Audre Lorde in the Master's outhouse

 When Audre Lorde was born, being black under the one drop rule, being a woman, and being a homosexual were positions of relative disadvantage. The Second World War and the Cold War which succeeded it changed this- at least for the masters of new types of knowledge and the new technologies that knowledge gave rise to. The Hegelian Master-Slave dialectic- precisely because it was thymotic, not epistemic- was deader than the dodo. It no longer mattered who was more 'spirited' and readier to risk death. Work still mattered but it wouldn't be slaves who did the type of work which now mattered. Labor- as opposed to drudgery- had ceased to be labor because it could not be alienated, or rather- its alienation was but planned obsolescence or 'creative destruction'- i.e. it was a case of parents being displaced and rendered redundant by their own children who, so to speak, had stood on their shoulders and thus gained a lifted horizon. This type of progress warms the cockles of the heart of those who, ageing out of life to be reborn into Death's kingdom of ends, may hope that spiritual progress is still possible beyond the veil. 

Lorde can't be blamed for not understanding this. For the first thirty years of her life, any amelioration experienced by members of her class seemed temporary and too easily reversible. Indeed, for some, such was the actual outcome. Addiction proved a more cruel master than Simon Legree. But the stupidity of identity politics, too, was an addiction. True, some might grow rich or gain influence because, in net terms, they were suppliers rather than consumers of that stripe of stupidity. But, it was an addiction nevertheless and all who partook of it, manacled their own minds and suffocated their spirit.

It is now 42 years since the publication of Lorde's famous essay titled-  'The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House'. It was foolish then and it is foolish now. Lorde's slave ancestors had known Masters some of whom had splendid houses. But those houses could be dismantled or demolished by tools similar to those which constructed them. Indeed 'slighting' (i.e. damaging or dismantling a prestigious building) was often accompanied by 'picking'- i.e. separating out a valuable part of the building and removing it and reinstalling it elsewhere. W.R Hearst was famous for having an ancient Spanish cloister dismantled and reassembled in California. This was a highly skilled process. I suppose one could say the new Master can 'slight' and pick over the old Master's house because he has better tools or can employ more productive people. What one can't say- unless one is as stupid as shit- is that tools of construction can't be used for destruction. 

Lorde must have known that, during the Civil War, the industrial North, with its superior tools and technology, crushed the agrarian South and put an end to Slavery. The British had previously ended the Slave trade using the same tools- viz. the ships of the Royal Navy- which had previously profited from that trade. In the USSR and China- and many other countries in Africa and Asia and Latin America- there had been bloody revolutions. The tools of the Masters had been used to slit their own throats. But, in some cases, those tools were used with greater brutality or efficiency to extract larger surpluses so as to fund Scientific research and rapid technological advancement such that previously weak and poor countries became strong and rich. Knowledge was itself the tool which created more Knowledge such that mastery was gained relative to those who, ostrich like, stuck their heads in the quicksands of chauvinistic bigotry or special pleading. This is where Audre and her ilk failed the rising generation. What they were touting wasn't Knowledge, it was Ignorance, Stupidity and Malice towards all. They created what Obama would call the 'circular firing squad' which has proved fatal to a 'progressive politics' which actively seeks to prevent anybody from making any progress. 

Speaking more than 40 years ago, Lorde said-

I agreed to take part in a New York University Institute for the Humanities conference a year ago,

Sell out! How come NYUIH has always been helmed by a White dude? No wonder the 'Humanities' are now considered to be fit only for sub-human imbeciles.  

with the understanding that I would be commenting upon papers dealing with the role of difference within the lives of American women: difference of race, sexuality, class, and age.

None of which matter. What's good for women is good for men. But what is that 'good'? The answer is raising general purpose productivity or, for those unable to work, total factor productivity. This is directly linked to the search for useful knowledge rather than shrill screams of grievance.  

The absence of these considerations weakens any feminist discussion of the personal and the political.

What weakens a discussion, is including stupid nutters.  

It is a particular academic arrogance to assume

that people teaching shit to shitheads are 'academics'. They aren't. They may are, at best, glorified child-minders. 

any discussion of feminist theory

which is shit 

without examining our many differences, and without a significant input from poor women, Black and Third World women, and lesbians.

Examining those differences would show they are irrelevant. Raise general purpose productivity. What works for one group will work for another. It is a different matter that if there are only a limited number of tenured positions for teaching worthless shit, then it becomes very important that obese, hirsute, otherwise unemployable, lesbians get their fair share. 

And yet, I stand here as a Black lesbian feminist,

not Black enough, darling. Also, you had two kids with a dude. It is totes triggering to me, a much darker complected Lesbian who has never let a penis penetrate me, that Lorde tried to 'pass' as a feminist of my sort. 

having been invited to comment within the only panel at this conference where the input of Black feminists and lesbians is represented.

I suppose Lorde's appearance there served its purpose. Later that year, Reagan won the election. Why listen to tweed-jacketed, pipe smoking, Professors of Milton if they let darkies and dykes- not to mention dark skinned dykes- bully them? 

What this says about the vision of this conference is sad, in a country where racism, sexism, and homophobia are inseparable.

Fuck off! They are wholly separable.  

To read this program is to assume that lesbian and Black women have nothing to say about existentialism,

which is shit 

the erotic,

stuff said about the erotic is shit unless it is itself erotic 

women’s culture and silence,

which stupid dudes tend to gas on about 

developing feminist theory,

which was and is just as shitty as the theory of shitting higher than your arsehole.  

or heterosexuality and power.

not to mention Onanism and Truth.  

And what does it mean in personal and political terms when even the two Black women who did present here were literally found at the last hour?

It means the both of you literally are, what Koestler called, call-girls. You may reply, 'we just happened to be home coz our prom date stood us up. But we had already ironed our frock and so when the call came, we jumped at it. ' But that isn't really true, is it? The invitation wasn't given at the last minute. You knew very well what you were signing up for- viz. being a token darkie/dyke, so deeply embittered by that twin circumstance as to rave in the manner of a Caliban or drunken helot, for the salutary purpose of establishing, for the Ivy League Jeunesse dorée, the irremediable brutishness, the fractal abjectness, of an entire class to whom, henceforth, noblesse oblige would entail no further obligation.

What does it mean when the tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy?

It means fools who babble nonsense about racist patriarchy are examining their own faeces. They think it might be a tasty fruit. They then eat it and encourage others to do the same. In this way the contribute to Feminist Theory.  

It means that only the most narrow parameters of change are possible and allowable.

No. If tools can examine fruits to some good purpose, it means those tools have achieved a high level of cognition. Spades can't examine the potatoes they dig up. Maybe a robotic spade with quantum computer based A.I will be able to do so at some time in the future. People working on developing such tools exhibit mastery. The 'parameters' of the changes they bring about are broad and 'disrupt' established industries and hierarchies and patterns of behaviour.

Slaves are welcome to grumble to each other about how the Master keeps beating and sodomizing them though, no doubt, they can do so more loudly if they aren't slaves but merely mad or mentally retarded. 

The absence of any consideration of lesbian consciousness or the consciousness of Third World women leaves a serious gap within this conference and within the papers presented here.

Lesbian consciousness consists in finding chicks fuckable. The consciousness of Third World women consists in wanting to get the fuck out of shithole countries or, at the very least, having more and more First World components in their life-style. As for the 'papers' presented at the Conference, they were smeared with the intellectual equivalent of shit. But the assholes who emitted that shit gained no greater degree of cleanliness thereby.

For example, in a paper on material relationships between women, I was conscious of an either/or model of nurturing which totally dismissed my knowledge as a Black lesbian.

I suppose vigorous fisting may be considered nurturing behaviour by those who like that sort of thing.  

In this paper there was no examination of mutuality between women, no systems of shared support, no interdependence as exists between lesbians and women-identified women.

The VCR revolution had begun by then. I suppose videos featuring stuff of that sort were available 'under the counter'.  

Yet it is only in the patriarchal model of nurturance that women “who attempt to emancipate themselves pay perhaps too high a price for the results,” as this paper states.

Why attempt to emancipate yourself when everybody over 18 had already been emancipated for a century?  

For women, the need and desire to nurture each other is not pathological but redemptive,

Men nurture each other. But so do cows.  

and it is within that knowledge that our real power I rediscovered.

It was the real power to talk utter bollocks.  

It is this real connection which is so feared by a patriarchal world.

Contempt is not fear. Nor, more sadly, is indifference.  

Only within a patriarchal structure is maternity the only social power open to women.

In which case, no patriarchal structure has ever existed.  

Interdependency between women is the way to a freedom which allows the I to be, not in order to be used, but in order to be creative. This is a difference between the passive be and the active being.

I like chicks. Fisting chicks and getting fisted by them makes a lot of difference to me. Since I am the most important being in the universe, everything in Academia should be about me. Why are some cunts studying Physics instead of my pussy? Is it coz iz bleck?  

Advocating the mere tolerance of difference between women is the grossest reformism.

Reform is a good thing. Revolution is a bad thing- at least for crazy lesbians.  

It is a total denial of the creative function of difference in our lives. Difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic.

The Hegelian dialectic didn't 'spark'. It was either stupid or evil shit. The reality was Revolutionary regimes were tyrannical. Dialectically, however, tyranny was freedom and freedom was tyranny. Sadly, few Homosexual's wanted to emigrate to either Stalin's or Mao's Paradise. They'd have got short shrift if they did. 

Only then does the necessity for interdependency become unthreatening.

There is no necessity to become interdependent or codependent on bitches who be kray kray.

Only within that interdependency of difference strengths, acknowledged and equal, can the power to seek new ways of being in the world generate, as well as the courage and sustenance to act where there are no charters.

This is nonsense. The sane are not dependent on the crazy. Lorde did not need to acknowledge that she was equal to smart people. She needed to pretend she was smart. Just being a dyke isn't enough even if the cherry on top is that you iz bleck.  

Within the interdependence of mutual (nondominant) differences lies that security which enables us to descend into the chaos of knowledge and return with true visions of our future, along with the concomitant power to effect those changes which can bring that future into being.

Sadly, Lorde was wrong. There was only chaos, not security, in making stupidity and craziness interdependent.  

Difference is that raw and powerful connection from which our personal power is forged.

No it really isn't. Personal power is forged by general purpose productivity. If you can do a lot you can have power. If you are utterly useless, you may have nuisance value. You don't have power- you have a shitty personality. 

As women, we have been taught either to ignore our differences,

No you haven't. You have been taught to register those differences which is why women are able to uniquely identify their Mummies or daughters or lesbian lovers. 

or to view them as causes for separation and suspicion rather than as forces for change.

The change that was occurring as Lorde spoke these words was that voters were moving to the Right. Feminism was turning into a ghetto. The supremacist ideology of the disabled lesbian of color was replacing the Welfare Queen as the bogeyman driving blue collar workers to vote for Evangelical Republican.  

Without community there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression.

Imaginary oppression. But 'community' wasn't the solution. It was Rehab or a padded cell.  

But community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist.

It has never meant that.  

Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society’s definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference—those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older—know that survival is not an academic skill.

STEM subjects have survival value. Screaming your head off because you are an elderly darkie or dyke has none.  

It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths.

