Date: Thu, 1 Sep 1994 04:22:06 +0800 (PST) From: hfspc002-AT-huey.csun.edu Subject: the meaning of "objectivism"? Before beginning to address the post below I want to mark my agreement with Chris N.'s post on this matter. Before we begin talking a lot of nonsense on this list, and we may very well do so anyway, we really should take a moment to actually sit down and read a bit of Marx. It may be comforting and emotionally satisfying to listen to audiotapes published by Laissez-faire press and conclude that our vigorous belief in the triumph of reason will guide us through a rigorous critique of something that we have not even attempted to read, but we should not be self-deluded into believing that our "critique" will be anything other than an embarassing foray into matters we know nothing about. Imagine, for example, me joining an Ayn Rand list and launching a vitriolic attack against _The Romantic Manifesto_ based on the abridged version of a synopsis published in Ellsworth M. Toohey's _Altruism: The Unknown Ideal_.... Or based on something I heard on Rush Limbaugh for that matter. I assume that I would be quite correctly ignored or laughed out of the forum. (Why then do I take the following "seriously"? Perhaps I don't; as Derrida has persuasively argued, the line separating the "serious" from the "nonserious" is thin indeed, and perhaps that which seems nonserious is the most serious of all. Having ignored Grossman's posts for some time except to inject "nonserious" replies, I now attempt a "serious" reply in order to attempt to show why his post cannot be taken seriously....) In any case, I respond to some of Grossman's "arguments" below: > castes are stable; classes, in capitalism, are unstable. Around 1900, in > a much more capitalist economy, it was common enough for businessmen to > leave their businesses to incompetent sons so that "shirtsleeves to > shirtsleeeves in three generations" was a cliche. What is Grossman talking about here? Is he being "serious"? Am I the only one that doesn't "get" the joke? (I recall that Grossman's position on humor, perhaps following _the Romantic Manifesto_, is that humor must be based on "truth" so that making fun of objectivists wasn't amusing but making fun of democrats, anarchists, etc., was funny....I'm not sure I understood it then either but here I am trying to look for the "truth" that makes this cliche humorous. If his point is that classes *change*, or that the 10% of the population that controls the 90% of the world's resources is a different 10% today than it was in 1900, well, I couldn't disagree more. Are the descendants of the Rockefellers poor in 1994? Going back further, do the descendants of the Hapsburgs control less of the world than they used to? But still, let us learn something from Grossman.... capitalism ("pure," whatever that is, or "corrupted," as Grossman seems to believe it is in the latter part of the 20th century) is flexible and unstable. And its instability has been precisely the mechanism for its continuity. This is the point Felix Guattari made in _Molecular Revolution_ and in _Anti-Oedipus_, and it follows directly from Marxian economics: capitalism is a liberatory mechanism in its decoding of the economic terrain to translate everything into the "general equivalent," which is money. While on the topic of money, let us listen to Ayn Rand for a moment, because we can perhaps learn something even from her. ("I'll even admit that there may be some things which I can learn from you";"now we're cookin'"). Rand, speaking through Francisco d'Arconia: "When you accept money in payment for your effort, you do so only on the conviction that you will exchange it for the product of the effort of others. It is not the moochers or the looters who give value to money. Not an ocean of tears nor all the guns in the world can transform those pieces of paper in your wallet into the bread you will need to survive tomorrow. Those pieces of paper, which should have been gold, are a token of honor -- your claim upon the energy of the men who produce. Your wallet is your statement of hope that somewhere in the world around you there are men who will not default on that moral principle which is the root of money. Is that what you consider evil?" (From _Atlas Shrugged_. Forgive me, by the way, for citing from Rand's fiction rather than her more properly "serious" nonfiction essays {what is the line between fiction and nonfiction but a line between the "serious" and the "nonserious," between the "true" and the "false," after all?