On Dec 1, 2005, at 6:52 PM, Michael Perelman wrote:
Following Jim's well-reasoned post, recall that Marx's method
(although he did not follow
it himself always) was to approach matters scientifically. He
referred to capitalists as
the character masks of capital -- meaning that they just play the
role assigned to them.
The problem is the script (Capitalism) not the actors.
"Capital" is our creation; we (including "capitalists") are not its
creation. This I take to be the social ontological claim on which
the idea of "fetishism" is based. The type of the "capitalist" is an
expression of human self-estrangement; it is a particular type of
subjectivity not simply an individual forced by the necessities of
capitalism to behave in a capitalist way. An essential aspect of
this is the attribution to that type of motives taking the form of
"passions" in the sense of Hegel.
Moralistic condemnation is inappropriate (and an obstacle in the way
of understanding) because the self-estrangement is not the
responsibility of the self-estranged individuals; it's the outcome of
the inconsistency between the actual conditions of life and the
conditions required for full human development, for the actualization
of "true individuality". This point is made by Marx re the
reasonable approach to "crime".
"If man draws all his knowledge, sensation, etc., from the world of
the senses and the experience gained in it, then what has to be done
is to arrange the empirical world in such a way that man experiences
and becomes accustomed to what is truly human in it and that he
becomes aware of himself as man. If correctly understood interest is
the principle of all morality, man’s private interest must be made to
coincide with the interest of humanity. If man is unfree in the
materialistic sense, i.e., is free not through the negative power to
avoid this or that, but through the positive power to assert his true
individuality, crime must not be punished in the individual, but the
anti-social sources of crime must be destroyed, and each man must be
given social scope for the vital manifestation of his being. If man
is shaped by environment, his environment must be made human."<http://
www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/holy-family/ ch06_3_d.htm>
Given that moralistic condemnation is unreasonable, what explains
it? One possible answer, consistent with the idea of irrationality
as an expression self-estrangement, is clinical narcissism i.e. a
weak unintegrated ego dealing with unacceptable aspects of its self
by projecting (estranging) them into others where they can then be
made a target for the unmastered instinctual sources of sadistic
hatred and aggression.
This will also explain dogmatic insistence on interpreting the
"materialism" in passages like the one just quoted, where "freedom"
in the "materialistic sense" is identified with "the positive power
to assert his true individuality" and with "correctly understood
interest" as productive of a coincidence between "private interest"
and "the interest of humanity", as the kind of "materialism" having
no logical space for these ideas, the kind that excludes any role for
"self-determination" and "final causation" as "causes".
Ted