By learning how to endow pigs with the capacity to sprout wings and take to the air. 

For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.

Unless the house is worth dismantling and moving to a better location.   

They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game,

Fuck off! The Master will shoot you if you try to saw his head off using one of his tools. Lorde knew very well that Black Lebsians hadn't beaten anybody at any game even temporarily.  

but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.

Nobody wants crazy dykes to bring about any change whatsoever.  

And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support.

There are no such women. Lorde babbled paranoid nonsense about non-existent threats.  

Poor women and women of Color know there is a difference between the daily manifestations of marital slavery and prostitution because it is our daughters who line 42nd Street.

And your sons who pimp for them. Prostitutes exploit working men taking both their money and their jizz. Disabled lesbian men of colour should be paid for our jizz.  

If white American feminist theory need not deal with the differences between us,

and if Black Lesbian feminist theory does not have to deal with Transgender pedophiles who demand the right to shit on Audre's tits 

and the resulting difference in our oppressions, then how do you deal with the fact that the women who clean your houses and tend your children

in return for money 

while you attend conferences on feminist theory

in return for money 

are, for the most part, poor women and women of Color?

who want to attend Conferences in return for money because they really really like money. 

What is the theory behind racist feminism?

What made Audre, who was shacked up at that time with a white lady, so bitter against White women? Was it that, being used to bullying her partner at home, she had got into a nasty habit? 

In a world of possibility for us all, our personal visions help lay the groundwork for political action.

Only in the sense that Narcissus had a 'personal vision' or that what Echo was doing was 'political action'.  

The failure of academic feminists to

achieve anything either for feminism or academia

recognize difference as a crucial strength is

 odd because they normally recognize any old shite

a failure to reach beyond the first patriarchal lesson.

Which is that if you don't got a dick, you can't be a patriarch.  

In our world, divide and conquer must become define and empower.

Defining stuff divides it from other stuff. What these cunts were defining was that which they claimed was utterly powerless. But that was disempowering.  

Why weren’t other women of Color found to participate in this conference?

Why don't women of Colour hold their own Conferences and then pay stupid White dudes to turn up to complain about how Black dudes look down on them coz of their tiny penises?  

Why were two phone calls to me considered a consultation?

As opposed to masturbation. 

Am I the only possible source of names of Black feminists?

You are a call girl. They called you and you came. Arthur Koestler was a popular writer back then. His book 'The Call-Girls' was about 'academics' who, at the lift of a telephone, jet off to attend a Conference of some more or less bogus type. 

And although the Black panelist’s paper ends on an important and powerful connection of love between women, what about interracial cooperation between feminists who don’t love each other?

i.e. how come there aren't lots and lots of papers about how women who aren't fisting each other can 'co-operate'- possibly by fisting themselves while shrieking and shitting themselves in a synchronized manner.  

In academic feminist circles, the answer to these questions is often, “We do not know who to ask.”

Why is there not a dude who specializes in this sort of thing? It's embarrassing having to ask some crazy dyke about crazy dykes who will show up for Conferences and shit themselves in public.  

But that is the same evasion of responsibility, the same cop-out, that keeps Black women’s art our of women’s exhibitions, Black women’s work our of most feminist publications except for the occasional “Special Third World Women’s Issue,” and Black women’s texts off your reading lists.

Some White dude should take responsibility for forcing 'women's exhibitions' to incorporate shite produced by darkies.  

But as Adrienne Rich pointed out in a recent talk, which feminists have educated themselves about such an enormous amount over the past ten years, how come you haven’t also educated yourselves about Black women and the differences between us—white and Black—when it is key to our survival as a movement?

It was key to the destruction of second wave feminism. It's one thing to say you must give up dick and become a muff diver to be a true feminist. It is another to demand you give yourself quotas for darkies, the obese, the disabled, the mad, and the recently deceased. Otherwise you are just a tool of the Patriarchy.  

Women of today are still being called upon

by voices in their head. 

to stretch across the gap of male ignorance and to educated men as to our existence and our needs.

Men say 'fuck off, you daft bint.'  

This is an old and primary tool of all oppressors to keep the oppressed occupied with the master’s concerns.

That tool is either money or the whip. You either pay people or beat people to do what you want them to do. Nothing else works.  

Now we hear that it is the task of women of Color to educate white women

White women in America were richer, smarter and better educated than darkies. But they were still shit relative to white men. That's a gap which hasn't closed. Feminism is correlated with worse academic outcomes for women in STEM subjects. Being born in Iran or Ukraine is an advantage if you don't have a dick but still want a Fields Medal.  

—in the face of tremendous resistance—as to our existence, our differences, our relative roles in our joint survival. This is a diversion of energies and a tragic repetition of racist patriarchal thought.

Why doesn't everybody understand that I am super special? It is a tragic repetition of racist patriarchal neo-liberal Nazism for peeps not to adore and obey me.  

Simone de Beauvoir once said: “It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our lives

it is a genuine condition of my life that I is a super-duper dyke whom everybody should adore and obey 

that we must draw our strength to live and our reasons for acting.”

Fuck that. Let's just wait till the Brits and the Americans turn up to defeat the Nazis and liberate us. After that we can acknowledge the genuine condition of our life as a cheese-eating surrender monkey.  

Racism and homophobia are real conditions of all our lives in this place and time.

No. Beat peeps who diss you and the only real condition in your life is the fact that your ass gets lots of kissing.  

I urge each one of us here to reach down

with your fist 

into that deep place of knowledge inside herself

i.e. frig yourselves silly, you stupid cunts but think of me when you do so.  

and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives there.

Alternatively, you could just eat your own shit.  

See whose face it wears.

Fuck. She probably means 'womb'. Fist your foetus till its face is all mashed up. Don't depend on male doctors to get abortions. Sisters are doing it for themselves.  

Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices.

At the very least, it can throw light upon post-Second Wave Feminism's choice to eat only its own shit.  

Rashid Khalidi's Vichy water on the brain

Are University Professors and students right to demand free speech? It depends. If they want free speech so as to be better able to pursue alethic research programs, then the answer is 'yes'. But if they have only entered the University to make money or wage war, then the answer is no. Back in the Sixties, the feeling was that the 'Military Industrial complex' wanted smart peeps, like Grothendieck, to work only on nuclear bombs. Yet, advances in pure mathematics would actually more than proportionately benefit both military and peaceful applications of new technology or new scientific theories. 

At that time, it was plausible to believe that a guy like Edward Said, who was a genuine A-rab, might be able to tell us truthful things about his part of the world while WASP professors, paid by the Pentagon, would maintain that all A-rabs be kray kray and thus much more tax dollars should be spent on bombing them to buggery. Sadly, Said turned out to be a hysterical fool. Identity Politics & Grievance Studies, of his sort, were mischievous and counter-productive. Why? The answer is, if people doing a PhD or who were supervising PhDs thought their main purpose in life was to say 'boo to the rich!' of 'fuck the police!' or 'kill all the kikes!', then, clearly what they were studying or teaching had about as much alethic value as being an alcoholic, paranoid, nutjob.

Over the years, this blog has mentioned various Columbia University Professors whose stupidity, bigotry and ignorance suggest that several faculties there are not fit for purpose. They have no place in what is supposed to be an Institution of Higher Learning. They must either get rid of those ignorant 'activist' Professors and students or forfeit Federal funding. 

 One Columbia Emeritus Professor, Rashid Khalidi, on whose book I commented five years ago, now asks in the Guardian whether 

 Columbia still merits the name of a university?

The answer is that some of its STEM subject faculties do merit that description. But many of its non-STEM subject departments lost any such claim decades ago. 

Columbia has long been run more as a business empire than as an educational institution.

No doubt, Khalidi thinks it ought to be run by Hamas as a business empire concerned with kidnapping and decapitating Jews. Pay-for-slay must replace paying for a sheepskin in non-STEM subject shite. Look at the progress Gaza has made under Hamas! Columbia, too, could achieve as much. 

 Now it’s acting like Vichy on the Hudson

No. It is acting in the opposite way from the Vichy Government which eagerly embraced the opportunity to deport Jews to death camps. This stupid shithead doesn't get that Hamas and his other chums have always been on the same side as Hitler. They hate Jews. 

 The question is whether a University 'on the Hudson'- and thus in a place where lots of Jews have been settled for centuries- will get rid of crazy anti-semites like Khalidi or whether they will become a 'safe place' for terrorists. Perhaps, Khalidi thinks tunnels under it should be built so kidnapped Jews and Christians can be held for ransom. 

It was never about eliminating antisemitism.

Which is why Khalidi was hired as 'Edward Said Professor' of Modern Arab- i.e. terrorist- Studies 

It was always about silencing Palestine.

Which other Arab countries have done well enough- though, sadly, this sometimes has involved killing or chasing them away.  

That is what the gagging of protesting students, and now the gagging of faculty, was always meant to lead to.

Nobody gives a toss about Palestinians, least of all the billionaires running Hamas. Interestingly, Khalidi seems wholly unconcerned with the uptick in casualties in Gaza where the death toll has risen above 50,000. He does not mention Huckabee's confirmation hearing, today. If he becomes Ambassador to Israel, many will see it as a signal that the 'two state solution' is off the table. Palestine has no right to exist. At that point, Khalidi will need to write an op-ed for the Guardian asking whether the US still merits the name of a nation. According to his logic, it would become a trans-Atlantic Vichy or, in the jargon of the far right, ZOG- Zionist Occupation Government. Hopefully, Khalidi will learn to chew tobacco and join a White militia in the Appalachian mountains. 

While partisans of the Israeli-American mass slaughter in Gaza may have been offended by their protests, large numbers of the students whose rights of free speech have been infringed upon via draconian punishments were themselves Jewish.

Khalidi is well known for his tender concern for Jews. He often volunteers his services as a Shabbas Goy performing menial services for Jews so that they can properly observe their Sabbath. 

Many of those faculty members who are about to be deprived of academic freedom and faculty governance, and perhaps fired, are themselves Jewish, indeed some are Israelis.

We should offer them refuge in tunnels built under Columbia University. Netanyahu is trying to get his hands on Jews whose freedom of speech Hamas is currently protecting. Yet, Zionist propaganda alleges that the Jews offered asylum by Hamas are 'hostages'!  

If it were ever really about discrimination, the university would have taken action against the ceaseless harassment of Palestinian, Arab and Muslim students and faculty,

by a British-Egyptian lady who had previously run the LSE 

and their allies and supporters, instead of endorsing and enabling it.

The University objected even to the occupation of its buildings! How many tunnels under it have the University funded? It does not even provide financial support for the kidnapping and killing of Jews. Thus, it can no longer call itself a 'University'. Just two years ago, a Columbia University Professor won the Nobel Prize for 'Chemistry'. Yet, Brus hasn't killed or even kidnapped a single Jew! How can Columbia call itself an Institute of Higher Learning when even Nobel Prize winning Professors there are too fucking stupid or lazy to kill Jews? This totally ignores the freedom of expression of Jews who should be screaming with pain as their heads are sawed off. 

