Date: Thu, 26 Feb 1998 21:47:43 -0800 (PST)
From: Ralph Dumain <rdumain-AT-igc.apc.org>
Subject: Re: The Misfortunes of Virtue (was Re: M-TH: Re: ethics and


We all know this, James, but it's a half-truth.  What distinguishes
bourgeois society from earlier social formations is that rationalization and
formalization of social institutions are driven to their logical limit, and
tendencies already implicit in previous societies emerge from earlier
formalized behavior, custom, and informal practices and take on the status
of fully abstract principles, drained of specific localized content.  The
individual subject as an abstract value may come into its own in bourgeois
society, but it is preposterous to think that it is merely a bourgeois
legalistic fiction.  There is no human society anywhere anytime that is not
aware of the individual subject, nor is there any lacking abstractions of
some kind concerning the nature of human beings, their rights and
responsibilities.  

Furthermore, the abstract conception of the sovereign individual is a
precious attainment that reaches its penultimate stage in bourgeois society.
It must be fought for and reaffirmed and upheld against all forms of
totalitarianism.  Socialism would not only not eliminate but rather increase
a sense of jealously guarded right to individual expression and fulfillment.
To confuse this with mere competitive economic individualism is childish in
the extreme, an exercise for 25-year grad students and sectarian creeps, but
hardly worthy of serious people.

The jejune nature of this ongoing discussion inclines me not to participate
further.

At 01:47 PM 2/26/98 +0000, James Heartfield wrote:
>The difficulty with this is that I don't think that we are thinking hard
>enough about the way that the form of morality is specific to a given
>social order. It is readily understood that different social epochs ahve
>different moral schemas, but that in itself does not go far enough. The
>very form of a moral subject choosing good or bad behaviour assumes
>certain aspects of social organisation that are not eternal but specific
>to capitalist society. First there is the individual subject -not an
>eternal feature of human socieities but an historical product of
>capitalist societies. Then there are 'morals' as abstract laws _outside_
>of us. These free floating abstractions correspond to closely to the
>abstract domination of the market to be taken seriously as components of
>the human condition.
>
>I take the view that Marxism is moral - its purpose is human - but it is
>not moralistic, it does not see morals as fixed, or as an abstract
>schema.



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