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. --- from list marxism-general-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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