This was always about protecting the monstrous, transparent lies that a genocidal 17-month Israeli-American war

Biden & Harris are war-criminals! Why have they not been charged with genocide?  

on the entire Palestinian people was just a war on Hamas, or that anything done on 7 October 2023

Hamas still has hostages. That justifies killing Gazans till those hostages are given up.  

justifies the serial massacres of at least 50,000 people in Gaza, most of them women, children and old people, and the ethnic cleansing of the people of Palestine from their homeland. These lies, generated by Israel and its enablers, which permeate our political system and our moneyed elites, were repeated ceaselessly by the Biden and Trump administrations, by the New York Times and Fox News, and have now been officially sanctioned by a once great university.

An American university acts in line with democratically elected American leaders. The question is whether it is justified in employing a Professor who thinks past American Presidents have engaged in genocidal war-crimes. Indeed, there is a question as to whether the naturalization of such Professors should be withdrawn.  

These lies are rooted in blatant racism.

Khalidi & Co. were very happy to settle in the deeply racist 'Turtle Island'. They are part of a genocidal project and an illegal occupation of land which rightly belongs to the indigenous First Nations.  

Frantz Fanon

whose native Martinique decided to remain part of France rather than become independent. The Lebanese wish France still ruled their country.  

wrote that the Manichaenism of the colonist sometimes “goes to its logical conclusion and dehumanizes the native, or to speak plainly, it turns him into an animal”.

He never learned Arabic. His widow demanded that the publisher of 'Wretched' omit Sartre's preface because of Sartre's support for Israel's right to exist in 1967. Later, having become disillusioned with Arab regimes, she killed herself in Algiers.  

Indeed, Israeli minister of defense, Yoav Gallant, in October 2023 called Palestinians “human animals”. Benjamin Netanyahu said of them: “I don’t call them human animals because that would be insulting to animals.”

Trump says worse about those he considers to be illegal migrants. The problem is that he may now cancel not just Green Cards but also Naturalizations and deport 'activists' of all sorts. Some Indians have already been sent packing. The problem with Palestinian Americans is that no country will take them.  

In this colonial war,

in which, this nutter says Biden & Harris were active belligerents

through this lens, Palestinian lives, like other brown and Black lives,

not to mention the lives of transgender people 

are rendered a worthless, faceless, dehumanized mass, while other lives are uplifted and individually cherished and mourned.

Why is Khalidi considered worthless whereas some 'Chemist' gets a fucking Nobel Prize? Is it coz Khalidi is a disabled Transgender person of Colour?  

We should hold on to these thoughts as long as we can, because in the dystopian world we have entered, simple mention of race and racism are, or will soon be, violations of the perverse current reading of federal law.

Even denouncing America and demanding the overthrow of the illegal ZOG may, perversely, lead to charges of sedition or even the cancelling of Green Cards or Naturalization papers.  

Once the quislings

i.e. Nazi collaborators- like Grand Mufi Husseini. Sadly, he escaped justice at Nuremberg.  

who run Columbia University have implemented the diktats of their masters in Washington and on the board of trustees, once these diktats have spread to other universities under threat, teaching and even quoting Fanon will be perilous indeed,

No. He was banging on about how fucking horrible it is to be bleck just as De Boudoir was banging on about how fucking horrible it is to have a vagina. That shite can continue. Support for terrorists who kill Americans may, however, get you incarcerated or deported.  

as will be mere mention of race and racism, not to speak of gender, disability and much else. We are approaching the status of Chilean universities under Pinochet, where on the orders of an authoritarian government, ideas and books were banned, students were expelled and arrested, departments were taken over, and faculty and staff fired.

Pinochet systematically sodomised dissident goats. Many of those goats protested to the UN but Kurt Waldheim, the Secretary General at that time, slut-shamed those goats. Sadly, Fanon's widow refused to publicize their plight because, as she pointed out, those goats looked a bit Jewy. Even more sadly, her dead husband refused to return to life to beat her in the manner to which she had become accustomed during her years of domestic bliss. I need hardly point out that both these outcomes were the direct result of Neo-Liberalism which is totes evil.  

We should not mourn what Columbia has become, for as great as it may have been,

back when Jim Crow was sound law 

none of this is entirely new. Before the current expulsions and suspension, Columbia once in its history expelled a student for non-violent protest: in 1936 for protesting against offering a platform to Nazis. In 1953 its president signed a letter pronouncing communists unfit to teach. Columbia trustees fired two faculty members for opposing the first world war on pacifist grounds, while student conscientious objectors were arrested and jailed.

So, the place did sensible things at a time when it was rising up. It can do so once again. The woke nutters have shat the bed and can be removed from Campus. Indeed, some will be removed from the country unless, like Ranjani Srinivasan, a PhD student at Columbia, they 'self-deport' after their visa is revoked. 

Columbia has long been run

properly, rather than as a terrorist organization 

more like the vast, wealthy business and real estate empire

in other words, it is professionally run.  

that it is, than as an educational institution.

I suppose, Khalidi thinks 'educational institutions' should focus on killing, or at least kidnapping, Jews, Americans and other such Kaffir scum.  

It is a place where trustees, donors and powerful professional schools dictate its policy, not the rest of its faculty.

I don't suppose the Chemistry faculty has any complaints. That is because Chemistry is useful. What Khalidi does is not useful. It is simply a way to pretend to fight for Palestine while remaining safe and secure.  

In the spring of 2024, two-thirds of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences

which was three quarters shit. 

voted no confidence in a president who bowed to outside pressure, threw her faculty under the bus, and called in the NYPD for the first time since 1968.

Faculties may hate Trump, but Trump is POTUS and SCOTUS is dominated by his appointees. 

Her successor has outdone her, further garlanding Columbia’s already rich repressive traditions with groveling obeisance to government dictates that were promoted and eagerly seconded by shameless collaborators within the university.

Will this nutter resign from Columbia and deport himself from 'Turtle Island'. No. He will continue to grovel to the ZOG and finance its genocide by dutifully paying his taxes. This man is a shameless collaborator with Pinochet's brutal program of sodomizing and slut shaming dissident transgender goats.  

After Friday’s capitulation, Columbia barely merits the name of a university, since its teaching and scholarship on the Middle East,

which is as shit as its 'teaching and scholarship' on America or Europe or everywhere else. On the other hand, the Chemistry department is good.  

and soon much else, will soon be vetted by a “senior vice provost for inclusive pedagogy”, in reality a senior vice provost for Israeli propaganda.

As opposed to Hamas propaganda. Sad.  

Partisans of Israel, infuriated that scholarship on Palestine had found a place at Columbia, once named it “Bir Zeit on the Hudson”.

that's a Palestinian Christian- i.e. Kaffir- University which, no doubt, the good folks of Hamas will shut down. 

But if it any longer merits the name of a university, it should be called Vichy on the Hudson.

This man has Vichy water on the brain. I'm kidding. It is obvious that Khalidi got Generative AI to write this for him. Say what you like, Palestinians are smart people. Sadly, the only growth industry Hamas will permit in Gaza is 'Pay for Slay'. 

arundhati darsana nyaya

Since a God who couldn’t die or lie wouldn’t be truly transcendent- save to one who has empirical knowledge of a mendacious, mortal, Creator- so savants have, very thoughtfully, provided this extra facility for the faithful.

In Christianity, the incarnate God does die but quickly rises from the grave before proceeding to do so much over the next 40 days that a record of His Acts could only be written down in a book larger than the world. Similarly, Sirhindi, Waliullah etc. wanted a God, for Islam, who could lie (imkan ul kizb) though most Indians found this unnecessary because, to be frank, they thought theologians to be stupid liars who had a great thirst for the blood of their rivals.

One solution embraced by the Indians and some mathematical Russians was onomatodoxy- i.e. the name of God is higher than what it denotes. This is perfectly logical. Denotation is categorical and ‘naturality’ (or non-arbitrariness) does not obtain if adjointness (by reason of optimality) is not implicit. In other words, transcendence breaks any image like relationship between God and Man opening the door to pure dependence as self-transcendence.

Schliermacher’s work influenced Grassmann who could be considered the father of linear algebra and whose work is category theoretical avant la lettre. However, this is not really a story about savants disenchanting the world to promote dharma, dependence & deontology. Grassmann’s own development (incidentally he also translated the Rg Veda) shows that the impetus came from Pestalozzi and the need to teach the children of the poor and thus raise up the Nation. Grassmann himself remained a school teacher who never got a University appointment. It seems what disenchanted the savants was the increasing enlightenment of the hewers of wood and drawers of water. Moh Tzu had asked over 2000 years ago what would keep the peasants honest if they stopped believed that ghosts kept watch on them. This was the dilemma for the esteemed pedants and paranoiacs mentioned in this article. Hardy was an exception. He knew Jude the Obscure could rise to any height provided he didn’t have ‘too menny’ kids to drag him down. Arnold was okay, all in all, and became a School Inspector or something useful of that sort. He championed German style philology over Victorian belle lettristic boosterism or bullshit. Clough ended up helping Florence Nightingale compile statistics. Good enough men in their way. Nietzche, poor fellow, was mad. He’d been made a Professor to reverse the gains made by German philology. This fitted well with Kulturkampf stupidity and the general swinishness of the German academic as incarnated by the nutcase Weber.

Doestoevsky, it must be admitted, was very bright. There is a story that Einstein said Karamazov influenced him more than Gauss and Lobachevski. Ivan’s Euclidean mind could but encompass the theodicy of the Godless Humanism of the Gulag- presided over by Dr. Faustus. I suppose we could fulfil the human need for transcendence by gloating over the shit on the carpet at the death of Stalin.

I think the author may have read a recent tendentious text mentioning Sankara’s commentary. To clarify, the Sage in question is Bahva (not Bhadva- which means pimp) who is instructing Vashkali, and though the Scriptural quotation is ‘Brahman is Silence’, the hermeneutic principle ‘arundhati darsana nyaya’ applies- i.e. the thing is like the small star known as Arundhati which is pointed at by means of nearby larger stars. In other words, sublation, not identity, obtains. There is orientation without accessibility or accuracy. Is that good enough for transcendence? Sure. Why not? Maharishi Mahesh Yogi made billions teaching ‘yogic levitation’. Apparently he also tried to get it on with Mia Farrow. Back in the Sixties, that was a cool thing to do. Now- not so much. Still, it is good to know that Ringo Starr is alive and counts as the richest drummer in the world. What’s better than transcendence is surviving such traps as Thanatos lays for the Self. Basho said ‘octopus traps, these dreams under a summer moon’. Ringo attained his octopus garden. Go thou and do likewise. Om Shanti Om. ET phone home.

Sen on Gramsci, Wittgenstein & Sraffa

In 'Problems of Philosophy' Bertrand Russell wrote-

Consider such a proposition as 'Edinburgh is north of London'.

Which means Edinburgh is currently closer to the geographic north pole (defined as the place where the planet's axis of rotation intersects the surface) than London. If it moves, then this relation may no longer hold unless it is fixed by historical convention. 

Here we have a relation between two places,

based on a third place- the geographic north pole.

and it seems plain that the relation subsists independently of our knowledge of it.

The intension 'north' has a well defined extension.  

When we come to know that Edinburgh is north of London, we come to know something which has to do only with Edinburgh and London:

and the geographic north pole- unless the magnetic pole is meant. 

we do not cause the truth of the proposition by coming to know it, on the contrary we merely apprehend a fact which was there before we knew it.