} such as those collected in _the Romantic Manifesto_, _The Virtue of Selfishness_, _Philosophy: Who Needs It_, or _The New Left_, each of which I have found to be overly pedantic and much less rigorously argued than the impassioned monologues peppered throughout _Atlas Shrugged_ and _the Fountainhead_. Though her fiction is no doubt overly pedantic as well, at least it is well-reasoned pedantry.) Back to the passage -- money, for D'Arconia, is a medium of exchange. A commodity, to be sure ("should have been gold"), but a commodity that sits outside of the circuit of exchange in order that it may be exchanged for any other commodity in proportional "values." One may, if one likes, exchange one pint of milk for one widget, if one finds an individual willing to exchange the widget for the pint of milk. If person A produced the pint of milk, she may exchange that pint with person B who produced the widget. This involves a social relationship between person A and person B. But let us stipulate that person A has no way of finding person B, the producer of widgets. Now, person A wants a widget really bad. In fact, let us imagine that Person A has a terminal disease that _requires_ her possession of a widget for her very survival (in other words, let us make the widget a _material condition_ of person A's very existence). Person B, in turn, cannot survive without milk. Instead of postulating a barter economy where Person A must find person B at the market and exchange the widget for the milk, the brilliance of the money-commodity is that it allows person B to put the widget on the open market, mediated through a general equivalent, a third commodity, the money commodity, so that person A can sell her milk for $3 and then go to the widget shop (Radio Shack?) and buy a widget for $3 WITHOUT EVER MEETING PERSON B. Now, according to d'Arconia, what has just happened here? the money commodity (whether gold or pieces of paper with little plastic strips inside of it) has mediated a social relationship between person A and person B. The value given to money, d'Arconia correctly notes, is not given to money by "the moochers or the looters." Not at all -- that money represents "your claim upon the energy of the men who produce." Or, as someone else pointed out ninety years before the publication of _Atlas Shrugged_, money represents "congealed labor-power." That money represents a social relationship between people -- the production and consumption of the fruits of human labor. So, what in this passage is different from anything in _Capital_? Remember that in Marx, "value" itself never appears as such. (And by the way Rand says nothing more nor less than this when she defines "value" in the opening of _The Virtue of Selfishness_). What something is _worth_ is determined by _social relations_ between human beings. These social relations are established in a mode of production which produces value as a structural possibility for exchange. The commodity is the _visible_ form of value, its reified representation. The magic of the money-commodity is its ability to transform human relations in a manner that allows one person's effort to be recognized in a commodity and realized in the process of exchange. Money, d'Anconia extolls, "rests on the axiom that every man is the owner of his mind and his effort." Unfortunately, this is the principle behind money that has been concealed through what Marx called the "fetishism" of the money commodity. For when we peel off a twenty dollar bill from our fat wad, we do not usually think of the effort and labor that went into the production of the commodities that that twenty-spot represents. In fact, if you ask T.C. Pits (The Celebrated Person-in-the-street) how much a twenty-dollar bill is _worth_, she will probably say that it is worth twenty dollars. This is of course circular. In fact, the twenty dollar bill's worth is determined only by what it is good for -- its "value," that slight, contentless thing that is determined in social relationships. If we use it to buy a copy of George Walsh's cassettes then that determines its worth. If we use it to snort methamphetamine through and then burn it, then that determines its worth. The transformation of a mere object (a piece of paper, a lump of gold, or a piece of wood) into a commodity is a mystical process in that a mere _thing_ is transformed into a representation of human interaction. Marx: "A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceities.... the table continues to be wood, an ordinary, sensuous thing. But as soon as it emerges as a commodity, it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing of its own free will." (_Capital I_). "Fetishism" in the religious sense occurs when an idol is misrecognized as a literal embodiment of the power it is supposed to symbolize. The fetish (idol) _becomes_ the power that the fetish-maker has imbued it with. Before the fetish is misrecognized, the fetish stands for a social power; after the misrecognition the fetish takes on a power of its own and is mystically transformed. The fetish-maker forgets that she is the one who first invested the fetish with its value. Similarly, the money- commodity has been invested with its value through human exchange relationships. The problem is not with money per se, but with the misrecognition of money as a value in itself, as something that can be accumulated. (Likewise, the problem is not capital per se but capitalism, the system that manages capital in such a way that those who _produce_ the wealth -- d'Arconia's "men who will not default on the moral principle which