On 8/21/06, Sandwichman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
If I may sum up that productivist anthropology is a single well-known
quote it would be:
"Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion
or anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish
themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means
of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their physical
organisation. By producing their means of subsistence men are
indirectly producing their actual material life."
Now let's zip ahead 50 years or so to the end of the 19th century. I
want to suggest a comparison of two texts: Engels's fragment, "The
Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man," published in
1895-6 but written 20 years earlier and "Der Rhythmus als ökonomisches
Entwicklungsprinzip" (Rhythm as a Principle of Economic Development),
the last chapter of Karl Bücher's Arbeit und Rhythmus, the first
edition of which was published in 1896.
Engels flounders badly in what looks to be an attempt to elaborate on
the thesis of the passage quoted above. By comparison, Bücher
impressively supports his thesis of a distinctively human "rhythm
activity" with extensive empirical research. The difference being that
for Bücher, "producing their means of subsistence" is only part (and
not really a distinguishable part) of a behavioural complex from which
labor, music and play would only subsequently be differentiated.
If religion traditionally emphasized an aesthetic abstraction at the
expense of subsistence, it seems that the traditional marxist
anthropology has emphasized subsistence at the expense of the
aesthetic (notwithstanding that there has always been a strong current
of marxist aesthetics that resists such a reductionism).
The Marxist emphasis on means of subsistence, I believe, was meant to
counter the traditional intellectual neglect of or even contempt for
the question of means of subsistence (after all, in pre-modern times,
all men and women of letters came from classes that did not have to
worry too much about their own subsistence), but it has gotten
overdone, way overdone, especially to the detriment of any prospect
for socialism here in the West.
Socialist states' records on freedom and democracy -- let alone play!
-- do not inspire people of the world. Socialist states do have
decent records on health, education, etc. (once they get over the
initial stage of socialist primitive accumulation which sometimes
resulted in large-scale famines, etc.), and that's still a good enough
selling point in large parts of the world where a majority are living
on less than a couple of dollars a day, but that's not a good enough
selling point to Iranians and others who are in the middle-income
category of the nations of the world and whose level of health and
education have been improving under the existing government and can
improve further (cf.
<http://hdr.undp.org/statistics/data/cty/cty_f_IRN.html>,
<http://devdata.worldbank.org/genderstats/genderRpt.asp?rpt=profile&cty=IRN,Iran,%20Islamic%20Rep.&hm=home>,
<http://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/iran_statistics.html>), _much
less to people in the West_. Islamists, nationalists, social
democrats, even the plain old _right-wing_ capitalist power elite like
the Liberal Democratic Party of Japan, etc. can do paternalistic
social welfare states as well as socialists.
Therefore, social welfare, the question of subsistence, can't be the
reason why people want socialism where socialism is most necessary if
there is to be an end to war and imperialism, like the United States
of America, the European Union, and Japan.
The main selling point of socialism has to be this: democracy in which
people are protagonists, history-makers, as Marx and Engels originally
envisioned. IMHO, Venezuela is an intimation of that (though what's
happening in Venezuela, too, has an element of paternalism, with
Chavez, its charismatic leader, as a generous patriarch to whom people
look).
We can't expect people to buy the vision of socialism = democracy,
though, by pretending that people don't know anything about the sorry
socialist historical records on democracy. Hell, politics in Iran
today is a lot livelier than politics in any of the former socialist
nations, North Korea, and even Cuba!
--
Yoshie
<http://montages.blogspot.com/>
<http://mrzine.org>
<http://monthlyreview.org/>