We don't apprehend a fact. We gain information.  

The part of the earth's surface where Edinburgh stands would be north of the part where London stands, even if there were no human being to know about north and south, and even if there were no minds at all in the universe. This is, of course, denied by many philosophers, either for Berkeley's reasons or for Kant's. But we have already considered these reasons, and decided that they are inadequate. We may therefore now assume it to be true that nothing mental is presupposed in the fact that Edinburgh is north of London. But this fact involves the relation 'north of', which is a universal;

It is an intension which, because there is a conventionally defined geographic north pole, has a well defined extension over which there is a partial ordering such that some places are north of some other places.  

and it would be impossible for the whole fact to involve nothing mental if the relation 'north of', which is a constituent part of the fact, did involve anything mental. Hence we must admit that the relation, like the terms it relates, is not dependent upon thought, but belongs to the independent world which thought apprehends but does not create.

This would be the case even if we were speaking of the Londistan and the Edinburgistan featured in a fantasy novel about fire breathing Islamic dragons.  

This conclusion, however, is met by the difficulty that the relation 'north of' does not seem to exist in the same sense in which Edinburgh and London exist.

It exists in the same way if there is a geographic north pole and a metric for distance from it. 

If we ask 'Where and when does this relation exist?' the answer must be 'Nowhere and nowhen'.

No. It exists on earth where there is a geographic north pole in a particular location. There may be 'true polar wander' and it may be that at some remote time, what is north and what is south will change. 

There is no place or time where we can find the relation 'north of'. It does not exist in Edinburgh any more than in London, for it relates the two and is neutral as between them. Nor can we say that it exists at any particular time. Now everything that can be apprehended by the senses or by introspection exists at some particular time. Hence the relation 'north of' is radically different from such things. It is neither in space nor in time, neither material nor mental; yet it is something.

It is what I have said. The earth exists in time and space. Over a long enough period, continental drift may change the relative location of places on it.  

It is largely the very peculiar kind of being that belongs to universals which has led many people to suppose that they are really mental. We can think of a universal, and our thinking then exists in a perfectly ordinary sense, like any other mental act.

If the 'extension' of the 'universal' (which is a name or an 'intension') is well defined then Liebniz's laws of identity apply. The thing is like other things.  

Suppose, for example, that we are thinking of whiteness.

I suppose this has a well defined extension for physicists. It may not do so for cultural discourse. I may say 'Rishi Sunak exemplifies whiteness in our culture. Donald Trump is a badass niggah.'  

Then in one sense it may be said that whiteness is 'in our mind'. We have here the same ambiguity as we noted in discussing Berkeley in Chapter IV. In the strict sense, it is not whiteness that is in our mind, but the act of thinking of whiteness. The connected ambiguity in the word 'idea', which we noted at the same time, also causes confusion here. In one sense of this word, namely the sense in which it denotes the object of an act of thought, whiteness is an 'idea'.

It is an intension. For some purposes it has a well-defined extension. For others, it does not. I may say 'Rishi Sunak reeks of whiteness. Trump is my homeboy. He got my back.'  

Hence, if the ambiguity is not guarded against, we may come to think that whiteness is an 'idea' in the other sense, i.e. an act of thought; and thus we come to think that whiteness is mental. But in so thinking, we rob it of its essential quality of universality. One man's act of thought is necessarily a different thing from another man's; one man's act of thought at one time is necessarily a different thing from the same man's act of thought at another time. Hence, if whiteness were the thought as opposed to its object, no two different men could think of it, and no one man could think of it twice. That which many different thoughts of whiteness have in common is their object, and this object is different from all of them. Thus universals are not thoughts, though when known they are the objects of thoughts.

Russell & Whitehead did not formalise the intensional logic implicit in 'Principles'. Alonzo Church  further developed Ramsey's simple type theory but some difficulties remained. 

The Wittgenstein of the Tractatus, was brimming with confidence that elementary propositions ('simples') existed such that they were their own truth functions and there was a 'general form of proposition which was a truth-function of elementary propositions, built up through successive applications of the negation operator. But, in this case either 'general form' is 'simple' and is its own truth function or it isn't general at all. It is specific and likely to be false. Consider the proposition that light is a wave. At some point it is just as true as the proposition that light is a particle even though a particle is not a wave.

Perhaps, Witless, for Russell, was an 'oracle' and the Tractatus was a 'model' for his system. So long as Witless appeared to be thinking very hard but remaining within that framework, Russell's purpose was served. But if even Witless could see the foundational flaw in the Tractatus then what use was he? Russell, charitably, attributed the later Witlesstein's useless to laziness rather than stupidity- "The late Wittgenstein...seems to have grown tired of serious thinking and to have invented a doctrine which would make such an activity unnecessary.'

The following passage in the Tractatus is often considered to encapsulate the error which caused Witless to change his position.

6.375 As there is only a logical necessity, so there is only a logical impossibility.

There are no known logically necessary propositions. It is not the case that all bachelors are unmarried or that it is always raining or not raining. In both cases we can point to situations where it is reasonable to hold the view expressed by the proposition. But we can also point to exceptions. The fact is the 'extension' corresponding to 'bachelor' or 'raining' is different for different people and changes according to context. The Prince Regent, by law, was a bachelor even if he was married to Mrs. Fitzherbert. Because the woman was Catholic, the marriage did not exist in the eye of British law.  

6.3751 For two colours, e.g. to be at one place in the visual field, is impossible,

This is nonsense. In my visual field, at this very moment, there are two colours at the same place. That place is the 4k monitor I'm looking at. This is because 'persistence of vision' occurs at a higher cognitive level and with a different time lag than that at which my visual field operates. What is happening is that at a given point in that field, there is a vector of observed colours but that vector is collapsed such that one colour is 'smeared' based on what other colour vectors are adjacent.  

logically impossible,

Nothing is logically impossible. Indeed, it is not impossible that a situation may arise where where logic isn't utterly misleading or mischievous.  

for it is excluded by the logical structure of colour.

Nothing has any such thing. Indeed, the structure of a logic is arbitrary not logical.  

Let us consider how this contradiction presents itself in physics.

It doesn't. Visual fields are physiological or cognitive.  

Somewhat as follows: That a particle cannot at the same time have two velocities,

It can do so in Non-Newtonian fluid dynamics 

i.e. that at the same time it cannot be in two places,

Quantum tunnelling. 

i.e. that particles in different places at the same time cannot be identical.

Quantum entanglement 

(It is clear that the logical product of two elementary propositions can neither be a tautology nor a contradiction.

There is no 'logical product'. There is merely an arbitrary assertion no matter how it was arrived at. 

The assertion that a point in the visual field has two different colours at the same time, is a contradiction

Frank Ramsey, who translated the Tractatus, wrote in his review-

It is a principle of Mr. Wittgenstein's, and, if true, is a very important discovery, that every genuine proposition asserts something possible, but not necessary.

This is not a discovery. It is a 'true Scotsman' type fallacy. Genuine propositions are very sweet and nice. They have the access to the mind of God and thus can assert possibility (i.e. 'compossibility') whereas even the smartest peeps can only say 'I think it is possible that x will be the case if we do y. Let us do the experiment'.  Also, we don't know if anything which is compossible is necessarily so. If we had a proof one way or another we would also have a proof re. God's existence and P not equal NP etc. 

This follows from his account of a proposition as the expression of agreement and disagreement with truth-possibilities of independent elementary propositions, so that the only necessity is that of tautology, the only impossibility that of contradiction. There is great difficulty in holding this; for Mr. Wittgenstein admits that a point in the visual field cannot be both red and blue; and, indeed, otherwise, since he thinks induction has no logical basis, we should have no reason for thinking that we may not come upon a visual point which is both red and blue. Hence he says that "This is both red and blue" is a contradiction.

This implies that the apparently simple concepts red, blue (supposing us to mean by those words absolutely specific shades) are really complex and formally incompatible. He tries to show how this may be, by analysing them in terms of vibrations. But even supposing that the physicist thus provides an analysis of what we mean by "red," Mr Wittgenstein is only reducing the difficulty to that of the necessary properties of space, time, and matter or the ether. He explicitly makes it depend on the impossibility of a particle being in two places at the same time. These necessary properties of space and time are hardly capable of a further reduction of this kind. For example, considering between in point of time as regards my experiences; if B is between A and D, and C between B and D, then C  must be between A and D; but it is hard to see how this can be a formal tautology. 

In other words, if there really was a contradiction here then it depended on some nonlogical impossibility of different colours occurring in a single place at the very same time. The problem here is that we don't know that the thing is impossible. If light can be both a wave and a particle, maybe a colour can be two or more colours. Still, for some particular purpose, there may be truths about points or colours or an 'exclusion principle' at work in a particular field. But such truths don't arise from the general form of the proposition which Wittless had hoped would determine all and only genuine propositions. Wittless chose to give up the claim that there were necessary and sufficient conditions to distinguish meaningless or senseless propositions. However other mathematical logicians were prepared to carry forward that program to a limited, but utile, end. By contrast, it appears there is no philosophical grammar to natural language. This is because even 'tautologies' and 'contradictions' have no truth value. This is why I can say 'I am not myself today'. The 'I' is an 'intension' whose 'extension' does not, as Sartre might put it, 'coincide with itself'. Indeed, nothing epistemic does which is why the learned Professions have 'terms of art' with buck stopped, protocol bound, extensions. But they are not 'complete' and, in so far as they are consistent, remain defeasible and, in that sense, arbitrary and provisional. On the other hand, what does not exist at all is 'that which cannot be said but shows itself only in a correct logical notation'. There is nothing whatever which 'lies beyond the limit to the expression of thought in a language.'' 

I suppose, over the course of the Nineteen Twenties, even quite stupid people came to understand that all  the 'Natural Laws' of the long Eighteenth Century had been buggered to buggery. Maybe, Language- reinvented as a cage- could replace the clockwork of Newton and Laplace such that, once again, one could talk ignorant bollocks. The alternative was to experiment and thus overthrow every type of received wisdom while achieving piecemeal progress in any and every utile field. Witless explained why we can't think because Language constricts us. Gramsci explained why hegemony must always be evil shit based on grinding down the face of the working man rather than general purpose productivity enhancing experimentation and innovation. 

Gramsci, it must be said, was not a mathematician or a logician but, rather, a student of literature, linguistics and the  philosophy of Croce who, in 1917, published 'Logic as the Science of the pure concept'. Sraffa was close to Gramsci and personally ensured that his fine mind was supplied with all the latest books. 

Amartya Sen, in discussing the influence of Gramsci, via Sraffa, on Wittgenstein- ignoring the 'Ramsey effect' on the last two, quotes the following passage from the Prison Notebooks- 

One can also recall the example contained in a little book by Bertrand Russell [The Problems of Philosophy]. Russell says approximately this: “We cannot, without the existence of man on the earth, think of the existence of London or Edinburgh, but we can think of the existence of two points in space, one to the North and one to the South, where London and Edinburgh now are.”

Russell says nothing of the sort. We can think of Londistand and Edinburgistan as described in a fantasy novel.  

… East and West are arbitrary and conventional, that is, historical constructions,

there is a magnetic north pole though, apparently, it is now fleeing Canada so as to settle in Siberia.  

since outside of real history every point on the earth is East and West at the same time.