is the root of money" -- are not the ones who _accumulate_ the wealth. "Socialism," then, would be a mode of production which would allow those who produce the wealth {those who labor, intellectually or physically, and I add that not to equate the academic with the plumber but rather to affirm Rand's position that intellectual labor is often as productive as physical labor, as in the invention of the steam engine or the plans for its use} to benefit from the fruits of their labor -- a system that would recognize that the wealth itself is the representation of social power and not confuse the representation of social power with power itself. Not to confuse money with the value of money, not to confuse capital with the value of capital). The key here is that the money form "conceals the social character of private labor and the social relations between individual workers, by making those relations appear as relations between material objects, instead of revealing them plainly." (_Capital I_). In other words, THE COMMODITY MAKES WHAT ARE ACTUALLY RELATIONS AMONG PEOPLE SEEM LIKE RELATIONS AMONG THINGS. <Grossman:> As I said and you have ignored, Marxism is a perceptual economics in which only immediate, concrete, physical action is considered productive. The conceptual mentality of capitalism is as alien here as a man from Mars. Capitalist production is (individually) rational, long-range, indirect, abstract, and division-of-labor. My cat perceives my hands moving, perceives sounds, perceives light and dark patterns on the bright thing in front of him but he does not have a conceptual faculty to identify the use of a computer. This is the limit of the knowledge of children, the insane, criminals, primitive savages, and Marxists about a capitalist economy. Marxists have a conceptual faculty but Kant taught them it was evil and impotent and not under their individual control. <end quote> Well, I'm not sure where any of this comes from. Is this a "joke" again? If so, what "truth" is it based on? I know few Marxists who believe that "only immediate, concrete, physical action is considered productive." I really don't know anyone who would say that, for example, the blueprints for a building produce nothing other than a piece of paper with lots of pretty lines on it. Additionally, I'm not sure why Kant taught us that our conceptual faculty is "evil and impotent." (Perhaps this is in the little known fourth Critique, reproduced in the even lesser known twelfth thesis on Feuerbach?) I'm also not sure why "criminals" and "primitive savages" can't use computers, nor why this has anything to do with Marxism even if it were true. <Grossman:>Marxism is Rousseauean, hippie primitivism, the absurd claim that production (for survival) is automatic so we should work to merely express our "individual" part of some alleged social consciousness. <end> Simply wrong. Skipping the ad hominems (what the hell is "hippie primitivism" and why is it bad?), the reason work is social has nothing to do with some mystical idea about our "alleged" social consciousness. Our social consciousness is as real as the bread we eat and the computers wqe type on. You don't think so, try to grow your own wheat, bake your own bread, kill whatever meat you dine on, and send email over the computer you built yourself without relying on the international division of labor to exploit workers in third world countries (and here at home) who grow silicone, manufacture transistors, mold plastic, etc., etc., ad nauseam. The human being is a social creature and has real social needs, and h/er labor is social by nature, not by some trick of mysticism or some belief in the social "consciousness." This is not a new idea; Ayn Rand's hero Aristotle (of "A=A" fame) pointed it out when he tried to distinguish between human beings and animals. <Work as play! This part of Marxism is apparently small relative to criticism of capitalism, but its basic. > You must be thinking of Marx's nephew Paul Lafargue (_The Right to be Lazy_). I don't think Marx ever said that work was play. And I doubt anybody who works in a factory producing 486 chips thinks that it is play, and I doubt even further that she thinks she is being playful by thinking that at the very least she should be able to afford a computer built around the chip she produced. <Marxism is the theft of capitalist wealth to (temporarily) suppport a mindless, tribal society in the fashion of hippies surviving off of capitalism.