File spoon-archives/marxism-feminism.archive/marxism-feminism_1997/marxism-feminism.9712, message 40


Date: Sun, 7 Dec 1997 20:11:27 -0500
From: Yoshie Furuhashi <Furuhashi.1-AT-osu.edu>
Subject: Re: M-FEM: All Work and No Play? No Way!


Juriaan wrote:
>There is a whole tradition in bourgeois thought which sees play and desire
>as something that is dangerous and that must be controlled, as Wilhelm
>Reich already pointed out. History is moreover replete with bourgeois
>attempts to regulate the moral life of the proletariat.  Marx may have
>written wrily in Capital that "the propagation of the working classes may
>be safely left to the working classes themselves" but the bourgeoisie
>evidently did not think so.
>
>	The preoccupation with control over sexuality seems to be related
>to the "protestant work ethic" as well, which, if driven to the absurd
>extreme, would adapt the extraction of semen completely to the optimal
>conditions for the extraction of surplus-value.  (Note: In The Right to be
>Lazy, Paul Lafargue also offered a critique of the bourgeois preoccupation
>with the work ethic).
>
>	Marx once said his "greatest happiness" was "to fight" but whether
>this can form the basis for a Marxist theory of happiness or pleasure is
>doubtful ! In terms of lifestyle though, it is clear that some lifestyles
>are, and some are not conducive to the project of changing the world
>progressively.  People who are very afraid, and lack confidence, are not
>equipped to participate in making changes, to fight for a better world.
>And so you could argue along these lines that certain lifestyles or norms
>are preferable to others from a Marxist point of view, to the extent that
>they foster more revolutionary capacities.
>
> 	Personally I don't think there can be a specifically Marxist theory of
>play or pleasure in a normative sense.  What is crucial from a Marxist
>point of view is rather the social/political/legal conditions under which
>play and pleasure occur in class society, or which prevent these from
>occurring, and the relationships between pleasure/play and other facets of
>everyday life.  Those are things which certainly can be theorised and
>critiqued.

I think we are going into the right direction. Can Juriaan himself or other
people say more about these: ruling ideologies about work/play and
contradictions between them and social conditions, as well as contradiction
*within* ideologies; battles against bourgeois attempts to make people
fearful and submissive; social/political/legal conditions for play and
pleasure; and the relationships between play/pleasure and other facets of
everyday life?

Boddhisatva wrote:
>	You wrote "We must attack hegemonic ideas that say to the worker
>class, "you don't deserve this, you are not entitled to that."  I could
>not agree more.  What's more, I think that the current debate about the
>work ethic (or lack thereof) among the working class indicates a necessary
>change in thinking.  The idea of being "deserving" and being rewarded on
>the basis of merit is in fact negated by capitalism itself, where one
>receives on the basis of ownership or service to those who own.  Whether
>capitalists are hard-working or lazy is moot, since they simply serve the
>interests of owners.  Why then not accept this negation and avoid the
>virtue debate that is already corrupted by the capitalist myth of
>meritocracy.  Who cares how hard or faithfully a worker labors for his
>slave-master?  To work is not to pray when it is in the service of Mammon.
>By the same token, the worker has no right to expect more than misery and
>alienation if he works to make another person rich.  He has no right to
>expect the state to provide for his welfare when that money just comes
>from other workers.  Let the worker take what is hers - the means of
>production.  Replace ownership with with "worker-ship" as a justification
>for economic reward and socialism becomes socially rational.

I agree in that moralizing work is as bad as moralizing abortion. But one
thing I am not too sure of is whether workers' embrace of play and pleasure
will directly lead to their desire to expropriate capitalists. It's more
complicated than that, I think. While the right to be lazy can never be
granted under capitalism, play and pleasure can and have been easily
commodified.

Doug wrote:
>Yoshie, as the admirable champion of desire & play around these virtual
>parts, can you compare the U.S. and Japan on these issues? If there's any
>society on earth that seems more driven than the U.S., it's Japan. Can you
>compare the two?

I think both Americans and the Japanese benefit from fabled Eurodecadence
in terms of vacation days. Ideological conditions in the U.S. are, however,
worse than those in Japan. There is a Japanese term "sei-hin" which
basically means "clean and poor" and for which there is no English
equivalent exists. So Japanese workers do not suffer (ideologically) as
much from capitalists attempts to criminalize poverty and "laziness." Maybe
because we are not Puritan? Besides, in the belly of the beast, ideological
density + cultural hegemony of capitalism are harder to resist. Remember,
Japan is only a second-rate imperial power.

Yoshie




   

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