Only in the sense that every place is both East of some particular place while being West of some different place. 

This can be seen more clearly from the fact that these terms have crystallized not from the point of view of a hypothetical melancholic man in general but from the point of view of the European cultured classes who, as a result of their world-wide hegemony, have caused them to be accepted everywhere.

Nonsense! The Chinese invented the compass or 'south pointer' and it spread to the Indians and the Arabs and the Europeans. The European cultured class didn't matter. Mariners did. They weren't cultured at all. They were drunken boors like Captain Jack Sparrow in 'Pirates of the Caribbean'.  

Japan is the Far East not only for Europe but also perhaps for the American from California and even for the Japanese himself, who, through English political culture, may then call Egypt the Near East.

Apparently, the Malay mariners used the term 'Bharat' (meaning India) for 'West'. It really isn't 'cultural imperialism' or 'appropriation' to use terms coined by some other civilization. Whining about the hegemony of White dicks (did you know Newton had a white dick? That's why he invented Gravity to prevent us darkies from flying away to Uranus) is no way for grown-ups to pass their time- even if they are Professors of shite subjects. 

Sen says

How exactly Sraffa’s ideas linked with Gramsci’s, and how they influenced each other, are subjects for further research.

Not really.  Both Sraffa and Gramsci failed. Marxism is stoooopid. Frank Ramsey was the one smart guy at Cambridge back then. But he died young. Had he lived he might have put a stop to the anal-tickle availability cascade of intensional fallacies. But then, he might also have put Keynesian economics on a sound footing and forestalled the foolishness of Arrow-Debreu.  

But it is plausible to argue that, in one way or another, Sraffa was quite familiar with the themes that engaged Gramsci in the twenties and early thirties.

They knew each other well. 

It is not very hard to understand why the program of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus would have seemed deeply misguided to Sraffa, coming from the intellectual circle to which he belonged.

Because 'elementary' or 'atomic' propositions are far to seek. Maybe, after mankind has attained omniscience, there will be such things. But till that time, we are stuck with 'epistemic' intentions which change as our knowledge changes. This meant that logicism was either something useful in limited contexts or else just the 'masked man fallacy' from the Fourth Century BC. 

Sraffa's economic equivalent of Wittgenstein's 'simples', is the idea of  a 'basic' good. Non-basic goods are 'luxuries' and Sraffa says they can be ignored even if they exist provided we assume that, by magic, the past remains the same as the present. This is because a deficit economy would not exist and a surplus economy would not be able to invest the surplus to raise growth. That's why only 'basic' goods determine everything. The problem is that, just as there are no 'simples', so too, there are no 'basic goods'. Everything can be a luxury- e.g. feeding wheat to parrots (Bohm-Bawerk's example). Sraffa wants a 'standard' commodity (numeraire) and so tells the luxuriantly plumed parrots to fly away so he can compose the standard commodity only out of 'basic goods'. But this is like the dream of getting rid of language and replacing it with propositions containing only 'simples'. The pay off is that we can get rid of Time and 'mechanical causality'. At this point, we no longer need to bother with language or knowledge or surviving. We have gone beyond Time and Causality and the duality of subject and object. In other words, we have become perfectly stupid and perfectly useless. 

Nor is it difficult to see why the fruitfulness of “the anthropological way”—novel and momentous as it was to Wittgenstein—would have appeared to Sraffa to be not altogether unobvious.

It was bigoted shite. Capitalists are hegemonic and using mind control to keep the proles in bondage. It isn't the case that factory workers don't want to run factories because they know that their fellow workers will steal everything in sight.  

I suppose one could say that Sraffa and Witless were equally useless because the things they thought mattered-'Capital' in the former case and  'following rules' in the latter- were 'intensions' with unique or well defined extensions. They may as well have made miaow miaow or woof woof noises. They weren't expressing anything at all. 

Sen says

(Sraffa) shows that capital as a surrogate factor of production cannot be defined, in general,

No. It is defined as physical capital- i.e. stuff used to make goods. There is a 'derived demand' for it.  

independently of the rate of interest,

It can be defined as an inventory of capital goods. But their money value (net present value) changes with the interest rate- if that is the rate of discount applied. But it might not be. There are ways to ensure that the long term discount rate is unaffected by short term changes. Here expectations regarding 'marginal efficiency of capital' play a role. 

and the so-called marginal productivity of capital can hardly be seen as governing the interest rate.

Which one? There are several. In theory, arbitrage should bring them all into line but, equally, sophisticated instruments exist so as to 'lock-in' to a particular interest rate which is deemed equal to m.e.K for a particular project. Here the capital value may change to compensate for differences in risk and cost of funds.

Indeed, techniques of production cannot even be ranked in terms of being more or less “capital intensive,” since their capital intensities, which are dependent on the interest rate, can repeatedly reverse their relative ranking as the interest rate is lowered.

No. Accountants keep track of 'historic costs' and thus rank capital intensity. What Sen means is that when interest rates, exchange rates, m.e.K and real per unit labour costs change, then for new projects capital intensity will be viewed differently. Consider the dramatic fall in the price of computing. What was highly capital intensive- because it required a mainframe- is not as cheap as chips and thus labour intensive. On the other hand, some things which were labour intensive- e.g. Indian software development- may become capital intensive if the work is done by generative AI running on 100 billion dollar quantum super-computers. 

This is a powerful technical result.

It is nonsense. We know that all models are underdetermined and hence lack categoricity. Still, at the margin, some are useful enough. Sraffa's wasn't useful. It was a picture of an economy without 'mechanical causation' or the lapse of time. He wrote-

Sraffa is assuming that marginal product means 'output from employment of an additional unit of the factor'. But it doesn't mean that. It means 'output from the last unit employed'. That can be found easily enough (otherwise no historical accountancy costs are discernible and hence Sraffa's system has no associated mathematical matrix) . Moreover, since the economy is in a steady-state, it remains unchanged for all time. But the force that sustains it in that steady state is magic. 

We can ask: what difference does it make?

Sraffa assumed a uniform rate of profit which meant his model was observationally equivalent to a constant returns model with 'aggregative capital'. So, the thing made no difference at all. It was just that Sraffa was lying about the assumption of constant returns. But, as Paul Samuelson pointed out, it was baked into the Math.

Aggregative neoclassical models with capital as a factor of production are irreparably damaged.

Both mathematical growth and capital theory turned out to be useless. But so did Arrow-Debreu general equilibrium which turned out to be 'anything goes'.  

But neoclassical economic theory need not be expounded in an aggregative form. It is possible to see production in terms of distinct capital goods and leave it at that.

Leave it to Accountants. They have been doing this stuff for hundreds of years.  

Also, the kind of practical insight for policy that one may try to get from arguing in aggregative terms (such as the case for using less capital-intensive techniques when labor is cheap and the cost of capital is high) is neither dependent on how interest rates are actually determined, nor conditional on any very specific model of capital valuation.

What determines 'policy advise' is who pays for it. If the guy who wants to sell capital goods pays you, your project appraisal is positive. If nobody is paying you, gas on about how 'Small is Beautiful' and poor peeps desperately need jobs spinning cotton or constructing super-computers out of cow-dung.  

Yet, at the level of pure theory, the idea that interest is the reward of the productivity of capital

there is no such theory. Interest is the reward for foregoing present consumption. The marginal product of capital is the incentive for borrowing or using your own funds for investment.  

rather than, say, the result of exploiting labor

and raping trillions of disabled lesbians with your invisible cock 

(or simply the passive residual that is left over between the output value and input costs, including wage payments

that is profit, not interest.  

) can play—and has often been made to play—quite a major part in political and social debates

between nutters 

about the nature of the capitalist system.

not to mention the nature of Whiteness or the fact that dicks cause rape. Ban them immediately! 

Thus, the political and social context of Sraffa’s demolitional critique of capital as a factor of production

which was achieved by constraining the future to be the same as the past.  

is not hard to see once the subject matter of the critique is fully seized and interpreted in line with a classical debate stretching over several centuries.

Sraffa was saying 'boo to Capitalism! It is raping trillions of disabled lesbians with its invisible cock!' But Italy and the UK were doing well under free- or freeish- enterprise. Nobody wanted 'Worker's Control' or the politics of envy- i.e. raising taxes till all the talented people ran the fuck away.  

Sraffa’s findings have to be seen as a response to a particular descriptive account—with normative relevance— of the capitalist system of production, and that is where the potential social relevance of these technical results lies.

Sraffa found Capitalist England a safer refuge than some shithole behind the Iron Curtain. He may have bit the hand that fed him but those were love-bites merely.  

I must confess that I find it altogether difficult to be convinced that one’s skepticism of unrestrained capitalism must turn on such matters as the usefulness of aggregate capital as a factor of production

in which case, Sen thinks Marx was barking mad and, moreover, barking up a non-existent tree.  

and the productivity attributed to it, rather than on the mean streets and strained lives that capitalism can generate,

It can generate the resources to fund collective insurance. That's what the Welfare State is- an insurance scheme. Workers pay into it and gain benefits from it when unable to work.  

unless it is restrained and supplemented by other— often nonmarket—institutions.

Insurance is a market institution. True the Government can take over the down-side but it can also go off a fiscal cliff. Entitlements may be rationed or undergo a haircut. The difference between the Government and a private company is that the Government has sovereign immunity. Madoff can be sent to jail. The Chancellor of the Exchequer is not liable to imprisonment for fraud if he reneges on welfare commitments.  

And yet it is not hard to see the broad social and political vision of Sraffa’s analysis and its argumentative relevance for debates about taking the productivity of capital as explication of profits.

It is very hard to see how debates about Capitalism were relevant when History vindicated it while shitting copiously on Communism.  

 Prices and Two Senses of Determination I turn now to a second example. Sraffa considers an economy in equilibrium to the extent of having a uniform profit (or interest) rate.

In other words, he considers an incompossible fairy tale world.  

He shows that if we take a snapshot of the economy with a comprehensive description of all production activities, with observed inputs and outputs, and a given interest rate, from this information alone we can determine (in the sense of figuring out) the prices of all the commodities as well as distribution of income between wages and interest (or profit).

In other words, he shows that if he thinks he has rigged a game in advance, then he thinks the game is rigged in advance. Sadly, no humans would play that rigged game.  

And, if we consider a higher and higher interest—or profit—rate then the wage rate will be consistently lower and lower.

But, assuming workers have higher propensity to consume, this means aggregate demand falls with the result that prices fall and thus profits fall. Interest payments may remain the same but some enterprises go bankrupt. This is a recession. There may be a small 'real balance' wealth effect but it will be cancelled out by bankruptcies and the fall in asset prices.  

We can, thus, get a downward sloping wage-profit relationship (an almost tranquil portrayal of a stationary “class war”), for that given production situation, and the specification of either the interest (or profit) rate or the wage rate will allow us to calculate all the commodity prices. The dog that does not bark at all in this exercise is the demand side:

In other words, senile Sraffa was writing nonsense.  

we go directly from production information to prices.

