Re: [ox-en] Re: compulsion
- From: Graham Seaman <graham seul.org>
- Date: Mon, 11 Feb 2002 18:14:38 -0500 (EST)
Hi Stefan,
What a long reply! You've virtually restated your whole thesis ;-) I
don't have a single counter-thesis to reply with; there are parts I agree
with, parts I'm not sure about, and I think, somewhere underlying a really
basic disagreement,, which I'm still struggling to pin down.
On Mon, 11 Feb 2002, Stefan Meretz wrote:
Hi Graham,
you raised one of the most important and most difficult questions in the
oekonux context -- as I see it. It has to do with the "picture of
humans" (Menschenbild) we have, or in other words: it has to do with the
way we think about humans. One key question is: Does human behavior
reflect the way to get along with societal conditions as we face them,
or is human behavior which we can observe an innate natural thing? Or in
other words: Is an human being societal by nature or is it an isolated
egoistic individual which has to be forced to be social?
This sounds to me a very 18th century polarity.. but let's see further
on...
We discussed this in ox in various contexts, however, we did not reach
consensus, but we found a lot of questions;-)
Often focussing on basic theory parts in ox (all of ox is theory...), I
focus on those basics here too.
Graham Seaman wrote:
The 'selbst' in 'selbstentfaltung' is great as an emphasis on people doing
things because they choose too, linking personal with social because
the unfolding of the self is only possible in a social context.
This choice is not of a type like choosing between TV programs, or shall
we eat fish or meat, or shall we make some nice selbstentfaltung today
or just hang around. I would say: life _is_ selbstentfaltung. The
question is: Can we live it? Selbstentfaltung is not an add-on, it is a
innate feature of humans. So the question is not: Will these ugly humans
self-unfold, the question is: how will they do it.
I think you are mistaking my use of 'choose' above, but it's not so
important - I will be happy with your expansion, providing you remove the
word 'innate' ;-)
Today the answer is: They do it mostly in an ugly way - except in FS;-)
However these fs guys are normal people. They don't have anything
special in the sense of being/having a special character.
Yes. However, in terms of the polarity you started with, the answer now
has to be 'the true innate human character is revealing itself once
released from (some of) the framework of capitalism'. You can take the
fact of FS as a disproof of Hobbesianism, the other term in your polarity.
But this polarity has ruled out other possibilities: for example, 'there
is some new structure to (a small part of) society which is producing
humans of this kind', or the classic Marxist one that capitalism
eventually produces men with a need to work, that man's nature is a
product of his history..
If we look into history we can say that until now selbstentfaltung is
only needed in a very restricted sense. This has to do with the
dominance of the type of development of forces of production
(Produktivkraftentwicklung) which changes in history.
The notion of development of forces of production (DFP) grasps the
relationship between human, nature and means. Life requires the usage of
means by the humans to do the metabolism with nature. I roughly sketch
this in a triangle (maybe you saw it on the first ox-conf):
human
/ \
/ DFP \
/ \
nature------means
Each of these three aspects is always present. However, you will find,
that in history different aspects are dominant for a period. And each
period is linked with a special form of mediation between the individual
and society (Vergesellschaftung).
Doing this schematically I obtain:
In the first "natural" period the cultivation of ground was dominant. We
have a lot of forms of personal dependency. Selbstenfaltung was nearly
not needed, it was suppressed. The main forces of production were
directed to optimize the usage to natural ground. Means were developed,
but very slowly and restricted. It was mere a side effect than a
primarily purpose. Economically you can use C-C (exchange of goods), or
C-M-C (commodity - money - commodity) for those societies which had money.
Well you did say 'schematically': but even so, I think this is completely
wrong. For proof: go into any gothic cathedral and look at the
mix of personal expression and overall structure and design. There was
far more 'selbstentfaltung' in 'high' feudalism than most of capitalism.
This was not the right argument to pick with a William Morris fan :-)
I'm also not sure that this kind of super-abstraction of Marx' theories is
very helpful generally, because it tends to block actually looking at
the real history.
In the second "industrial" period, where we live in, the development of
means is dominant. The development of means is end in itself, because
the whole society is driven by this end in itself: To make more money
from money. In short: M-C-M' (money - commodity - more money). In this
period the increasing absense of personal rule is typical.
Agreed in general. However, it is possible to exagerate this absence. I
know that Marx talked of capitalists as the 'personifications' of capital.
But outside Marx' economic writings, he was extremely aware of the role
of personalities. To take a small example: the pressure to turn thought
into 'Intellectual Property' comes from the system; it is impersonal. But
the actual laws proposed, the details of the tactics to take to impose
IP law are very much affected by the personal history of the people
involved, and the tactics to take to stop those laws need to take that
into account.
BTW: It was
(and is) an historical misunderstanding of the workers movement to fight
against personal power. It is hard, but we must say, that the workers
movement is a movement of establishing capitalism. The supremacy is a
subjectless one, it results from the selforganizing M-C-M'-mechanism of
the cybernetic machine.
Now you seem to me to have reached a position which I don't agree with at
all. In fact, there are two positions in this: the sentence in the middle
('It is hard...') seems to me to have no necessary connection with the
rest, so I can't argue with it - it's just a statement I don't agree with.
The rest of the paragraph I also disagree with, but I know why. You have
collapsed all of life in capitalism into a single level, the 'cybernetic
machine', and therefore lost all of politics, law, tradition etc. This
seriously limits what you can think about doing.
However, it also make the structure of your thought hard for me to follow
(like I wrote at the top, I'm not completely sure exactly where the
disagreement originates, in which idea). Your paragraph is something which
taken on it's own I would say is pure Althusser: there are no 'people',
only 'supports' ('trager'?) of economic positions. But this is the theory
of Stalinism, which tries to kill selbstentfaltung wherever it finds it.
Yet obviously this doesn't apply to you at all. So, if you have this view
of capitalism, I suppose selbstenfaltung HAS to be something innate which
is suppressed by the cybernetic machine, but bursts out when the machine
is taken away.
And now: the new period we can see at the horizon and in most
contradictions we face today is the period of the third factor in this
DFP-triangle: the development of human as an end in itself. Or in short:
selbstentfaltung. So you see, that this selbstentfaltung was and is
always present. Without it the reproduction of society would not be
possible. However until now it was only needed in a very small degree,
because an unbounded self-unfolding human is dangerous for all types of
supremacy. But now we reach a new point in the developement of
capitalism. All potences of capitalism are exhausted. This does not mean
that development stops, M-C-M' cannot stop, but it is deathmatch.
Developement today means destruction. No further qualitative development
is possible on the basis of the current level of DFP.
Like everyone, I can see signs of this too. I tend to believe it's true.
But saying ALL potencies of capitalism are exhausted may be too much;
it's certainly not something you can prove one way or the other/
A new level can only come from the human itself, from a human which
self-unfolds unbounded. However, this unbounded selbstentfaltung is only
possible under conditions where my selbstentfaltung is a prerequesite of
the selbstentfalt