| This question <491|457> overall <520|522> Hans: <519|524>. |
| Question 652: Whenever Marx plays the social against the individual point of view, he acts as if the social point of view was the true point of view. Is this justified? |
| [521] Hans: Capitalist neglect of the individual. If you only look at the social or only at the individual point of view, you are leaving out an important aspect of reality. It is necessary to look at both. This still leaves the question open how these points of view are related: are they equivalent, or is one in some sense dominant? |
| Some scientists (methodological individualists) argue that looking at the individual gives you an inside look at society, and therefore any explanation of social phenomena must be an explanation of what the individual carriers of these relations do. They concede that social categories may be useful for simplification, but if you really want to get to the bottom of it all, you must look at the individual. They say things like “society does not exist.” Modern mainstream economics privileges the individual in such a way; in this theory, individual utility functions determine prices. It is an example of a theory which builds the whole society from individual building blocks (“microfoundations”). |
| Marx, by contrast, says that the social relations form a system which has its own dynamics, and its structure can and must be understood before one can make sense of the individual actions in this system. In this view, both individual and society are causal forces independent of each other, and neither can be reduced to the other. Zizek says that a “parallax view” is needed, and Bhaskar talks about a “hiatus” between the social and the individual. This is the point of view that is most convincing to me personally. |
| But there is still something else going on: while maintaining this parallax view, Marx still gives more weight to society than the individual. I think in future socialist societies this weighting may be reversed. Perhaps a really good utopian society can be understood best by looking at the individual, by asking what it means to be free and to have a good life, what self-realization is, etc., and then asking the question how social relations must be structured so that these goals of individual emancipation can be reached. If people consciously design their social relations as an environment enabling individual flourishing, just as an architect designs a building for specific purposes, then the social point of view will not be dominant. Then it makes sense to begin with the individual. |
| But today in capitalism we are not yet at this stage. The deeper meaning of commodity fetishism is that individuals do not have control over their social relations. If it is necessary to look at the social point of view as the dominant point of view, then this is a regrettable necessity coming from the flaws of the social system we are involved in. |
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