File spoon-archives/marxism-general.archive/marxism-general_1996/96-10-27.164, message 12


Date: Thu, 24 Oct 1996 18:37:37 +1000
From: rws-AT-comserver.canberra.edu.au (Rob Schaap)
Subject: M-G: Re: Community & Class


G'day all,
Adam has asked me what on earth I'm on about - and, having reread my last
post, I have some sympathy with him.  So here goes, from child-like
simplicity to verbose confusion ... 

Step one: I take structuralism to entail identifying structures that, at
least, 'condition' objects of analysis (typically by enabling
human'institutional agency at the same time as they set determinate
boundaries outside which there are no rational, or sometimes even
thinkable, options).

Step two:  Simply put, I take structural Marxism to proffer as the
fundamentally constituent structure in capitalist society the economic
base, within which lie  two terminal cancers:
- (a) the contradiction between the forces of production (in their push to
ever increasing production) and private appropriation of the means of
production and the ensuing products (for the bourgeois individual, his/her
capital loses value relative to increased general production); and 
- (b) the development of the proletariat, a dispossessed class, which must
logically grow in relative magnitude just as long-term downward pressure
must equally increase on the exchange value of the variable capital their
labour represents (due to above contradiction).

Step three:  I take the superstructure to be lived life, both in the work
place and elsewhere.  Here the base spreads its metastasis.  But that is
not all that happens here.  What Raymond Williams called 'residual' (ie.
>from precapitalist days - say, religion) and 'emergent' (eg. WWW
relationships within the context of a physical isolation in 'virtual'
workplaces/recuperation venues?) cultural components also have agency here.
 This means there's stuff in the superstructure that was not put there by a
capitalist base (various status roles, various Gods, notions of decency
etc), and there is stuff there that might have been spawned by the base,
but has its incidental potentials.

Step four:  Anything which unpredictably and uncontrollably transforms
existing communication networks has the potential to open up new ways, and
close down old ways, of what I think sociologists call 'identity
formation'.  A radical structuralist might argue that the objective
identity has already been formed (a natural function of the base relation),
but a more sociologically inclined Marxist would respond only that a
necessary condition for socialist change exists.  As a cause is only a
cause when it is necessary and sufficient to produce its effect, history
has shown the objective structure to be insufficient.  There must also
exist conditions within which the 'I' can recognise (a) a social dimension
to his/her identity, and (b) how s/he is positioned in that whole.  

I guess I'm pointing to these residual and emergent cultural components,
both as cause for concern, and reason for hope.  As I've been rather a
depressing presence so far, let me mention a couple of pluses from my part
of the periphery:

- Marcuse and Hirsch are two who have lamented the institutionalised
assimilation of unions into western pol.eco. systems.  Well, capitalist
triumphalism has pushed the unions so far out, it is entirely conceivable
that they revert to their true purpose.  Technical questions of wages and
conditions are the sum-total of union interests only when they have a place
at the capitalist's table.  Questions of a higher order might now become
both thinkable ('freedom's just another word for nuthin' left to lose') and
practical (to excite a rapidly departing proletariat, too long
disillusioned with corporate collaborators);

- The greedier (coterminous with 'more powerful') capitalism gets, the
harder it nudges at its own contradictions (more on this later, perhaps);

- 'Citizenship' is suddenly a buzz word!  As I've argued before, however
you define this term (unless you make it coterminous with 'sovereign
consumer', I suppose), it always highlights a category that can not
logically be a commodity.  'Netizens' well know this, and like the
well-educated libertarians so many of them are, they are trumpeting their
case to anyone who'll listen.  That can only be a good thing, to my mind. 
If I might risk my arm (I haven't read 'The Renegade Kautsky' yet), I still
believe liberal democracy has its practical uses - and also has the great
virtue of discursively bringing out its own essential contradictions.  As
Santiago Carrillo said: 'The generations of Marxists who lived through the
grievous experience of Fascism and who, in another order of things, have
experienced Stalinist degeneration, appraise the concept of democracy in a
different way (from Lenin), and not in opposition to socialism and
communism, but as a road towards them as a main component of them'.

That should get a few of you reaching for your keyboards ...

Cheers, Rob.





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