Date: Wed, 22 Oct 1997 14:30:28 +1000
From: Rob Schaap <rws-AT-comserver.canberra.edu.au>
Subject: Re: HAB: ROB - SEND MORE INFO!



>Quit teasing.  You can't really expect me to read a book over
>250 pages long simply because it historically contextualizes
>Kelley's note.  Spill the beans - don't hold back.

I wasn't teasing - I was being slack - I've a mountain of marking to do if
ever I'm to see my Nescafe-stained, Marlboro-branded desk-top again.

Anyway, here's a modest beginning.  If there's interest, I'll blather on a
bit more later.

It's chapter seven I was pointing you at: 'The demos versus 'we, the
people': from ancient to modern conceptions of citizenship'.

EMW goes on about early modern republicanism.  They critiqued the
demonstrable truth that no legitimate room room for politics existed
outside the parliament (Habermas's 'will formation' occurs in the House
only, if you like); a concept of citizenship is invoked, but it applies
only to those with a legitimate stake in the polity: the male owners of
property (shades of the bourgeois public sphere').  Sparta was the model in
effect, not Athens.  These blokes were about constructing a post-feudal
society, but could not help but retain feudal parameters.

But property was already assuming a capitalist form (property was as
property did now, no longer was 'extra-economic' status the determinant.  A
competitive environment had come to be.)  And importantly, the serf, with
his mutually recognised entitlement to the allotment upon which he lived,
was also on the way out.  As a formally represented subject, for he could
not represent himself (he was not a citizen), he was formally free now.
Free of his land but also free to contract his labour to anyone he liked
for as much as could get.  True formal freedom, eh?

What capitalism had done was reposition/redefine power - no longer a
function of lordship but now one of property.  Moving on from the
republicans, and basing its new direction on the formal freedom now
extended to all, capitalist democracy now found it could extend formal
citizenship to all men, but by restricting the agency of the citizen
accordingly.  The price for formal equality was that it comprised a narrow
range of rights and that it could come only by way of the annihilation of
more practical and traditional ties between individuals and corporate,
prescriptive and communal identification and obligation.  Dispossession and
alienation = formal citizenship?

So, we have the political birth of Locke's theorised individual.

Lots of good stuff ensues (I'm writing from notes) and on p 213 EMW feels
she can conclude:

In capitalist democracy, the separation between civic status and class
position operates in both directions: socio-economic position does not
determine the right to citizenship - and that is what is democratic in
capitalist democracy - but, since the power of the capitalist to
appropriate the surplus labour of workers is not dependent on a privileged
juridical or civic status, civic equality does not directly affect or
significantly modify class inequality - and that is what limits democracy
in capitalism.  Class relations between capital and labour can survive even
with juridical equality and universal suffrage.  In that sense, political
equality in capitalist democracy not only coexists with socio-economic
inequality but leaves it fundamentally intact.

Look, Ken.  I've only touched on one point (and HAVE PROBABLY not yet
established it in your quasi-liberal, quasi-post structuralist eyes [is
that even close?]), but I have a lecture and a tute before me now, and then
I have to pick up the little 'uns.  I'll have to get back to you on THE
AMERICAN REDEFINITION OF DEMOCRACY (P213); A 'PEOPLE' WITHOUT CONTENT
(P218); FROM DEMOCRACY TO LIBERALISM (P225); & LIBERALISM DEMOCRACY AND
CAPITALISM (P233).

Not bad coverage for one small chapter, eh?

And all appropriate stuff here, I think.  Habermas remains a socialist,
however far he strays from the path of marxian righteousness, and that's
why he spent so much time with the problematics of citizenship.  And that,
I maintain, means we should think of each in terms of the other on a
Habermas list.

Really gotta go.  I have two minutes to decide what I'm going to say for
two hours on the topic of political economic investigations of
telecommunications and the internet.

See ya soon,
Rob.

PS

>Come on Rob  - convince me that this book is worth reading.

I'm not sure I can, Ken.  I think it's the best book I've read in years
(although Moishe Postone's latest [with which I have but fondled as yet]
looks to be another beaut).  But then I'm a socialist by inclination and
conviction.

>ps.  besides - the book is charged out at the u of t library (alas,
>only one copy) and i won't be able to get it for some time.

I'm really please that you looked it up, though.

Cheers,
Rob.


************************************************************************

Rob Schaap, Lecturer in Communication, University of Canberra, Australia.

Phone:  02-6201 2194  (BH)
Fax:    02-6201 5119

************************************************************************

'It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have
lightened the day's toil of any human being.'    (John Stuart Mill)

"The separation of public works from the state, and their migration
into the domain of the works undertaken by capital itself, indicates
the degree to which the real community has constituted itself in
the form of capital."                                    (Karl Marx)

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