DDeBar wrote:
>Exactly. You must consider that, in the absence of an objective
>understanding of one's place at the moment in the larger scheme of things,
>workers, like everyone else, will opt for the short term economic advantage
>every time. It appears, from the subjective vantage point, to be the sane
>thing to do. Unfortunately, since the average worker does not have a team
>of economists, accountants, historians and Craig Supercomputers to do
>her/his forecasting, the worker is at a disadvantage.
I'm not sure about that. A team of economists sounds like a DISADVANTAGE to me.
>These aids to the
>capitalist, along with the superior education, teams of lawyers, prepaid
>political, police and military assistance as well as the power of the media
>are the the contemporary manifestation (of sum of 100 more years) of
>alienated labor confronting the worker which Marx described in Capital.
Education can be a disadvantage too. I consider myself fortunate to have
got off with the minimum sentence (about ten years of education) but I see
people around me who were indoctrinated for much longer and who are almost
incapable of thinking at all.
<<>>
>Can you enlighten us more about this Hanson? Is she the Australian
>Gingrich, or Clinton, or something else?
Pauline Hanson owns a fish & chip shop in Ipswich, a satellite city of
Brisbane in Queensland . She was the endorsed Liberal* candidate for the
VERY safe Labor electorate until, in the middle of the last federal
election campaign, she contravened unwritten Liberal election strategay and
SAID SOMETHING (something stupid). Since she didn't have any chance of
winning anyway, and as a warning to other liberals tempted to SAY
SOMETHING, she was sacked as a Liberal candidate by the top brass of the
party. As a result of the martyr factor, and hatred of the (then) ruling
Labor party by the predominately working class voters of the electorate,
she was promptly elected to the seat which the Labor party had held since
Adam was a boy.
(*Note: over here the Liberals are the CONSERVATIVE party.
Like I said - Ms Hanson is the Australian version of Chance the gardener -
you remember - Jerzy Kosinski's book "Being There", Peter Sellers starred
as Chance in the film version.
In this story a naive gardener, Chance, cloistered behind a garden wall for
years, is exposed to the real world on his master's death and, by virtue of
his naivete and happenstance, is taken on as an advisor to the US
President. His political patrons interpret his naive description of the
world, as a garden to be maintained, as profundities to be pondered upon
and used as electioneering tools for forwarding their own selfish
ambitions.
Anyhow that's how I see her, others to take her EXTREMELY seriously (which
is the point of my analogy). Everytime she has a public meeting around
Australia there are hundreds, sometimes thousands protesting outside the
venue. She gets more police protection than the Prime Minister and more
publicity. This despite the fact that the media seem to universally despise
her, in fact I note she seems to have NIL support amongst the elites
(greatly adding to her popularity with folk who have nothing in common
except they despise the elites). I think I'll vote for her myself if she
lasts that long - as a sabotage tactic.
Her views - she thinks aboriginals get 'special' treatment. (Compared to
native fauna maybe? They aren't allowed to hunt them in Queensland
anymore.) Migrants are 'taking our jobs' (that's what we liked about
migrants - they took the shitty jobs), and of course she complains the
Japanese are 'buying up' Australia (a new landlord, what's the big deal?).
>As you look for this lesson, I recommend (re-?)examining 1.) the phenomena
>that Lenin described in "Imperialism - the Highest Stage of Capitalism" and
>2.) the history of the German experience with Fascism.
What lesson am I looking for in examining the german Fascist experience again?
<<>>
>I think you need to (again, re-?)read Lenin about this "inevitability"
>thing. A thorough reading of Lenin's extensive writings nowhere give rise
>to the suspicion that he harbored any magical thinking whatsoever. As far
>as the "overproduction thing" goes, Marx, Engels and others have pointed
>out that it is an internal contradiction of Capitalism.
I'm not sure I see overproduction (or crisis of profitability as someone
else put it) as a contradiction exactly. Its just, as I've said here
before, that it seems to mean that the huge productive capacity created by
capitalist rule can NEVER realise its potential to free mankind from
poverty, because under capitalism production is only carried out for profit
rather than to satisfy human needs.
To me that seems to indicate that if we want to satisfy human needs we
don't have any other option than to end capitalism. Nobody on this list has
quarrelled with this analysis, although I suspect there is likely to be
some controversy over just what we mean by socialism. Frankly I'm not very
attracted to a 'socialism' where we just change the elite. My support of
socialism is dependant on it being something which fullfills its promise to
abolish class based society.
I also agree fully with those who ridicule the proposition that the working
class can be emancipated by an elite or 'vanguard'., As De Leon put it in
that article I posted recently:
"the belief that [the masses] can be emancipated from wage slavery
without their knowledge",
seems so absurd to me that I really can't accept someone like Lenin, who
tried to do just that, as a teacher. However it seems to me that it is
equally foolish to throw out all of this 'objectivist' thinking. It is an
overreaction to discard it completely because (and I'm not too sure who is
doing that because I need to read up on that a lot more) it does contain
some important truth, that is that the objective CONDITIONS created by
capitalism will create, in turn, the material conditions for the working
class to gain, as you put it, an "objective understanding of one's place at
the moment in the larger scheme of things".
My view is that it does not take a team of economists or other experts to
gain such an understanding, in fact that is inimical to an understanding.
What is needed is the material conditions in terms of available technology
and information, which is improving for people like me I can tell you
(Chomsky's books aren't even AVAILABLE at my state libraray, and I can't
afford to buy books, but I have still read some of his work and even had
the chance to discuss it in forums like this).
What is ALSO needed is the material INTEREST to understand what is going on
and being done to you. As Chomsky has indicated, it doesn't matter what the
objective evidence is - we tend to believe what it is in our interests to
believe, DESPITE the objective evidence if necessary. This harks back to
the earlier discussion on "self-deception" in the Chomsky list, the point
being that the elite 'experts' can't help the socialist endeavor simply
because the interests of the elite are those of their masters and it is
only the occassional exceptional person (and the young of course) who have
the ability to comprehend (let alone acknowledge) an analysis that directly
threatens their own self interest.
I don't know enough about the "objectivists" and their detractors to know
whether the difference between material 'determinism' and material
'conception' is acknowledged and by who. But I already know where I stand
on this.
Time to think is also essential. The capitalist class is giving plenty of
us plenty of spare time these days too.
Bill Bartlett
Bracknell Tasmania
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