> What are you talking about? It seems you are invoking what d'Anconia called the "moochers" and "looters" to describe Marxists, but I really don't understand how one is stealing capitalist wealth (or any wealth for that matter) by reading Marx or even (horror of horrors) agreeing with him from time to time. Yet the theft of wealth occurs every day when, for example, a self-identified "capitalist hippie" sells a tie-dyed print bedsheet for $300 that was made in India by women working for the equivalent of $2/week. Or when Microsoft corporation steals the ingenuity of its programmers to make huge profits off of their creations without even a byline for the people who wrote the majority of the code. Etc. These aren't even the most obvious examples; this is only the tip of the iceberg of exploitation in the capitalist economy. <Its either capitalism or primitivism, not primitivism supported by capitalist wealth. A wealthy, scientific-industrial economy is supported by the values of realism, independent judgement,and selfishness, however implicit or explicit these may be. After socialist hippies steal the wealth and individual freedom of those skilled and motivated in running an advanced economy, there will be no more and the socialist hippies will die waiting for "society" to save them. Reason is volitional, not social.> Reason can be both, my friend. Everything is social. We cannot escape the social, no matter how hard we try (and all this talk of individualism vs. the social, by the way, reminds me more of hippies than anything Marx has ever said; perhaps that is because I grew up in the seventies and not the sixties.... the "hippies" in the seventies were busy trying to beat it into the eighties and even the ones without a pot to piss in can be found at Rainbow gatherings preaching the wonders of individualism and the fascism of "collectivism," whatever that is.). As soon as we learn to speak, we have already entered into and been written by the social in ways that overdetermine everything we do. Language is not the creation of a heroic individual; it is a social tool that we all enter into in order to survive. You don't believe me? Go without talking to anyone for a year or two. (And that means no email either, which is certainly a social tool). And what is this choice between capitalism and primitivism? What is so primitive about a society (purely theoretical at this stage, perhaps that is the hippie myth to which you refer) in which those who actually produced the wealth were the ones who profited from it? > Your references to "selflessness" are ambiguous. I advocate building > a classless society primarily because I'm selfish. <Marx's species-being is mystical nonsense. Only individuals are real. Society is an abstraction. Your alleged selfishness is that of a social unit expressing his particular social consciousness. It is not the selfishness of a rational animal (not a social animal) whose actions either further or threaten his individual, non-social,survival.> What is Marx's "species-being"? Did I miss that somewhere in the Eighteenth Brumiere? Society is an abstraction -- that I can agree with. But it is a necessary abstraction, just like the individual, which is _also_ an abstraction. A rational animal _is_ a social animal because the very facility of reason or rationality is a social creation which makes NO SENSE without the existence of and interaction with OTHER individuals. < Your alleged selfishness is logically dependent upon a context of rejecting individual selfishness for social approval for sociallly subjective values, ie, your alleged selfishness is not that of an individual, with volitional reason, surviving in objective reality but that of a tribal savage sacrificing, tho in his own psuedo- individualist way, his individual life and individual happiness, to society. Its the pseudo-selfishness of a drug addict who acts, not for survival, but to evade the need for independent values and action. Marx is a SECULAR DISCONTENT OF THE MODERN WORLD, afraid of the loss of social control over his life because he chooses to hate the need for individual thought and action. Marx accepted the death of God but retained the religious morality of selflessness and thus hated the modern world of, above all, individual achievement.> Please cite the texts in which Marx states his hatred of any of these things. Who is talking about social approval? Most of this passage is pure ad hominem, without any analysis of what is being talked about. What is a "tribal savage" and how does a Marxist analysis ask an individual to "sacrifice" individual life and happiness to "society"? The problem is that the individual life and happiness of the average worker has been sacrificed to the happiness of those who profit off of his work. This is not selfishness on the part of those who produce but exploitation by those who don't. <"[Secular discontents of the modern world, including Marx, want] a heaven here on earth wherein all wants were automatically taken care of,a world of warm, loving relationships in which each person was valued for his intentions [Rousseau, Kant], wholly apart from what he delivered." [George Walsh, _Marxism_, cassettes, Laissez Faire Books, NYC]> Yeah sure, don't we all. It is nice that George Walsh is privy to Marx's secret desires. I prefer to stick to what Marx actually wrote to make my arguments here; though I certainly haven't read everything so if this desire for heaven-on-earth is published someplace I'm not aware of I'm sure that Mr. Grossman will correct my error. >I don't like the > fact that it's impossible for most parents, including myself, to feed > our children and simultaneously