Marxists who give up when it doesn't work out in their lifetime. Surely that's the most possessive, individualistic, commodified relation one could have to time, ever? I mean, fuck the whole Green 'what about our grandchilderen' thing, but, come on, if you really meant it, you'd be holding out for 2190, 3400, 799342 or, like the Posadists, for socialism on other planets. If you left a million Martians in a room with a million copies of Windows Office for an infinite length of time, one of them would type the Communist Manifesto. In Martian. Unfortunately, one of them would also type the script for the current world order in which it's okay to make fascist salutes on the steps of Rome's city hall and rape your own daughter for quarter of a century in the basement of your apparently respectable home. Piss-sticks.
Lately I keep thinking I need to read more liberal/right economics stuff (ha! I really am depressed). I own Gareth Steadman-Jones' copy of Schumpeter's History of Economic Analysis, for some contingent reason, but perhaps I need to go further back...Smith, Ricardo....650AD and the invention of paper money in China? The dismal science seems a bit depressing already. Reading Michael Barratt Brown's Models in Political Economy, with its post-89 preface 'there were certain misjudgements...they concern my estimates of human capacities and the effect of these on the basically Marxist model of human society with which I was working', etc. I've never understood those Marxists who give up when it doesn't work out in their lifetime. Surely that's the most possessive, individualistic, commodified relation one could have to time, ever? I mean, fuck the whole Green 'what about our grandchilderen' thing, but, come on, if you really meant it, you'd be holding out for 2190, 3400, 799342 or, like the Posadists, for socialism on other planets. If you left a million Martians in a room with a million copies of Windows Office for an infinite length of time, one of them would type the Communist Manifesto. In Martian. Unfortunately, one of them would also type the script for the current world order in which it's okay to make fascist salutes on the steps of Rome's city hall and rape your own daughter for quarter of a century in the basement of your apparently respectable home. Piss-sticks.
