Date: Thu, 19 Jun 1997 19:48:17 -0400 (EDT)
From: Andrew Wayne Austin <aaustin-AT-utkux.utcc.utk.edu>
Subject: Re: M-I: Failure of imagination


On Thu, 19 Jun 1997, boddhisatva wrote:

> Who is closer to the proletariat do you suppose?  Let me clue you
> in to something, comrade. People like flowers. They like flowers and
> Nintendo and monster truck races. What they don't particularly care for, as
> evidenced by the demographics if nothing else, is self-righteous hippies
> telling them to live like Mexican peasants.  

First of all, you set up the classic false dilemma. The assumption here is
that socialism involves giving up flowers, Nintendo, and monster truck
races in exchange for living like peasants under the rule of
self-righteous hippies. This rhetoric is incredible! Boddhisatva, you have
perfected bourgeois propaganda. Come in here dear boy and have a cigar.

Your assumption is a classic bourgeois argument against socialism: 
"socialism is the road to serfdom." You fear rational planning because you
have been told it will take all your goodies away. *You* don't want to
lose Nintendo, Boddhisatva. 'Fess up. 

But I will proceed on the basis that there will be sacrifice in socialist
transformation, because I think that there are deeper assumptions in your
worldview that need to be exposed.

A 1994 GSS study found the following three very disturbing beliefs among
the US population. First, a majority of white Americans believe that
blacks are poor because they are lazy. Second, a majority of white
Americans believe that blacks are naturally more prone to violence and
crime than whites. Third, a majority of white Americans believe that
blacks are intellectually inferior to whites and Asians. 

The people, Boddhisatva, are not always right in their judgments. This is
not an argument in support of Mr. Hamilton's dictum that "The people
seldom choose right." Hamilton believed this was a permanent condition of
those destined to be the subordinated. I do not. But this doesn't mean
that I have blind faith in the decisions of the majority.

The majority of Americans are generally not aware of, and do not act in
accordance with, their objective class interests. If communists had faith
that the worker and the farmer always make the correct choices, i.e., if
the worker and the farmer consistently aligned their intersubjectivity and
their collective behavior with their objective class interests, then we
wouldn't be about the business of raising consciousness. Why would we
waste our time preaching to the choir? Why would we need to? 

Avineri correctly observed that "history is not only the story of the
satisfaction of human needs but also the story of their emergence and
development. Whereas animal needs are constant and determined by nature,
man's needs are social and historical, i.e., determined in the last resort
by man himself.... Man's consciousness of his own needs is a product of
his historical development and attests to the cultural values achieved by
preceding generations. Needs will relate to material objects, but the
consciousness that will see the need for these particular objects as a
*human* need is itself a product of a concrete historical situation and
cannot be determined *a priori*." 

Boddhisatva, you uncritically look at what (some) humans need (flowers,
Nintendo, monster trucks) and you assume that people need these things
because it is in their nature. Just as earlier this month you argued that
patterns of authority determine the division of labor, today you again
place ahead of structure and history those values which are in reality the
outcomes of structural arrangements and historical development. You argue
that what the majority wants (if you are even correct about what they
want) is what we should see them have. You make this point a premise in
your argument that the people want capitalism rather than socialism
because they want Nintendo and monster trucks (both supposedly impossible
objects or desires without capitalism). At least that is the way I read
you.

Marx wrote that "just as one does not judge an individual by what he
thinks of himself, so one cannot judge such an epoch of transformation by
its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be
explained from contradictions of material life, from the existing conflict
between the social forces of production and the relations of production."

If people want Nintendo and monster trucks, then we do not say "Give the
people capitalism then!" We ask why they would choose these things over
independence and freedom (if socialism indeeds calls for this sacrifice). 
What we find is that these things, like all things human, are manufactured
needs. Then we ask *who* manufactured these needs and why. The answer is
that capitalists manufactured them, and they did so for profit (okay,
maybe not flowers). We also find that these needs may replace or displace
the need for meaningful association, freedom and independence, needs that
while also historically conditioned and socially manufactured, are more
enduring and important, by any moral standard, than consumerism. 

