Christian-Marxist Dialogue: On Continuing to Read Phil McShane

[Hugh Williams]

Christian-Marxist Dialogue: On Continuing to Read Phil McShane

Phil McShane who I’ve come to regard as a revolutionary Lonerganian despite the fact he usually rejected the attribution of being a Lonerganian, said in his final years that the necessary transition period ahead of us demands for most of us a commitment to think and point, and to even teach beyond our own present competence.

He added that a major problem in our present culture is that the vast majority of those teaching in the humanities and the sciences were/are not prepared for the shocking cultural lift involved in Lonergan's GEM methodology ….

To give content to this very general claim … McShane would return repeatedly to the problems of financial capitalism as, for him, the worst-case illustration of cultural decline for our time. It is a situation that emerges in the light and darkness of dialectic crying out for cosmopolis, for some alternative methodological order. Despite such ‘cries’ this ‘business’ … this ‘finance’ is not about the science of economics or economy but about ‘gambling-casino’ possibilities.

Some ‘painful transition’ is required and necessary here – is it not? … some transition having to do with the regulation and control over money as a public utility?

This I suggest was the materialist heart of McShane’s strange little booklet “The Road to Religious Reality” (Axial Publishing, 2012) ….

Does John and Pierre’s text – “Attentive, Intelligent, Reasonable, and Responsible” have a position on this?

Hugh

[PIERRE WHALON]

Hugh,

I would say that Phil’s position on this question  was that ignorance of what money is and how it circulates in a (diphase) economy is the issue with capitalism: « the iron laws » we must conform to. That includes that financial markets are not casinos, though many want to bend them that way. Having worked in a gambling joint (legal) in my misspent youth, I can tell you that the House always wins in the end… unless the employees steal.

As for our argument, I think John will agree that we focus on the redistributive function because it is the heart of both the basic and the surplus economies. Not to be monkeyed with.

Insisting that humanity must adapt ourselves to those laws is the shocking cultural and financial « lift » ; progressives hate it because it does begin with a moral claim, and conservatives hate it because a well-functioning economy rewards all with a generous hand.

Pierre

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[Hugh Williams]

thanks Pierre

for a very succinct

and on point response ...

Hugh

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[Hugh Williams]

Pierre,

let me add that as I laid my head down to rest

... I had a flash of insight because of your good and succinct response below.

as essential or sound as Lonergan's analytical framework is for understanding

the "two circuit economic law" to which we must adapt if we are to have a functioning economy,

Lonergan's theory of economy does not provide an adequate account of the political context for its realization,

so we have in effect an incomplete social theory. (Your AIRR text helped me to see this ...)

Thus perhaps the need for dialogue with marxism to help provide for that

in a way that ideologically holds up the priority of labor and not of capital (as we now have in much of the West),

i.e., capital is to serve labor.

This as I understand it would in the most general terms be in the best of the tradition of Popes Francis and Leo xiv

referenced earlier by John ....

Hugh  

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