Sen is drawing a conclusion previously arrived at by Arun Bose in 1964. Sraffa rejected it, writing to him- ' I am sorry to have kept your MS so long—and with so little result. The fact is that your opening sentence is for me an obstacle which I am unable to get over. You write: “It is a basic proposition of the Sraffa theory that prices are determined exclusively by the physical requirements of production and the social wage-profit division with consumers demand playing a purely passive role.” Never have I said this: certainly not in the two places to which you refer in your note. Nothing, in my view, could be more suicidal than to make such a statement. You are asking me to put my head on the block so that the first fool who comes along can cut it off neatly. Whatever you do, please do not represent me as saying such a thing.' The problem here is that saying 'Sraffa gets rid of Time and Causality so as to rely wholly upon Magic so as to do a bit of Marxian Econ' makes Boses and Sens and Chatterjees and Mukherjees look as stupid as their hero.  

There is no need, in this mathematical exercise, to invoke the demand conditions for the different commodities, which are, for this particular analytical exercise, redundant.

Just have Soviet style rationing and forget about prices.  

In interpreting this very neat result, the philosophical foundation of meaning and communication comes fully into its own.

No. What becomes obvious is that Sraffa is committing the intensional fallacy. He thinks demand is independent rather than impredicatively related to prices and wages. In other words, he just got rid of the Slutsky substitution and income effects.  

It is extremely important to understand what is meant by “determination” in the mathematical context

it is finding a unique value or solution.  

(or, to put it in the “anthropological way,” how it would be understood in a mathematical community), and we must not confound the different senses in which the term could be used.

Just as there are no unique rules for 'language games', there is no unique solution to any type of general equilibrium model because of impredicativity and epistemic intensions- i.e. expectations or preferences.  

There has been a strong temptation on the part of the critics of mainstream economic theory to take Sraffa’s “critique” as showing the redundancy of demand conditions in the causal determination of prices, thereby undermining that theory since it makes so much of demands and utilities.

Professors of shit subjects think they know what everybody should have in their shopping basket. It is vitally important, in a truly democratic country that people's liberties and capabilities are protected such that they don't end up buying tasty things to eat or nice clothes to wear.  

Robinson (1961) is not the only commentator to display some fascination towards taking that route (p. 57): …when we are provided with a set of technical equations for production and a real wage rate which is uniform throughout the economy, there is no room for demand equations in the determination of equilibrium prices.

Because the 'real wage rate' is the money wage (which is known) deflated by a weighted price vector which is not known. That price vector captures the demand side. The problem is that nobody knows the 'real wage rate' at any given moment. Only after a time lag will different deflators be available to show how real wages in different industries have changed. Even then there will be Laspeyres or Paasche type bias. In the former case, there may be a negative income effect. In the latter case it may be positive because people are switching to goods embedding more recent (and thus better) technology. 

However, since the entire calculation is done for a given and observed picture of production (with inputs and outputs all fixed, as in a snapshot of production operations in the economy), the question as to what would happen if demand conditions change—which could of course lead to different amounts of production—is not at all addressed in this exercise.

In other words, it is stupid shit. The fact is, in the Soviet Union, there was 'repressed inflation'- i.e. longer queues instead of higher prices. But there was also a lot of waste. Some goods were too cheap and thus bought and used for some other purpose. One way round this would be to use 'shadow prices' to reflect scarcity. But the informational requirements for computing this for the whole economy was too high.  

The tendency to interpret mathematical determination as causal determination can, thus, cause a major misunderstanding.

There was no such tendency. During the Sixties all sorts of mathematical models were found to lack unique solutions. They were 'anything goes'. Indeed, 'naturality' (non-arbitrariness) turned out to be far to seek. Then came problems of concurrency, complexity and computability. Deterministic systems might have unique solutions but in a time class exponential to the life of the Universe. 

The question was why Marxism didn't just curl up and die once it was known that it either had no mathematical representation or if it did (e.g. Koopmans/Kantorovich) the thing was intractable and so for a Hayekian reason, markets must prevail or else a wasteful type of sclerosis would grip the economy. The answer was it suffered brain-death but remained spry enough on select Campuses. It was merely a branch of Grievance Studies on a par with that of Disabled Lesbians of Colour who were being oppressed by invisible white dicks. Sadly, the Queer Crips were even more vocal before being supplanted by militant transgender activists who consider TERFs the source of all evil. 

In a footnote, Sen quotes Sraffa who described his little book as dealing with an

extremely elementary problem; so elementary indeed that its solution is generally taken for granted. The problem is that of ascertaining the conditions of equilibrium of a system of prices & the rate of profits, independently of the study of the forces which may bring about such a state of equilibrium.

The condition for price equilibrium is simple. Markets clear. Everybody can buy or sell as much as they want at the going price.  There is no equilibrium condition for 'the rate of profit' which is a matter of historical accounting. One may speak of a notional 'marginal rate of profit' which is equated to a notional equilibrium interest rate. But that notion is epistemic and has to do with expectations. You commit the intensional fallacy if you equate it to something in the world rather than in the head. 

Value and Descriptive Importance If Sraffa’s results do not have anything much to say on causal determination, then what gives them interest?

I suppose Sraffa was useful in pushing back against the stupidity of mathematical capital or growth theory.  Perhaps, he was opening a door to a purely gesture political Marxism unconcerned with what causes things so as to focus exclusively on 'the Cause'.

That question can be answered by considering the nature of social communication to which Sraffa’s work contributes. First, analytical determination—not only causal determination—is a subject that interests people a good deal.

Causal determination enables one to change outcomes. That is interesting. If analytical determinations enable us to make better predictions, that too would be interesting. Otherwise, they are just a schizophrenic word-salad or species of paranoia.  

Sraffa’s demonstration that a snapshot picture of just the production conditions of the economy can tell us so much about possible prices is not only a remarkable analytical diagnosis,

It was nonsense. Production conditions in the British economy are such that wankers produce a lot of jizz. This suggests that the price of jizz must be high enough for so much of it to be forthcoming.

it is also a finding of considerable intellectual interest to people who want to think about the correspondence between quantities produced and prices charged.

There is no such correspondence. My farts are a free good. I invite people to smell my farts but they refuse on the grounds that they have plenty of their own farts to smell.  

Gramsci has argued that everyone is a philosopher

Stalin was. Oddly, his philosophy of language was actually quite helpful at a time when some on the Left demanded that traditional forms of poetry in vernacular languages be banned. Stalin said language is independent of the 'sub-structure'. You are welcome to use feudal or bougie language or literary forms. You don't have to be a rabid Proletkult hooligan.  

at some level, and perhaps an exactly similar thing can be said about the fact that analytical—and even mathematical—curiosity is widespread, and influences our social thinking.

Mimetics, not mathematics, influences our social being.  

The idea that it is possible to find out what the commodity prices are merely by looking at the given “production side” (inputs and outputs), along with the interest rate, is a powerful analytical result.

Sen doesn't understand that the price vector is the deflator for the real wage which is assumed to be known. That vector captures the demand side.  

A second reason for being interested in Sraffa’s results is to understand them in terms of the idea of value and the political content of that concept.

It was Marxian or Georgist garbage. True value is created by disabled Lesbians of Colour. Sadly, they are sodomized by invisible White cocks and thus surplus value is confiscated by Jewish Bankers.  

In classical thought, “value” has been seen not merely as a way of getting at prices (Smith, Ricardo, and Marx all discussed problems in going from values to prices), but also at making a descriptive statement of some social importance.

Value is only created by disabled Lesbians of colour. If you deny this elementary truth you are a Nazi and should very kindly top yourself.  

To many economists the idea of “value” appears to be thoroughly wrongheaded. For example, Robinson invoked positivist methodology (she could be described as a “left-wing Popperian”) to dismiss any real relevance of the idea of value in general and its invoking in Marxian economics in particular. In her Economic Philosophy, Robinson (1964) put her denunciation thus (p. 39): On this plane the whole argument appears to be metaphysical; it provides a typical example of the way metaphysical ideas operate. Logically it is a mere rigmarole of words, but for Marx it was a flood of illumination and for latter-day Marxists, a source of inspiration.16 “Value will not help,” Robinson concluded. “It has no operational content. It is just a word.”

Robinson was wrong. During the War, people realized that some things had 'survival value'. Other things didn't. What is or isn't valuable depends on whether or not there is an existential threat. Still, some costly things might be bad in their effects or repugnant in themselves and so Society may forbid their production or consumption. 

The philosophical issues raised by Gramsci and Sraffa, and of course by Wittgenstein, have considerable bearing on this question.

No. Workers don't want 'Workers Control'. They just want to get paid. Gramsci was wrong though, at certain times and certain places, it could be argued that workers would do a better job running enterprises than lazy hereditary proprietors. As a matter of fact, worker participation in management can raise productivity, quality control, etc. 

Sraffa was a good descriptive economist and had he remained in Italy, his books and articles would have been widely consulted. Sadly, he had to relocate to lean unlovely England. Wittgenstein, on the other hand, was as stupid as shit. Perhaps he'd have done well as an engineer.  

Just as positivist methodology pronounces some statements meaningless when they do not fit the narrow sense of “meaning” in the limited terms of verification or falsification, the Tractatus too saw little of content in statements that did not represent or mirror a state of affairs in the same logical form.

Witless was optimistic that conceptual (he would say 'logical') truths were discoverable and empirically verifiable. But, if so, where were they? There had been empirical verification of Einstein's theory. Why had nothing similar happened for Russell & Wittgenstein's own project?  

This has the implication, as Simon Blackburn (1994) put it, of denying “factual or cognitive meaning to sentences whose function does not fit into its conception of representation, such as those concerned with ethics, or meaning, or the self” (p. 401).

If we had access to all the facts about the world, we might deny that anything else was meaningful. But it seems less and likely that we could ever be in that position. Still, for Economics, Sraffa stopped being meaningful (though, one understood, he didn't like Capitalism probably because it got drunk and went down on Mussolini) and, for Mathematical Logic, Witless stopped being meaningful. Still, if you were stupid, you could do your PhD on one or the other or both of those losers.  

In contrast, the philosophical approach pursued by the “later Wittgenstein,” partly influenced by Sraffa himself, sees meaning in much broader terms.

This could be useful for Grievance Studies mavens craving affirmative action.  

The interpretation of value and its descriptive relevance have been well discussed by Maurice Dobb (1937, 1973), the Marxist economist, who

recruited for the KGB 

was a close friend of Sraffa and his long-term collaborator in editing David Ricardo’s collected works. Dobb pointed to the social and political interest in a significant description of economic relations between people.

There is greater significance in describing the sexual relations between people. It may be that a proper audit will reveal that the Brits benefitted India economically. However, what we must remember is that evil Viceroys used to surreptitiously enter the hovels of trillions of starving Indians and mercilessly drain them of their vital bodily essence through aggravated acts of fellatio and cunnilingus. King Charles should apologize for this disgusting vice of his Grandfather's Viceroys. He should offer us suitable reparations. I'll settle for a case or two of Champers every week. Also a hamper from Fortnum & Mason's. 

Even such notions as “exploitation” which have appeared to some (including Robinson) as “metaphysical,” can be seen to be an attempt to reflect, in communicative language, a common public concern about social asymmetries in economic relations.

Fuck economic relations. You can't exploit people with very low productivity. You can drain them of trillions of gallons of jizz.  