to save for their education. I don't > like the fact that I will have no pension to live on in my old age > because I was unable to work for the same company for thirty > consecutive years. I don't like having to give ninety percent of our > family income to the bank who holds the mortgage. If everyone would > be quite selfish, and really stick to it, we'd choose socialism. <You prove my point better than I could. "I don't like" is your basic view of the metaphysical nature of man, a nature which demands a basic reliance upon independent judgement and action rather than the fallacy of social omnipotence. Society cannot help those who refuse to make independent judgements. There is no substitute for independent judgenment. Society is a narcotic and has no magical power to provide the material and spiritual values needed for individual survival and individual happiness.> Who is refusing to make independent judgements? I don't like a lot of things too, that have nothing to do with human nature but with human behavior. "I don't like" is certainly an independent judgement. "Society cannot help" anyone; it is up to us to make society (that's a paraphrase of the eleventh thesis on F, a bit out of context perhaps) which requires, yes, "independent" judgement and action. Society may be a narcotic but it is a necessary one, much more integral and natural to human survival than, say, advertising (the ultimate capitalist narcotic) or cigarettes. As is the "individual" -- a narcotic, an addictive myth that makes us (American society) behave in odd ways ("collectivist ways" we might say) to get a "fix" -- running in droves to Schwarzenegger or Stallone movies, for example, or smoking Marlboros, to feel like we are participating in an individualistic triumph.... > If you want to know about dialectics, study 20th century physics. > Without any reference to Marx and Engels, read some Schrodinger and > Heisenberg. Try to find your "law of identity" in the "probability > waves." > <The mainstream of post-Kantian thought, philosophy, art, science, etc. is corrupt and intellectually worthless. Kant split mind and reality and later thinkers merely applied this to their specialities. Try to find Kantian antimonies or Hegelian/Marxist dialectics in the metaphysics of identity. Science is the creation of philoosphy and stands or falls with it. Bad philosophy causes bad science. Even contradictions, by the metaphysics of identity, _are_ contradictions. A is A. Of course, you can value contradictions if you please and you can even guide your actions thereby. But you are not free to avoid running into the metaphysics of identity. Thats why socialism cannot create wealth but only steal it from capitalism.> Again, what the hell are you talking about? Kant got it wrong so therefor socialists steal from capitalists.....could you take us through this step by step please? Who values contradictions? Value, remember, expresses a social relation between producers of wealth. Marx pointed out that the contradictions of capitalism were covered over by its machinations -- what were contradictions in reality appeared as noncontradictions, as if handed down by tradition (recall the discussion of money -- the contradiction between the social power and the object (paper gold whatever) is covered over by a mysticism which equates the object with the social power it wields). A is A, but capitalist accumulation and the fetishism of the commodity makes it appear as if A is NOT A.... Once we can accept that A is not A we can attempt to make A equal to A again. If we simply accept things as they appear, in their ideal (their representation, in language or wherever, which Rand argues is an ideal representation of a concrete reality but not the concrete reality itself; see the _Romantic Manifesto_ and _Fountainhead_), we have strayed from the concrete, the material. >I wish I knew what the hell you are talking about. Just because I >believe, while you don't believe, that the workers in every workplace >are more technically qualified to elect the managers than a group of >absentee stockholders are, and that the workers are more entitled to the >dividends, now I'm supposed to try to decipher your 9 uses of the >word "reality" and your 6 uses of "concrete"? > <This is the anti-reason, perceptual mentality of Marxism (and of most of history). You limit production to the immediate, concrete situation. But capitalist production is long-range, abstract, conceptual. Knowing a specific machine operation does not automatically provide the knowledge of anticipating and making practical use of _constantly_ changing ideas, values, inventions, trades, etc. of customers, suppliers, and competiters.> True, but knowing the machines operation _is_ important. Whereas _owning stock in the machine_, which is what the issue is here, also does not "automatically provide the knowledge of anticipating and making practical use of _constantly_ changing ideas, values, inventions, trades, etc. of customers, suppliers, and competiters." <The failure of most new businesses to make consistent profits proves, within a rational economics, that only a relatively few people can profitably manage production in the long-run. The rest must be grateful to these heroes of capitalism!