En relaci�n a Re: [CrashList] FW: Silviu Brucan: The Hard-Earne,
el 16 Aug 00, a las 12:03, TAHIR WOOD dijo:
>
> The notion of socialism, ...
> that is defined in terms of productivism plus workers'
> control is just dead. Finito. But I think Nestor's last
> post, while I disagree with it on the surface, does suggest
> something else that I would like to bring back into focus.
Wow, so that there _is_ something beneath the surface of what I
write! Maybe years of training in Aesop's language have given birth
to something worthy. But Tahir is also in the Third World, so he can
also read between the lines (something Mark can do more easily than
others, BTW, because of his Russian experience, that is for sure).
>
> Basically this is about the cultural or psychological aspect
> of the proletarian.
I feel this is a wrong way to put it, though yes, you have hit the
nail. I was concretely speaking of the _existential being_ of humans,
particularly workers, but simply humans. I was thinking in
philosophical terms of the relations between the forms of
consciousness and the conditions of existence, particularly on the
conditions under which each social subject constructs itself. I am
first and foremost thinking about the swarm of humans who lack a
livelihood in the Third World -I would not say non proletarian
masses (and the reasons why are IMHO particularly adequate for South
Africa as well as Argentina), will try to explain below.
One of the things that capitalism and
> capitalist industrialisation did was to transform the human
> psyche, to create an international material community, to
> develop the individual far beyond the limited notion of
> individuality that had existed, to put an end to rural
> idiocy, etc.
Sure? I would rather say that it was the opposite. Alienation and
rationalization under the rule of the law of value have generated,
for the first time in history, a possibility that individual subjects
imagine themselves as units in isolation. The atomistic mind (though
heralded by Lucretius) was actually produced by capitalism during the
14th to 16th centuries, and triumphally exploded with Luther in the
realm of religion and with English empirism and French rationalism in
the realm of philosophy. But dialectically enough, the process of
abstract rationalization has generated the precondition (not at all
the actual condition) for a concrete consciousness of the basic unity
of human beings. Up to this day this unity is considered as a
relation of equivalence such as that present in the commodity
relation. But yes, it is under capitalism that the first material
conditions for a description (still contemplative, passive and thus
existentially void, however) of the basic similitude of human beings
take place.
.
In this sense I DO agree with Tahir when he explains that
>This, above all, is why capitalism is a
> precondition for socialism. Now I believe, from the third
> world where I am sitting, that this project is incomplete or
> at least highly unevenly carried out. The surplus population
> that Mark alludes to, probably the world's majority, are not
> proletarians in the sense I am referring to here (South
> African Trotskyists with their typical blind spot have never
> been able to see this). They are not organised, they are not
> 'modernised', they are religious and superstitious, they are
> illiterate, etc.
Now, wait a minute, Tahir. Could you, hand on heart, safely state
that workers in the core ARE "organized, 'modernized', irreligious,
with no superstitions"? I would not. And what is the idolization of
commodities but the ultimate form of superstition...
> And to make matters worse, according to
> Chomsky's formulation, globalisation means not the diffusion
> of the first world model, but precisely the generalisation
> TO the first world of the third world model.
I assume this is exactly this way, but what I contest is the idea
that irrationality will thus bounce BACK into the First World. I am
afraid that the weed of "primitivism" has always been there.
> If this is so
> then we can expect to see in Western inner city areas the
> emergence and growth of essentially third world and
> non-proletarian communities.
This is the moment when I will explain why I contest this usage of
"non-proletarian". When you belong to the Reserve Army, you are also
belonging to the proletariat. The degree of proletarianization of a
community is not necessarily exposed by the ratio of employed
industrial workers to the sum total, it is not a quantitative
determination. It is a qualitative determination. If the only way to
earn a living is to enter a wage relationship, then you are still
proletarian in a broad sense, in an existential sense. You can even
struggle for an expansion of the wage relationship so you can be
coopted by it. In the end, this is what national struggle means for
the poor in the Third World, doesn't it? Take Argentina (and probably
South Africa) as an example. Without the generalization of the wage
relationship it would be impossible that the rising figures in
unemployment had the acid and revulsive meaning they have here.
People in Argentina simply cannot go and till a plot of land. There
is none, and there is no agrarian tradition for the large masses.
There is no agrarian haven where to return. Unemployed, starved,
rejected by the system, but proletarians. This is why even though the
numbers of the industrial working class have dwindled here, the
General Confederation of Labour is still the axis around which
politics moves: when its leaders hit the table, the whole building
shakes.
However, all these seem to be sidesteppings (is this good English?)
because we seem to agree on this essential paragraph:
>
> So I could imagine a limited industrialisation, an
> eco-friendly science, limits on population growth, etc.
> within a new socialism - yes, but this socialism would
> initially have to be built on the human needs of, and as a
> material community of, a population that is comprised of a
> non-proletarian majority. And it seems to me that this is
> where Marxism sheds the most light on the contemporary
> dilemma, but precisely shows it as a problem that marxism
> has no ready-made solution for.
Maybe. Maybe. The world I imagine is a world where
overindustrialization will be redistributed, wasteful consumption
patterns will be deemed repugnant, and a more natural living will be
the rule. But what we cannot forget is that there is a road ahead
towards that world, a road that first of all needs us to imagine some
way to achieve a concrete unity of humankind, a unity that is not
mediated by the law of value.
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N�stor Miguel Gorojovsky
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