I can recall bringing up Jane Jacobs even here and getting a knee jerk "Marxist" label immediately attached to her ideas. She's so far from that form of bureaucratic structured thought I can't even begin to imagine what brain deadness brings up that knee jerktion. Maybe it comes from the sense of leveled populist individuality embedded in her ideas of bottom up small business creativity that she envisioned as being the sparks that created the vibrant cities through time since the first we know of so far at Çatalhöyük, Turkey. As I see it, Marx focuses mostly the evolution of the labor side of the recently arisen industrial capitalist coin. He skips right past any effort at understanding the importance of individualism in the mix. No wonder he is often credited with being the formulative basis for modern day social "science."
Actually, I said Marxist/Leninist. Not communist like you first mistakenly said and not Marxist solely. So please pay attention but more importantly it was not even addressed to you. If it was it would have had your name or quote included. As you told me several times, if it does not include either in your post then it is not in reference to you.
Better yet, you can could have addressed the issues I brought up and either confirmed it or explained how it was different. I am sure you know about Marxism/Leninism to explain the similarities and differences with Jane Jacobs through the center/periphery analysis.
Just give it a rest, or answer the responses...
You even go on to explain some differences that do not matter to the issues I even brought up.
His root paradigm ideas don't appear to me to be in any way about innovation and personal freedom to think for oneself. They are about the results of an in place division of labor he and Engels found in what was a pinnacle example of it in their time (in the 1840s), in Manchester England, and how that "idea" they saw as both some sort of example of both the good and the horror of human societal evolution, will some day evolve into a classless communal perfection of some sort. In their own ways they were just as trapped in the patriarchal paradigm of hierachy as Adam Smith and the early thinkers who are credited with the budding attempts to understand principles of individuality in the Age of Enlightenment, which was, if you read their writing, for men, and for the elite thinking men. It took a lot of work from the always disenfranchised groups in these masterful systems, the laborers, the women, the non whites, to bring about any equality and protection of rights for them.
But like usual your
experts as in this case Jane Jacobs are more important than what experts I quote and analyze. For example here is a conversation that would make Thom's look like trolls in a circle:
Male bias in macro-economics???Or a complementary conversations at:
VLQD: Saving the World's WomenMany of us were going through that same route of deconstruction at just about that same time. Personally, I was fighting against NAFTA, GATT and other world globalizing nation state agreements. I had recently stopped working as a consultant writing strategic plans for businesses so they could become bigger, and more efficient. I was involved in helping to put together the research that would hopefully expose the dangers of international agreements that would overrule the efforts of nation states and areas within nation states to regulate the structural business agreements that involve the devastating effects to environments that businesses try to pass off as an expense the rest of the planet must absorb.
I have yet to see in 4 years any of this work. I have to wonder if it is just your wishful thinking. Of course you studiously ignored the benefits of transformations that even Jane Jacobs would recognize. Your Utopian views are more than likely contradictory.
Labels: ren, Thom's Loonies