> Please, get real. The failure of most new businesses means that the tiny percentage that owns the machines and institutions of productions don't have room for competition. That, paraphrasing Lepore, the 10% of the population that owns the 90% of the wealth really feels threatened by the relatively few of the exploited who have figured out that they are being exploited. Take Radio Shack for instance. There is no heroism involved in being the only store in a strip mall in Coralville, Iowa that sells diodes at 2PM on a Sunday. Never mind the international division of labor involved in the production of those diodes; lets talk "business" -- even if I wanted to open a "new business" that would provide these diodes cheaper and more reliably than the Rat Shack I wouldn't have a chance. After all, how often do people need to buy diodes? The Rat Shack has a monopoly. It doesn't need to sell *any* diodes in Coralville to keep its store open; as a national chain it can profit elsewhere and keep its Coralville store open even if people in the community realized the benefits of buying diodes from me instead of them. AND it could continue to get away with cataloging the names, addresses, phone numbers, Social Security numbers, etc., of every customer that walked through the door ("company policy") even though the policy is unpopular and unreasonably intrusive to individuals (why the hell does Rat Shack need my SSN just to sell me a diode?) because I would never sell enough diodes to keep my store afloat whereas they would continue to prosper even in the absence of a huge demand for diodes. This has nothing to do with ingenuity or heroism on Radio Shack's part. (And it is really unclear to me why a small company that gets bought out or driven out or driven out by a huge monopoly should be "grateful" to the "heroes" that bankrupted them). <This gratitude is not submissiveness but respect from one independent-minded person to another. Employers and employees are essentially similar in being productive. THey differ in degree (not in kind) of productive ability. Of course, in a hippie commune (ie, Marx's communism), production is held down to the least competent so all will feel equal. A high price for equality!> Again, get real. How many "hippie communes" have you visited recently. "i.e., Marx's communism"???? What did Marx ever say about allowing long-haired pot smokers to sleep on your couch for six months??? I missed that; was that the thirteenth thesis? "Employers and employees...differ in degree (not in kind) of productive ability," Well, then, why the hell do the employers make so much more and have so much more power? What is the "degree," precisely? It ain't a bachelor's degree that's for sure (unless its from USC or Harvard).... Perhaps the necessary degree is a pedigree... Seriously though (?!), I agree that the one who does the intellectual labor necessary for the long-term management of an institution should reap the benefits of that institution. But when that person's labor consists only in determining how to best exploit the labor of others I really don't think the benefits should be that extensive. Is Donald Trump a "hero" for monopolizing gambling and getting his friends to pass legislation (is this "socialism"?) that prevents Native American reservations from allowing legal gambling on their land (what little is left of it) so that he has no competition for the profits of legal gambling? Are the native Americans "primitive savages" for trying to compete in this arena? Really, capitalism has turned into its opposite, which is NOT socialism. This binary opposition prevents us from recognizing that socialism is an idea that is dependent upon capital -- capital managed in a different way than capitalists have managed it; socialism would be a system (and I'm not sure that it has ever existed, certainly not in the former USSR, or the PRC, or Cuba, Nicaragua, even Sweden) that would manage capital in such a way that its existence as a SOCIAL REALITY was recognized. <Capitalism is society ordered, not from itself, but primarily from the metaphysical needs of individual human survival. Ie, how does the material universe affect survival. What is reality, regardless of conventional values?> Well, maybe, but then capitalism has never existed either. You are describing Marxism, in which the ideals and modes of production of society (the models on which society functions) arise from the material conditions of that society rather than the material conditions of society being manipulated to coincide with some predetermined ideal (as in Hegelianism, and as in present-day American individualism). <Again, the secular discontents of the modern world, including Marx, want a society in which individual thought and achievement is politically incorrect; in which, in George Walsh's words, "God loved man with a warm and comforting love." Marx merely substituted society.