[Xmca-l] Re: The Idea of the Idea

[Andy Blunden]

As I see it, the governments are pumping vast amounts of 
cash into the economy to stimulate the economy. Governments, 
being what they are, give a bit of it to poor people who 
will actually spend it, but most of it goes to wealthy 
people via tax cuts and corporations supposedly so they'll 
spend the money hiring people. But because of the pandemic 
people don't have much to spend discretionary money on and 
there is absolutely no prospects for productive investments 
while businesses are going over the cliff like lemmings. So 
what do you do with the money? You invest it in the Stock 
Market, which is not paying dividends, but it can still 
absorb the money with wealthy people buying and selling 
paper to each other. The result is that the total amount of 
money in the economy increases but all of it in the hands of 
the wealthy, while the cash in the hands of the poor is 
going down. The result is declining real economic activity 
(making things and doing things for other people) and 
massively increased inequality, because even though the 
stocks don't generate new wealth, they can still be 
converted into the same money you use in the Supermarket.

andy

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*Andy Blunden*
Hegel for Social Movements <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://brill.com/view/title/54574__;!!Mih3wA!XRbYrYRrIZ1UhRKXtLKsmhreiCptJ8yy703Vu0VRPnE3HlElcDm2ORo6LhbAel9OO0qL-A$ >
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On 3/09/2020 10:25 am, HENRY SHONERD wrote:
> David,
> Go to your browser, type in “The stock market is not the 
> economy”.
> Henry
>
>> On Sep 2, 2020, at 5:01 PM, David Kellogg 
>> <dkellogg60@gmail.com <mailto:dkellogg60@gmail.com>> wrote:
>>
>> Spinoza says that the mnd is the body's idea of itself. 
>> But the way he says it is a little weird: he says that 
>> the idea of the mind has the same relationship to the 
>> mind as the mind has to the body. So the idea of the mind 
>> is the idea of the idea of the body of itself.
>>
>> As told Anthony, I think that Spinoza's "idea of the 
>> idea" is pretty important for Vygotsky. Just to take an 
>> example, when Vygotsky argues (in Chapter Six of T&S and 
>> also in his lecture on School Age, which I am currently 
>> translating for Volume Two of the Pedological Works) that 
>> the reason why the child's other functions have become 
>> intellectualized but intellect as such remains 
>> unintellectual is that before you can have the idea of 
>> the idea, you need to have the idea.
>>
>> Scientific concepts, higher aesthetic concepts, ethical 
>> thinking, Darwin's tree, the hierarchy of genus and 
>> family and species, the powers of ten in mathematics--all 
>> of these depend on the idea of the idea.. My own PhD 
>> supervisor, David Butt, points out that every clause ever 
>> produced can be given a unique and precise "semantic 
>> address" (that is, we can exhaustively describe it in 
>> terms of unique, once-occurent choices at the phoneme, 
>> word, group, phrase, and clause level). Because each 
>> higher rank is entirely and only composed of elements 
>> from lower ranks, we can describe the higher rank as an 
>> idea of the idea (a notion of a notion, a concept of a 
>> concept).
>>
>> Yanis Varoufakis argues that sometime in late August, in 
>> both the UK and the USA, capitalism made an important and 
>> terrifying transition. Although BOTH economies are now in 
>> Covid-induced recessions, BOTH are experiencing major 
>> stock market expansions. This is because, Varoufakis 
>> argues, in both countries there are enough speculators 
>> who believe that there are enough speculators who believe 
>> that stock prices will increase at least in the short 
>> term, despite the dismal prospects for shareholders in 
>> the long term. The idea of the idea has become more 
>> powerful than the idea itself.
>>
>> (As usual, we are at the cutting edge here in Seoul: our  
>> real estate market has depended entirely on this idea of 
>> the idea for years!)
>>
>> David Kellogg
>> Sangmyung University
>>
>> New article in Mind, Culture, and Activity:
>> Realizations: non-causal but real relationships in and 
>> between Halliday, Hasan, and Vygotsky
>>
>> Some free e-prints today available at:
>> https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/Y8YHS3SRW42VXPTVY2Z6/full?target=10.1080*10749039.2020.1806329__;Lw!!Mih3wA!XRbYrYRrIZ1UhRKXtLKsmhreiCptJ8yy703Vu0VRPnE3HlElcDm2ORo6LhbAel_Yn7inFw$  
>> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/Y8YHS3SRW42VXPTVY2Z6/full?target=10.1080*10749039.2020.1806329__;Lw!!Mih3wA!SRiw8QGioBGwdR67oxWjWvvziYnUdmMNTwZzxYNpjkvhAxGygLOjYitcV25uLPKGy16y6w$>
>>
>> New Translation with Nikolai Veresov: L.S. Vygotsky's 
>> Pedological Works Volume One: Foundations of Pedology"
>> https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9789811505270__;!!Mih3wA!XRbYrYRrIZ1UhRKXtLKsmhreiCptJ8yy703Vu0VRPnE3HlElcDm2ORo6LhbAel8cBfueKQ$  
>> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9789811505270__;!!Mih3wA!SRiw8QGioBGwdR67oxWjWvvziYnUdmMNTwZzxYNpjkvhAxGygLOjYitcV25uLPKISZZUHA$>
>
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