Date: Tue, 23 Jul 1996 00:13:50 -0700 (PDT) From: Ralph Dumain <rdumain-AT-igc.apc.org> Subject: Re: MARX... & OUR WORLD Jukka, I didn't realize I had created confusion in responding to Trotter. Of course, capitalism fostered individualism even as it was destroying the individuality of millions in the industrial revolution. Don't think I am opposed to individualism or the destruction of traditional social ties. I love individualism; I wish we could wipe all vestiges of traditionalism off the face of the earth. With individuality as with everything else, capitalism's achievement is radically contradictory. It proclaims the abstract individual and the values of individual autonomy and then it frustrates those very same hopes by turning millions of workers into interchangeable units, who no longer have a direct relationship to any artisanal skills, nature, or creative activity, but who instead do indifferent, repetitive drudgery, and their cultural lives as well as their personalities and physical and mental health deteriorate. This is what Marx meant. More potential for the individual in theory, but a theft of concrete individual character in practice. Not only are the workers robbed of individuality, but so are the abstract individualists. For instead of developing rich, manifold relationships to the empirical world, their relationship to the world, and they themselves, become pale, underdeveloped abstractions. This was Marx's accusation against Feuerbach and Stirner, and it applies a fortiori to all the libertarians today. Have you ever dealt with these disciples of laissez faire capitalism, the devotees of Ayn Rand? What is most striking is that all of these individualists are so predictably alike. So yes, something drastic happened for both good and bad. Man was freed from his traditional conjunctural self-concept: I am Grog, son of Og, a shoemaker like my dad and his dad and his dad and his dad unto the 20th generation, and I am also a reincarnation of my dead great great uncle, and let me pay homage to the ancestors before I slip into my moccasins. Good fucking riddance to that concept of the self. Good riddance! The abstract individual, however, is in a quandary as to now to relate to the rest of the universe, or even in what direction to go personally. And so the isolated lonely self can be a pitiable underdeveloped creature. But that state also demands a rethinking >from the ground up of all human relationships. And that's good. For socialism can't be socialism until it's thought from the ground up. Who could imagine socialism in some semi-feudal agricultural society? What, because people live collectively? what utter nonsense, as nonsensical as this rubbish about primitive communism. What did Oscar Wilde say? That socialism would finally make individualism possible? That was Marx's message, too, and if anybody dare to tell you otherwise at this late date, follow Brecht's advice and hit him with a rock until he dies. (Lucky for Brecht himself he's dead so that 'the measures taken' can't be applied to him.) While we're talking, let's compare the stuff I've been writing lately to the frivolous flapdoodle you cited from Zizek and others recently. How do you ('you' being the generic English 'one') boil down your wide-ranging erudition to something that actually applies to life as you live it and observe it around you? No matter how esoteric and remote the material is that I present, no matter how abstruse the ideas I'm presenting, I always make it a point to be as direct, forceful, and to the point as I can. I write as if what I have to say matters. And if Zizek and the rest had something to say, they would do the same. Charlie Parker couldn't have said it better: "If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn." --- from list marxism2-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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