File spoon-archives/marxism2.archive/marxism2_1996/96-07-31.055, message 69


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 ---


   

Driftline Main Page

 

Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005