[Xmca-l] Re: 62:3.5 billion

[‪Haydi Zulfei‬ ‪]

David,
I have good reasons for my pauses and stops in writing . However , I'll send you two posts offlist regarding our previous debate . 
I'm sure you're , as always , somehow ! able to show where my confusions are . I now say I might not be able to reply in time . You'll be generous to accept my apologies beforehand . 
>From what you have written , I think some sort of a concept of 'innateness' could be drawn out . 
We were trying to digest : instruction leads development . And does not instruction come from the outside ? zpd , affordances , Internalization , etc. ? And you said previously using Mike's epigraph that for one type of good insight , mind as an 'object' makes history . Of course , I think , Mike presents this just as an epigraph (you removed psychology like the natural sciences) liable to expansion and reasoning and penetration. In his latest endeavour on academia.edu with Peter and Braga he's quite fair and logical with what we might infer from the content , connotation , metaphor of his epigraph . Most importantly is his reliance on the Vygotsky SCHOOL .   
 
You're alright with Marx as he says capitalism nourishes its destroyer within itself --capitalism is its grave-digger . And you're right with another phenomenon , development , by saying that in infancy , there's potentialized moment of puberty . And with the idea of refreshment of 'contemplation' , that we should avoid activity ; otherwise , two opposite things (dualism?) get mixed , especial genus of contemplation loses independence ?

Not only is Kautsky wrong , and not only is Carol quite right (the oppressed are still being fooled by appearances , got nowhere with the essence , inner mechanism of 'capitalism' (she seems to be optimistic with another trend cz she thinks of cash resistances not speculations-get to know--my apologies) , but also you're wrong with your notions , concepts. All in all , there are about 450 cases of quoting from Marx by Vygotsky which I'm sure are against the way you interpret . Marx says many times if you're satisfied with the appearances , then science will be superflous . By misinterpreting Vygotsky's understanding of Marx , you think you have superceded him in true cognition . Practice is the criterion for theory and theory is born from practice. With underconsumption , you think you've distanced yourself from appearances ? For workers to reappropriate their products of labour , you didn't suggest a solution . What is the morsel for worker , is luxuries , swollen cottony breasts , insured milliony bottomline virtuosities in cabares for some elites and ... my sincere apologies, and you opt for some ambiguous way of reappropriation . Yes , production is enough for the ever-increasing multitudes but where's a pair of scales to weigh equally ? What's bad in 'social justice' that you come forth with underconsumption on behalf of the worker. Why don't you talk of mass destruction of the very products ? Monoply of scientific achievements is in the service of diminishing the number of morsel-users and preventing them from being converted in worker-theorist. What do you mean by keeping the market intact ? You forget the bail-outs ? Was it workers'will operating ? Is the Market just a Sale Site for supply and demand without versatile interventions on the part of huge banks and international capitalistic institutions (money in reserve for adulteration??) Does That mean workers for some instances of defect and deliberately don't purchase their products of their own labour ? 
To prove your misinterpretation , I momentarily give just three short quotes from Vygotsky in regard to your previous posts which is now also helpful : 

[[This type of complex, this form of concrete thinking, is predominant in both functional and genetic terms in the child’s actual thinking. Therefore, more detailed consideration must be given to this critical moment in the development of the child’s concepts, a moment which simultaneously separates and connects complexive and conceptual thinking.]] ...
[[We have consistently taken a genetic approach to the analysis of our problem. We have, however, attempted to represent the moments of this genetic process in their mature, classic forms. The inevitable result is that we have diverged from the complex and twisting path that characterizes the actual development of the child’s concepts.]] 
[[Such forms of activity as modeling and building exercises, which by their very nature
 are designed to promote a child's [SENSORIMOTOR] development, [can and must] be
 organized in such a way that they promote the child's discovery and knowledge of
 objects and help him to form [GENERALIZED IMAGES] which reflect the phenomena of real
 life correctly and in depth.]]
I've gathered many and the reason is you twist the debate the way you like , in fact , you deviate from the main path not for constraints but for overproduction . 

[The crisis is not done away with by
extending it to the world market; quite the contrary.]
This really reminds us of your not believing in wholes , rational thinking and development even . Why not see it in the mechanism of the whole market . 

Generally speaking , opposites are cause for motion of any kind because , the way you argue , dialectics is in Nature itself . And Mind does not make history itself by itself ; it's the whole man who makes history . To make history man first of all engages with Nature , makes things , makes himself until he enters history in the sense of cultural development . It's just for you , my mentor , to think of your "internalization" . If everything is there , why internalize ?? It's man who internalizes things not an ant or the amoeba let alone Capital . Then your SUPERPRODUCTIVITY of new formations and the OPERPRODUCTION of the capitalistic formation are two distinct things . As you practically experience empirical thinking achievements , you sense similarity between the two . We work out and operate on things with their indepth transformational interactional differences and particularities AS WELL . Hence the relevance of the THESES . Andy's referebce to Marx's bathing of colors as peculiarities to reach UNIversal as concrete . 
Best 
Haydi


      From: David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com>
 To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu> 
 Sent: Monday, 18 January 2016, 10:55:53
 Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: 62:3.5 billion
  
I think Andy's quote from Kautsky is a little misleading, and that its
power to mislead doesn't stop at the obvious place--that is, the obviously
false conclusion that the reason that the masses don't revolt is that they
are not yet sufficiently oppressed. I think that Carol is trying to rectify
that by saying that the reason that the masses don't revolt is that
although they are objectively oppressed enough, they are not subjectively
aware of their oppression or (what amounts to the same thing) they are not
subjectively aware of how unoppressed the top half of the world is.
Nevertheless, it seems to me that both points of view are wrong and neither
point of view provides a really sound basis for understanding how Vygotsky
exapts the term "crisis" to describe child development.