> Where is this in Marx? I remember William Bennett speaking on "political correctness" saying that the phrase had been picked up from Marx. If any of the Marx readers on this list have identified where in Marx the phrase appears I would really like to hear about it. Marx never accused those who achieved or thought independently of being "politically incorrect"; if some Marxists do so today that is not Marx's doing nor is it the doing of anyone else who happens to agree with Marx's economics or politics. "Political correctness" was invented by the right wing (or perhaps appropriated from the left by the right) in an effort to discredit the very few achievements of the civil rights and feminist movements of the sixties. So the 60s radicals got a few brilliant scholars tenured, and so even fewer of them continue to argue for a radical restructuring of society. This, for some unknown reason, really threatened the "old guard" of the William Bennetts and Skull and Bones bunch, so they had to invent a demon to bash, and it was the "politically correct" -- i.e. young faculty members who retained enough of their radicalism to continue to speak out against blatant exploitation (by the "moochers" and "looters" mentioned above). <Capitalism grows indirectly from the free will choices of individuals in a society, if those choices are based upon the metaphysically first human choice: to reason about reality. A rationally surviving individual knows that other rational individuals provide knowledge and trade. So he wants a society in which independent action is politically correct, in which the initiation of force (which splits mind and action) is politically incorrect.> The true face of the "political correctness" media hype shows itself here; the capitalist wants those that s/he categorizes as "splitting mind and action" (??) to be seen as "politically incorrect," and does so by saying they are part of the so-called "political correctness" movement. > Aside from the assumption that it's form of "productive work" to > inherit one's great-grandparent's wealth and deposit it with > stockbrokers <As I repeatedly stress, discontents hate and dont even, sometimes, recognize individual achievement. News reports are constantly filled with descriptions of individual businessmen _creating new_ wealth but this is impossible in the metaphysics of these discontents. > Can you give an example? Which news reports? What individual businessmen? True, some small businesses _do_ survive, and that is part of the reality of flexible accumulation. As I mentioned earlier, (about 2 hours ago??!! Sorry about the long- windedness here) Guattari noted that the revolutionary nature of capitalism is such that it allows much freedom for change and dynamism -- but in that dynamism, something is covered over. "The more things change, the more they stay the same." The problem is that the dynamic nature of capitalism allows exploitation (in very stagnant forms) to continue to appear as "new" so that an ideology develops. So that poor third-world immigrants who make a few bucks in America by opening their own business end up believing the entire myth of American individualism ("pull yourself up by your bootstraps") and will defend the CEO of Boeing as a "hero" who pulled himself up just like they did while ignoring the material division of labor that continues to make it impossible for their former countrymen and women to "pull themselves up," and continues to make it impossible for native Americans to "pull themselves up" or blacks to "pull themselves up" etc etc.... (more garbage deleted; pure ad hominem about Marx and the "holy spirit") >industrial institutions are, for all practical purposes, public institutions >- only with the cooperative labor of millions of people can they be >constructed and operated. <They are private. Cooperative labor is unproductive unless led by individual reason, even if hidden in subtle kinship relations in tribal culture.> What the hell is tribal about the international division of labor? My point is that even "private property" is social. A belief that "those who own the corporations are the most productive and intelligent" is pure mysticism and nothing more. The real "subtle kinship relations" that hide "unproductive labor" are those that, for example, make my father continue to feel loyalty to the "private" corporation that laid him off after 30 years of productive labor. In other words, ideology. The idea that "the best and the brightest" are naturally going to end up in charge is the most absurd kind of mysticism, giving up on human ingenuity in favor of the myth that whatever happens happens because it should happen. I won't use the term "cowardice" to describe this situation (as Grossman has for situations he clearly knows nothing about) but I think that it would be more appropriate here than in the situations he attempts to address. <Capital is created by volitional reason in individual achievement. Its thus not metaphysical but man-made and temporary. Those who created capital in the past might be unable in the future. Those unable to create capital in the past might in the future.