Date: Tue, 25 Jul 1995 19:34:45 -0800 From: djones-AT-uclink.berkeley.edu (jones/bhandari) Subject: Re: That Infamous Turn To The Right (Our "Problem" with Liberalism) >From Leo's very thought-provoking post, I'll take this as a central claim: >What Schmitt finds so disturbing in liberalism are precisely those principles >-- pluralism, hetereogeneity and openness -- which define not only that >philosophy, but in many ways, the political thrust of the new social >movements of the 1960s. A concept such as multi-culturalism, with its >implicit cultural pluralism and heterogeneity, is, for Schmitt, a classically >liberal notion. I am not convinced that the problem of the left can be traced back to a putuative critique of liberalism. Moreover, I equate liberalism more with possessive indidualists and formal equality (I don't remember any political theory though). What are the historic origins of liberalism? Here's daring hypothesis (drawn from Sydney Coontz). Liberalism is the product of capital's eventual success at overcoming its labor shortage. Initially capital can only accumulate extensively requiring enslaved labor at constant technique and maximum wage laws. As capital begans to operate on its true basis of relative surplus value, there is a progressive increase in the reserve army of labor which solves the labor shortage (wage squeeze arguments are I think anachronistic, belonging to an early stage of capitalism in which the general law of accumulation has not yet worked itself out). Capital can now trumphet universality, freedom, and justice as it can accept the abolition of both slavery and maximum wage laws and even the emergence of trade unions, actually now necessary if the actively exploited proletariat is to receive the value of its labor power and thus reproduce itself in its slavery. As revolutions in technique and value become endemic and as the IRA disciplines the workers, capital can now pump more surplus labor (in the production process) out of freely sold labor power than previously enslaved labor. Accumulation is intensified. So the bourgeoisie also comes to embody freedom, equality, universality, justice... and productivism. As we have seen the principles of freedom, equality,universality--once useful for the overthrow of slavery-- can easily be used against affirmative action. I really don't get Leo's argument about the compatibility between liberalism and multiculturalism. It is the language of individuals, rights, equality under the law--the classic concepts of liberalism--which is being used against affirmative action for example. So the problem seems to me to be the maintainence of bourgeois values which the left thought it could eventually bludgeon the ruling class with. While at the same time sounding fair and oh-so respectable. Of course it is more than pathetic who many of these so-called Marxists are bludgeoning. And it seems to me clear that productivism can only be reactionary in the face of a job- and environment-killing machine of run away growth. Remeber Bhopal? What I am getting at is that I do not think the problem is liberalism or democracy but our own beholdeness to the values and ideals which capital embodied in its defining moment, in the transition from strategies of absolute to relative surplus value, the rise in the IRA being both consequence and cause of this development. We don't need a language of liberalism or democracy but a class conscious one of freedom and human needs. And this is what I miss in Telos; I am sorry I a missed those days of Korsch, Marramao, Winfield, Council Communism, Bonacelli and others--especially of course Jacoby's piece on Grossmann and Mattick! Rakesh --- from list marxism-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu --- ------------------
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