I still believe that alienation and dehumanization are real.

I must not fail to mention that when we investigate how Nintendo makes
their products we may find exploited and superexploited labor, landless
peasants driven into the factories, proletarianized and impoverished,
locked doors and forced production quotas, 15 hour work days, slave wages. 

This is Boddhisatva's biggest failing, in my view: he focuses almost
entirely on the commercial market, the sparklies of the world he walks
through everyday, and not on productive arrangements and the exploitative
nature of capitalism. This is why he touts the virtues of "market
socialism." Not because it might be an efficient way to order production,
but because it will give us nice consumer items.

I am concerned that capitalism systematically prevents people from
choosing right.

So my question is this: since when is a warrior in the battle for social
justice supposed to give up on his or her deepest convictions on the basis
of some superficial material need manufactured by smart marketing and
advertising? Since when have we substituted blind faith in majority
opinion for the difficult task of historical, political economic, and
class-dialectical analysis? 

> If you want to promulgate this particular philosophy, I suggest you try
> the next Grateful Dead convention. 
> 	Grandiose plans about world socialism by edict are undermining us. 

How could a plan about world socialism be anything less than "grandiose"? 
"WORLD SOCIALISM." Just the sound of it is grandiose. The communist plan
for world socialism should be bold and attractive. We are trying to pull
the worker and the peasant out of the capitalist morass. We are trying to
create faith in a better world. 

Are we to give up on our goal of world socialism, Boddhisatva? If you
believe communism will make us all Mexican peasants then I can understand
your reluctance to leave the comfortable world capitalism has created for
people in your stratum. It means that you have bought into the big lie. 

And like you do not already live in a world ordered by edict. You live by
the edicts of the rich and powerful few. 

> Welfare-state socialism is dead, even in France.  It's time we see it for
> the bourgeois construct that it is and get on with getting the keys to the
> factories into the hands of the factory workers.

But the communist plan for world socialism is about getting the keys to
the factories into the hands of the factory workers. If "welfare-state
socialism" has failed it is only because it involved piecemeal reform and
not a "grandiose plan" for world socialism. 

Btw, France is a corporatist state society, not a socialist one. And I
wouldn't close the coffin on welfarism yet, particularly in France. They
have a fear of becoming like the US. Turns out the French like flowers,
but hate monster truck shows.

> Whether they will then work longer or shorter hours is their concern. 
> The government shortened work-week is so much pitiful reformism,
> proposed by the self-satisfied. It is the product of bourgeois
> alienation and it is useful to us only as a sign of the same.  Of course
> it would be nice for workers to work less and get paid more, but we are
> Marxists, and we should know that it doesn't solve anybody's problem in
> the long run to make capitalism more palatable.

Struggling for a shorter work week with the same level of pay is not a
small concession. A big part of the labor struggle has been over the
length of the working day. You act like shorter work weeks that the
socialist seeks are a call for less pay. This is absurd. It is about more
leisure time, the ability to tend to one's family. The US Communist Party,
for example, has called for the elimination of income taxes on working
people, a doubling of the minimum wage, reduction of the work week with no
reduction in pay, and universal health coverage and education. A reduction
in the work week is only one part of a large package of demands that some
workers organizations are making. This package, or any one element of it,
are worthy of struggle. 

You don't want a "grandiose" plan for world socialism, but you don't want
reform either. What is it that you think we should struggle for,
Boddhisatva? Flowers, Nintendo, monster truck shows? 

The more and more I read of your thinking the more I am confused about
your purpose on this list. Not that I mind having you around. But your
thinking is not Marxist, and your goals don't appear to be socialist. Are
you trying to set us communist straight on a few things, of something?

Andy







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