> And that is precisely why those who _accumulate_ capital are most often those who are afraid of the ones who _produce_ capital; in short, the bosses have forgotten how to produce capital and are now afraid of their own workers. Let us see the CEO of GE change a lightbulb before branding him a hero. <IBM was the leading computer company until Bill Gates created new wealth. There is no metaphysical necessity to Gates being able to produce new wealth in the future. But, in capitalism, every day, some individuals will be new capitalists and some old capitalists will be unable to compete. > So why do all the new capitalist leaders look so much like the old ones? (white, male, middle-upper class, American/European)? I don't deny that genius occasionally is rewarded in modern capitalist society. But Bill Gates is the exception, not the rule. And Bill Gates consolidated his "empire" by being able to monopolize information. There are many computer geniuses as brilliant as Bill Gates or more so. And there are many who have produced more. But not all of them will achieve what Gates has achieved economically (and politically, in terms of power). Gates will make 17 million dollars just for telling some DOS-ignorant CEO not to press the NUM LOCK key when using FTP (OK, I'm exaggerating to make a point). But the millions of other computer geniuses in this country and others will be happy to get jobs as unacknowledged drones who write most of the code that Gates profits from. This is not to say that Gates is evil; I'm sure he's a decent guy, but rather to say that structurally he is in a position that most people won't occupy regardless of their intelligence, creativity, or work ethic. <Sometimes these old capitalists donate money to Marxist causes because they, like Marxists and other discontents, want automatic social status without having to earn it as individuals endlessly competing with other creative individuals. THey want automatic, unearned, moral self-respect. > Or sometimes they run for office (e.g. G. Bush, oil tycoon) because they "want automatic social status without having to earn it as individuals endlessly competing with other creative individuals. THey want automatic, unearned, moral self-respect." And they want the ability to back it up with force, the "enemy of reason". <philosophy to find and create fantasies of a metaphysical nipple. Just suck hard enough and everything will be wonderful.> Is that what the "giant sucking sound" is all about? > > a mindless herd of self-destructive cowards. >I sometimes wonder why nearly all ad hominum remarks are made by capitalism advocates. <You have it backwards. People who freely choose Marxism do so because they already have chosen to be self-destructive cowards and need a rationalization. I fully recognize that ideas are not reducible to psychology. This is absurd, given the easily available Marxist literature, the popular image of emotionally disturbed businessmen, the lack of Marxist ideas in basic economics (recall Bohm-Bawerk and von Mises!), and Marx's claim that ideas were reducible to the person's life situation (ie, class). You should make this claim to uneducated people.> Can someone tell me what he's talking about here? Who said that this list was "a mindless herd of self-destructive cowards"? Who's making the ad hominems here? >One would think that they would take comfort > in the fact that their ideal, the ownership of 90 percent of the > wealth by the wealthiest one percent of the population, is now in > full bloom all around us. <Do you want serious argument or not? I know of no pro-capitalist intellectual who even suggests this.> Who suggests what, that a minority of the population owns the majority of resources? If they don't say it, they're not unaware of it.... George Kennan said it openly in 1948. Theodore Roosevelt said it openly. So did Winston Churchill; so did Alexander Hamilton. Are you denying it? It's not like this is a disputed point. I know of no pro- OR anti-capitalist intellectual who can credibly deny it. <Serene? Revolutionary literature is filled with military images of destruction and hatred of non-revolutionaries. Read some Ayn Rand for serene reflection. > Well, I'm not unfamiliar with her work. It's not serene. Don't get me wrong; she was a brilliant writer and I thoroughly enjoyed her work, even considered myself an "objectivist" for a while, but she's not serene. Look at her characters in _Atlas_ or _Fountainhead_....either they are the perfect embodiments of objectivist philosophy or they are twisted, depraved "altruistic" cowards who will do anything to prevent a genius from achieving his rightful rewards. Her Atlantis is the embodiment of a technologically sophisticated "hippie commune," right down to the Joshua-Norton-style currency (anyone remember "Emperor" Joshua Norton?). Sorry, Mr. Grossman, but the real world doesn't work this way. Ben Attias ------------------
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