As Dobb (1973) put it (p. 45):exploitation” is neither something metaphysical nor simply an “ethical” judgement (still less “just a noise”) as has sometimes been depicted: it is a factual description of a socio-economic relationship, as much as is Marc Bloch’s apt characterisation of Feudalism as a system where feudal lords “lived on labor of other men.”

Feudal lords killed other feudal lords or wannabe feudal lords. Their military prowess was directly linked to their remuneration.  

Sraffa’s analysis of production relations and the coherence between costs and prices (within a snapshot picture of the economy), while different from a labor-based description in the Marxian mould, is also an attempt to express social relations with a focus on the production side, rather than on utility and mental conditions.

If so, he would have a theory of the entrepreneur, the arbitrageur (market maker), and the managerial class. Under cartelized 'administered pricing', a snapshot of the supply side did give you information about the demand side on the assumption that tastes are slow to change. But Sraffa was not engaged in this type of Galbraithian analysis. 

We can debate how profound that perspective is, but it is important to see that the subject matter of Sraffa’s analysis is enlightening description of prices and income distribution, invoking only the interrelations on the production side.

If so, Iyerian analysis would be even more enlightening because it would focus only on farting and jizzing. Assuming that both activities are discouraged while engaged in the production process, we would have a snapshot of who actually has a job (because their output of farts and jizz would fall while at work). Assuming real wages are known, then the price vector is known. Moreover, by adding up consumption bundles we get to total Consumption. We can work out Investment from the Capital Output ratio and standard rate of depreciation. Anything else we need, we can assume to exist. Thus, we can also compute the total number of invisible flying unicorns which feed on my farts.  

Closely related to this perspective, there is a further issue which involves addressing the classical dichotomy between “use-value” and “exchange-value,” as it was formulated by the founders of modern economics, in particular Adam Smith and David Ricardo.

This is the difference between the benefit you get by keeping something rather than selling it on Ebay. It is of interest to Marxist nutters because they claim that the boss class beats and sodomizes proles while forcing them to work in factories. Some claim that workers get a 'wage'. This is absurd. Closely examine any prole and you will see he is dripping cum from every orifice. Ask him if he gets paid and he will laugh bitterly.  

Sraffa and Dobb, who collaborated in the editing of Ricardo’s collected works, had significant interest in this question, and to that issue, I now turn.

Neither Sraffa nor Dobb were benders and thus Cambridge was wasted on them. Sen does not say as much, but their 'collaboration' on Ricardo did not involve butt sex. This proves they were homophobic Nazis. Also they had dicks. White dicks! We must decolonize and depatriarchalize Ricardo- a leading Lesbian of Colour who was noted for her vigorous fisting of Queen Adelaide. 

Use, Exchange and Counterfactuals David Ricardo’s foundational book, On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, published in 1817, begins with the following opening passage: It has been observed by Adam Smith, that “the word Value has two different meanings, and sometimes expresses the utility of some particular object, and sometimes the power of purchasing other goods which the possession of that object conveys.

Just speak of price and be done with the matter.  

The one may be called value in use; the other value in exchange. “The things,” he continues, “which have the greatest value in use, have frequently little or no value in exchange; and on the contrary, those which have the greatest value in exchange, have little or no value in use.”

Some things are 'free goods' because the supply equals or exceeds demand. That is why their price is zero.   

Water and air are abundantly useful; they are indeed indispensable to existence, yet, under ordinary circumstances, nothing can be obtained in exchange for them.

Shitting is vital to existence. Why don't we get paid for our shit?  

Gold, on the contrary, though of little use compared with air or water, will exchange for a great quantity of other goods 

It is scarce. Smith and Ricardo supported a 'Labour theory of value' because they thought of the Aristocrat and the Clergyman as a parasite.  

There is a puzzle here that is of some interest of its own,

No. This is stupid shit.  

and can also tell us something about how we may think about prices and values in general. There are two alternative ways of perspicuously explaining how gold can come to command a higher price than water,

the first is to piss on the person saying 'if you value water so highly, you will be fucking delighted to receive copious quantities of my urine'. The second is to say 'gold is less valuable that water. In returning for pissing on you, I'm going to take your gold wedding ring. Don't think this make us even. It's just that I'm in a generous mood today.'  

despite being so much less important for human life. One answer, based on the utility side of the picture, is that given the large amount of water that is generally available and the shortage of gold, the so-called “marginal utility” of water (the incremental benefit that a consumer gets from an additional unit of water) is small, compared with the marginal utility of gold. The other answer is that the cost of production—or of mining—of gold is much higher than that of water, in the situation in which we examine the economy. Neither explanation is an attempt at causally explaining why and how the prices and quantities that exist have actually emerged. They are, rather, answers to the Smith Ricardo question: How can people understand why gold “though of little use compared with air or water” exchanges “for a great quantity of other goods”?

No. This is stupid shit you have teach kids in the first week of their Econ 101 course. It prepares them for the stupidity and uselessness of the rest of the course.  

The cost based explanation and the utility-based explanation are, thus, alternative ways of explicating what we observe, by invoking ideas like costs of production and marginal usefulness, which can serve as means of social communication and public comprehension.

Fuck public comprehension. This is shite which teechurs get paid a little money to teach. You must make students understand that Econ is boring and stupid. Chances are you will end up doing a boring and stupid job. Get used to it.  

While Sraffa himself did not publish much that relates directly to this interpretational question (except to comment on a distinction involving the use of “counterfactual” concepts, on which more presently), we can get some insight into the issues involved from the writings of Maurice Dobb, Sraffa’s friend, collaborator and exponent.

Dobb understood that the Mummies and Daddies of his students had spent a lot of money on their education. His idea was that should revenge themselves on their parents by working for the KGB in between having lots of butt sex.  

Indeed, in a classic paper on “the requirements of a theory of value,” included in his book, Political Economy and Capitalism, Dobb (1937) had argued that a theory of value must not be seen only as a mechanical device that has merely instrumental use in price theory.

There is no need for any such theory. Just look at how much people will pay for a good or service. This is called 'market research'. Then find out how much it would cost to supply the item. This is called 'cost and management accountancy' and is deeply boring.  

Even as theories of value address the “Smith- Ricardo question” regarding a coherent understanding of the dual structure of value in use and value in exchange, they attempt to make important social statements of their own on the nature of the economic world by focusing respectively on such matters as the incremental usefulness of commodities, the satisfaction they can generate, the labor that is used in making them, or the costs that have to be incurred in their production.

But, theories of value are useless. You have to teach them at the beginning of Econ 101 so as to lower the  expectations of pupils who might think you will help them get rich by buying and selling traded options. Remind them that they were too stupid to study Medicine and not good looking enough to become social influencers. You are going to have a boring life. Get used to being bored out of your gourd. 

The inclination of classical political economy, including classical Marxian economics, to expect from a theory of value something much more than a purely mechanical “intermediate product” in price theory is, of course, well-known.

Did you know that the boss class pays you less money than they make by selling what you produce? You did? Oh. Well, don't you think 'profit' is a form of anal rape? You don't? What if I tell you I can get billions of dollars in damages for you if you claim that the Boss's invisible cock has fucked you in the ass umpteen times? Will that change your mind? Sadly, people tend to want to be paid upfront before going on 'Only Fans' with video footage of their being sodomized by Top Hatted Capitalists.  

Indeed, this inclination is often taken to be special pleading, for largely political reasons, in a contrived justification of the relevance of labor theory of value. However, this diagnosis does the classical perspective less than justice, since the importance of perspicacious explanation and communication is part and parcel of the classical approach.

It is wholly unnecessary. Peeps may want to study Econ to get rich. But Economists want to bore the fuck out of them. Let them drop out of Collidge and go get rich somewhere less boring.  

Indeed, it is important to recollect, in this context, the significance that has typically been attached, in the perspectives of classical political economy and Marxian economics, not just to labor and production, but also to the idea of “use value” (and to its successor concept in the form of satisfaction—or “utility”—that commodities may generate).

The problem here is that if labour supply becomes elastic (because of high general purpose productivity) then there can be no Marxian exploitation. Thus, raising general purpose productivity is a policy prescription everyone can get behind. The next step is to get rid of 'ideas of justice' or politics which lower total factor productivity or which increase 'regime uncertainty'. But this just means defunding shite Social Science and telling Chief Justice Chandra Chooth to go fuck himself. 

The comparison between the two rival value theories in the form of labor theory and utility theory was taken to be of interest precisely because both made socially engaging statements;

anyone can make those. What is intolerable about our society is that invisible white dicks, belonging to Merchant Bankers, are raping everybody including the Environment.  

there is no attempt here to deny the nature of social interest in utility theory as a theory of value.

nor any attempt to deny the nature of social interest in anti-Semitic theory based on the fact that the majority of invisible cocks are circumcised.  

Indeed, in 1929, in a prescient early critique of what would later develop into the “revealed preference” approach (led by Samuelson 1938), Dobb (1929) regretted the tendency of modern economics to downplay the psychological aspects of utility in favor of just choice behavior (p. 32): Actually the whole tendency of modern theory is to abandon … psychological conceptions: to make utility and disutility coincident with observed offers on the market; to abandon a “theory of value” in pursuit of a “theory of price.” But that is to surrender, not to solve the problem.

Just as refusing to address the problem posed by invisible white cocks is to surrender, not to solve, the underlying problem. Obviously, this involves joining the KGB or Hamas or whatever.  

Indeed, “the problem” to which Dobb refers, and to which utility theory of value, like the labor theory, caters, is to make “an important qualitative statement about the nature of the economic problem” (Dobb 1937, pp. 21–22).

Rich peeps cause poverty by sneaking into the hovels of the poor to steal all their cool, shiny, stuff.  

Dobb went on to distinguish between these two social explanations by noting that “the qualitative statement [utility theory] made was of a quite different order, being concerned not with the relations of production, but with the relation of commodities to the psychology of consumers” .

He was wrong. Utility was just the 'objective function' to be maximized. Suppose the aim is to kill the enemy. Then you assign higher utility to weapons which kill lots of them.  

In contrast, the picture of the economy presented by Sraffa concentrates precisely on “the relations of production,”

No. He has no theory of entrepreneurship, the managerial class, market-making arbitrageurs etc.  

and in explicating Sraffa’s contributions, Dobb (1973) pursues exactly this contrast. There is much evidence that this contrast was of particular interest to Sraffa himself. But in this comparison, Sraffa saw another big difference which was methodologically important for him (though I know of little evidence that it interested Dobb much), given Sraffa’s philosophical suspicion of the invoking of “counterfactual” magnitudes in factual descriptions.

I suppose Sraffa knew of Ramsey's test for counter-factual conditionals- viz. to assess "If A, then B," you hypothetically add the antecedent (A) to your current knowledge and see if the consequent (B) follows, making minimal adjustments to maintain consistency. For Sraffa, might not entertaining such hypothesis be the thin edge of the wedge by which you become subjected to 'hegemony' or 'false consciousness'? 

Sraffa noted that in opting for a cost-based explanation (in line with Sraffa 1960), we can rely entirely on “observed” facts, such as inputs and outputs and a given interest rate, without having to invoke any “counterfactuals” (that is, without having to presume what would have happened had things been different).