Marx was, in his way, a great champion of capitalism: he had enormous
respect for the productive power that the industrial revolution unleashed
and saw immediately that the establishment of a world market meant that
scarcity was no longer natural or necessary in any way in any part of the
world without exception. Marx's explanation for capitalist crises is not an
explanation that relies on under-production or on scarcity--quite the
contrary, for Marx the crisis is a crisis of under-consumption. Capitalism
has unleashed productive power that cannot be absorbed by workers, for if
workers are paid the wherewithal to reappropriate the product of their
labour, how can the capitalist appropriate surplus value? Where will the
capitalist's reinvestment capital, not to mention his profit, come form
without exploitation?

You might say that the problem is easily solved: capitalist and worker,
hand in hand, can export to the part of the world where Carol lives, and
together live off the surplus value expropriated from rich and poor in the
non-capitalist, or at least, extra-national capitalist, economy. But that
would leave out Marx's second great insight, which is that the
establishment of the world market transforms the whole world in the image
of capital and makes scarcity into a historical, rather than a natural,
law. South Africa must pay for its Apple computers somehow, and the only
way it can do that is by becoming itself part of the world which is paid
less than the value of its labor. The crisis is not done away with by
extending it to the world market; quite the contrary.

In a lot of the discussions of the various crises in child development that
Vygotsky posits (see Volume Five of the Collected Works in English, or,
better, the 2001 Lectures on Pedology) we can see the non-Vygotskyan idea
that the crisis comes to the child from the outside, by some demand made by
the social situation of development which the child does not yet have the
means to meet. But if that is really what Vygotsky has in mind, why can't
the crisis simply be abolished by eliminating those demands on the child
that the child cannot meet or by meeting them, as Karpov and other
"neo-Vygotskyans" insist? Why does Vygotsky say (on the very last page of
Volume Five) that the crisis is always INTERNAL in nature? And why does the
crisis seem to keep coming back in different guises?

It seems to me that Vygotksy's exaptation of the Marxian notion of crisis
is much better fitting than we have assumed. In fact, the crisis is always
brought about the SUPERPRODUCTIVITY of the neoformation. For example, the
child's "instinctive form of mental life" creates meaning potential
(realized as visceral fears in adults) that the child cannot use at two
months. The child's "autonomous speech" creates intonation and stress that,
unanchored to lexis, cannot be used to communicate at twelve months. And at
three, when the child learns negation, the child unlocks the vast store of
meaning potential which Huw was discussing on another thread, and is simply
unable to absorb it. That's the true origin of the crisis, just as the true
origin of the crisis in our own time is the inability to reappropriate the
products of labor and keep the market intact.

David Kellogg
Macquarie University

On Mon, Jan 18, 2016 at 3:24 PM, Carol Macdonald <carolmacdon@gmail.com>
wrote:

> What makes the end of capitalism more likely is that the bottom half of the
> world *get to know* about those billionaires.
>
> However, I think at the height of Victorian capitalism, the *relative*
> differences were as great, at least in England. (I can't talk about the
> rest of the UK.)
>
> Carol
>
> On 18 January 2016 at 07:31, Alfredo Jornet Gil <a.j.gil@iped.uio.no>
> wrote:
>
> > Yeah... "unimaginable" but quite predictable, to our shame. What is more
> > sad is that "imagining" how to reverse this situation seems so difficult,
> > if not impossible, to most of us today. It reminds me Latour saying,
> "today
> > it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism".
> > He made this comment to point out that what classically had been thought
> of
> > as "Nature", now appears less stable and secure than the "artificial",
> that
> > is, than our economical/societal organization. It turns out that the
> latter
> > is just as real and natural as the former... The good news, I guess, is
> > that another way to do things should be just as imaginable as it is
> > desirable to many of us.
> >
> > Alfredo.
> > ________________________________________
> > From: xmca-l-bounces+a.g.jornet=iped.uio.no@mailman.ucsd.edu
> > <xmca-l-bounces+a.g.jornet=iped.uio.no@mailman.ucsd.edu> on behalf of
> > Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net>
> > Sent: 18 January 2016 06:07
> > To: xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu
> > Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: 62:3.5 billion
> >
> > Kautsky certainly would have found this situation
> > "unimaginable":
> >
> >    We consider the breakdown of the present social system
> >    to be unavoidable, because we know that the economic
> >    evolution inevitably brings on conditions that will
> >    /compel/ the exploited classes to rise against this
> >    system of private ownership. We know that this system
> >    multiplies the number and the strength of the exploited,
> >    and diminishes the number and strength of the
> >    exploiting, classes, and that it will finally lead to
> >    such unbearable conditions for the mass of the
> >    population that they will have no choice but to go down
> >    into degradation or to overthrow the system of private
> >    property. (Kautsky, 1892)
> >
> > Andy
> > ------------------------------------------------------------
> > *Andy Blunden*
> > http://home.pacific.net.au/~andy/
> > On 18/01/2016 3:44 PM, mike cole wrote:
> > > Oxfam report: The world's 62 richest billionaires have as much wealth
> as
> > > the bottom
> > > half of the world's population.
> > >
> > > Literally unimaginable.
> > >
> > > mike
> > >
> >
> >
> >
>
>
> --
> Carol A  Macdonald PhD (Edin)
> Developmental psycholinguist
> Academic, Researcher, Writer and Editor
> Honorary Research Fellow: Department of Linguistics, Unisa
> alternative email address: tmacdoca@unisa.ac.za
> *Behind every gifted woman there is often a remarkable cat.*
>