So, Sraffa gets rid of opportunity cost. Sadly, he could not get rid of the asset-stripper who notices that the book value of a company is much less than its market cap and thus sees that a profit can be made by buying the company and selling off its assets. Economics without opportunity cost is Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark.  

This is not the case with the utility-based explanation, since “marginal utility” inescapably involves counterfactual reasoning, since it reflects how much extra utility one would have if one had one more unit of the commodity.

No. It is the increment in utility from the last unit consumed. This is equated to price. 

The philosophical status of counterfactuals has been the subject of considerable debating in epistemology.

Rational Expectations aren't counter-factual- they are the prediction of the correct economic theory on the basis of all available information. However, 'what if' considerations lie at the heart of economic activity because of Knightian uncertainty- i.e. the fact that all possible states of the world are not known. This militates for prudential, regret-minimizing, behaviour. But this includes things like FOMO- fear of missing out- and jumping on speculative bandwagons but not perhaps with both feet. 

I see little merit in trying to exclude counterfactuals in trying to understand the world. But I do know—from extensive conversations with Sraffa—that he did find that the use of counterfactuals involved difficulties that purely observational propositions did not.

Knightian uncertainty involved the difficulty of dumping utility maximization in favour of regret minimization but this was not realised at the time. Arrow-Debreu were happy campers.  

It is not that he never used counterfactual concepts (life would have been unbearable with such abstinence) but he did think there was a big methodological divide here. Whether or not one agrees with Sraffa’s judgement on the unreliability of counterfactuals, it is indeed remarkable that there is such a methodological contrast between the utility-based and cost-based stories (in the Sraffian form).

There is the common sense view- viz. that entrepreneurs and arbitrageurs and a managerial class are involved in production and that they need to keep a sharp eye on market cap versus book value- and there is the crazy Marxist academic's view which is that all the non-Marxist economists are evil bastards. On the other hand, Sraffa had made a lot of money buying Japanese bonds when most people assumed they were worthless.  

The difference between them lies not merely in the fact that the former focuses on mental conditions in the form of utility

but those mental conditions depend on material things- e.g. how tasty this pizza is.  

while the latter concentrates on material conditions of production

which depend on the mental conditions- in particular the expectations- of the entrepreneurs and managers and bankers and so forth.  

(a contrast that is easily seen and has been much discussed), but also in the less-recognized distinction that the former has to invoke counterfactuals, whereas the latter—in the Sraffian formulation—has no such need.

Only because Sraffa wasn't concerned with actual production. 

  Concluding Remarks The critical role of Piero Sraffa in contributing to profound directional changes in contemporary philosophy, through helping to persuade Wittgenstein to move from the Tractatus to the theory that later found expression in Philosophical Investigations, is plentifully acknowledged by Wittgenstein himself (as well as by his biographers).

But Witless was a cul de sac. Like Russell, he hadn't kept up with developments in his field- Godel, Gentzen, Tarski, Turing, Church etc.. In any case, Game theory was important. It explained 'conventions' as Schelling focal solutions to coordination (or discoordination) games. By contrast, 'language games' were useless.  

What may, however, appear puzzling is the fact that Sraffa remained rather unexcited about the momentous nature of this influence and the novelty of the ideas underlying it.

Culturally, Italy was ahead of the UK. Pareto was a greater intellectual than Marshall. England was wealthy but Philistine. The Viennese were dilettantes.  One final point, Sraffa and Witless had fought on opposite sides during the Great War. Was the latter really bright or had he been promoted by Milord Russell who had lost his taste for mathematical logic? 

However, the sharpness of the puzzle is, to a great extent, lessened by the recognition that these issues had been a part of the standard discussions in the intellectual circle in Italy to which Sraffa belonged, which also included Gramsci. As a result, the weakness of Wittgenstein’s view of meaning and language in Tractatus would have come as no surprise to Sraffa, nor the need to invoke considerations that later came to be known as “the anthropological way” of understanding meaning and the use of language.

The similarity was that both wanted an 'objectivist' or even 'physicalist' credo. Sraffa could be considered a proponent of 'fix-price' economics (where prices stay the same and quantity consumed rises or falls) which captured aspects of cartelized manufacturing industry in the inter-war years.  

There appears to be an evident “Gramsci connection” in the shift from the early Wittgenstein to the later Wittgenstein, though much more research would be needed to separate out, if that is possible at all, the respective contributions of Sraffa and Gramsci to the ideas that emerged in their common intellectual circle.

Gramsci was a heroic, Garibaldi-like, figure. Incarceration meant he had to substitute intellectual for revolutionary activity. I suppose the influence of Ramsey- and perhaps the experience of hearing Brouwer lecture- caused Witless to repent off his dogmatism in the Tractatus. It is said that Ramsey was moving the direction of Weyl though his last paper looks Piercian. Maybe Pragmatism is Intutionisitic, unless it's the other way around.

Turning to Sraffa’s economic contributions, they cannot, in general, be divorced from his philosophical understanding.

I suppose, au fond, he had an 'externalist' theory of value. I sympathize. If only scientists could catch at least one of those invisible flying unicorns which feed on my farts, then mathematical economists will be able to conclusively prove that I produce 88 percent of the World's GDP. 

After his early writings on the theory of the firm (and his demonstration of the need to consider competition in “imperfect” or “monopolistic” circumstances), his later work did not take the form of finding different answers to the standard questions in mainstream economics, but that of altering—and in some ways broadening—the nature of the inquiries in which mainstream economics was engaged.

Sraffa saw that, at Cambridge, he could influence a lot of young people who were bound to gain power and influence in their own countries. Thus, though he wasn't doing economics, he was playing a part in the war against Fascism or Capitalism or whatever. But, Markets won that war everywhere. It doesn't matter how many people you recruit for the KGB or how severely you critique 'mainstream' theory. The inefficient is replaced by the slightly less inefficient.  

I have argued in this essay that it is possible to interpret Sraffa’s departures in terms of the communicational role of economic theory in matters of general descriptive interest (rather than seeing them as attempts at constructing an alternative causal theory of the determination of prices and distribution).

Sraffa, through no fault of his own, was excluded from the affairs of his own country. He fought the good fight- as he saw it- in England but his Econ was crap and thus his victories were imaginary. 

Sraffa used analytical reasoning to throw light on subjects of public discussion in political and social contexts.

Sadly, what people wanted was cool, shiny, stuff. Analytical reasoning doesn't cut the mustard.  

In particular, he demonstrated the unviability of the view that profits can be seen as reflecting the productivity of capital.

Yet, if you raise the productivity of any capital you own, you end up with a bigger profit. Why not demonstrate the unviability of getting richer by having lots more money?  

More constructively, Sraffa’s work throws light on the importance of value theory in perspicacious description.

Value theory can enable you to describe Elon Musk as a very poor Guatemalan cat. It is totes illegal for the Donald to allow him into the Oval office because HE IS AN ILLEGAL MIGRANT! Also, he is a cat. I like cats but I'd never put one in charge of a Government Department. Frankly, their attention span is rather short. 

The contrast between utility-based and costbased interpretation of prices belongs to the world of pertinent description and social discussion, and the rival descriptions are of general interest; these have been invoked in the past and remain relevant today.

No. I recall the teacher of our Trade Theory class coming in looking very mournful back in 1981. He said he'd been teaching Hicks style fix-price/flex-price models for years and was a devout believer in downwardly sticky wages. Then the LSE cut his nominal salary! That's when the penny finally dropped. We needed to get out of Econ and into something yet more boring- like Accountancy.  

The inquiry into alternative descriptions differs from the subject of causal determination of prices, in which both demand and supply sides would tend to be simultaneously involved. There is an obvious similarity here with John Hicks’s (1940, 1981) classic clarification that while utility and costs are both needed in a theory of price determination, when it comes to “the valuation of social income,” utility and costs provide two alternative ways of interpreting prices, with respectively different implications on the understanding of social or national income. The measurement of social income “in real terms may mean valuation in terms of utility, or in respect of cost, and that these two meanings are in principle different” (Hicks 1981, p. 142).

Welfare is about consumer surplus. If the price of a thing in inelastic demand falls, less is spent on it though welfare may have increased a lot. This is known as the 'income effect' of the price fall.  

 In pursuing the descriptive distinction between utility and costs, Sraffa attached importance to the demonstration that his account of the cost-based story (as in Sraffa 1960) draws exclusively on observed information, rather than having to invoke any counterfactual presumptions.

Sadly, Sraffa's toy economy is 'incompossible'- i.e. can't exist in the real world. It isn't even 'counter-factual'. It is out and out a fairy story.  

This differs from the utility-based picture, since the concept of marginal utility is constitutively counterfactual.

Nope. It is the benefit gained from the last unit consumed. 

How methodologically significant this distinction—between descriptions with or without counterfactuals—in fact is remains an open question (I confess to having remained a skeptic), but it is a subject to which Sraffa himself attached very great importance.

He was a true believer and didn't want nice looking hypotheses- which were secretly syphilitic ho-bags-getting access to his mind, via the Ramsey test, and buggering his brain till it got AIDS. 

It also relates to other methodological features of Sraffa’s analysis, including his strenuous—but entirely correct—insistence that his analysis does not need any assumption of constant returns to scale.

This is disputed. The plain fact is the Leontief-Sraffa matrix is strictly first order homogenous. The suspicion is that it was supplied by Ramsey. Still, this isn't the big problem with it as I have explained elsewhere.

The temptation to see Sraffa’s contribution as a causal theory of price determination (managing, mysteriously, without giving any role to demand conditions) must be resisted.

Whereas the temptation to truthfully declare his work to be stupid and useless should be embraced strenuously.  

Everything here turns on the meaning of “determination” and the usage of that term on which Sraffa draws. The sense of “determination” invoked by Sraffa concerns the mathematical determination of one set of facts from another set.

In which case there is a unique price vector. What is it? Dunno. Thus, there is no fucking determination in Sraffa's system. But this was also true of Arrow-Debreu. Stupidity was nobody's monopoly back then. 

To illustrate the point (with a rather extreme example) a sundial may allow us to “determine” what time it is by looking at the shadow of the indicator (gnomon), but it is not the case that the shadow of the indicator “causally determines” what time it is.

Yes it is. The Sun causes rays of light to fall on the gnomon which causes a shadow to indicate the time. This is a causal sequence. Moreover, it is a unique determination.  

The value of a clock does not lie in its ability to “fix”—rather than “tell”—the time of day.

The value of a clock lies in our ability to fix it to tell the time. Sen thinks clocks don't have to be set up to run properly.  

It would have been very surprising if, in his economic analysis, Piero Sraffa were not influenced by his own philosophical position, and had stayed within the rather limited boundaries of positivist or representational reasoning commonly invoked in contemporary mainstream economics.

He stayed within a Leftist tradition which drew on Marx. He was not in the 'positivist' or 'representational' tradition. He was neither predicting economic outcomes nor describing economic institutions. 

In addressing foundational economic issues of general social and political interest (some of which have been discussed over two hundred years), Sraffa went significantly beyond those narrow barriers.

in order to write nonsense. 

It is, I suppose, comforting to know that there were not many Piero Sraffas, but one.

This would only be comforting to know if we suspected that a Piero Sraffa may be lurking under our bed and another Sraffa- with an axe- might be hiding in the closet.