Asia and hormones: query

Rob Schaap rws at comserver.canberra.edu.au
Sat Jun 20 10:48:07 PDT 1998


G'day Doug,

I really must get home soon ... but I'll chance a reply - and remember, you did ask ...

You ask:


>So we just want to do individualism better than the liberals?

Well, yeah. I do reckon the free individual can make sense within a Marxian take - you gotta take a line from the young Marx through the humanist existentialists to Fromm. The latter makes the point that Marx's criticism of capitalism entails bewailing the destruction of individual personality. Marx explains history in terms of class and class consciousness, but that is not to say (as Daniel Bell says, rather tendentiously) Marx has no respect for the individual. It is the individual's freedom that centrally concerns Marx, I think. Look at the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts: man must be independent, and can be so only 'if he affirms his individuality as a total man in each of his relations to the world, seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, thinking, willing, loving - in short, if he affirms and expresses all organs of his individuality ... '. That said, this independence is a variety that recognises the individual's social being - our every perception and action is, after all, a moment of *relating*. In as far as our laws would constrain, they'd constrain only behaviour that goes against our social essence - something we're not in a position to know a lot about yet as we're alienated beings just now.


>How do you get to the solidarity part from the polyvocality part?

If I may babble (it's 3.30 on a Sunday morning): We do that by recognising everyone needs and deserves like freedoms, and then blithely defining freedom as the Liberals do - ie. however free one can be to do what one likes so as not to take that same from another (that's bastardised but recognisable Rawls isn't it?). As people are different, such freedom must clearly be something more than a formal right. We all have the right to eat, but some of us do, in fact, starve. Liberalism comforts itself with the fact that it never denied the emaciated corpse the right to eat, but it must be reminded that the right means nought without the provision of food to give the right in question any real content. This it can not deny, I think. But it can also demonstrably not provide the food. As there's food enough for all, this must mean those who are hoarding food must be exceeding their formal rights, for the freedom they claim is such as to deprive others of a like claim. And this means the prevailing order is internally incoherent.

We all have the right to self-fulfilment, but half of us have wombs and half have not (birth-giving and parenthood constituting self-fulfilment for some and a constraint on same for others). Again, freedom is a universal category, but a like freedom for all requires the meeting of differential needs. These differential needs (ie requisites for a like freedom) logically amount to rights. You might need different rights from me if we're to enjoy the same freedom.

And anyway, on purely practical grounds, the freedom of a minority is unlikely to be won by that minority alone - the freedom of each of us must be the business of us all, because only together can we win the differential rights differential people need to attain the same freedom as everyone else. I'll win you yours for a reason any Liberal would understand: because I too want freedom, and I need you if mine is to be won. That's accessible rhetoric, innit?

And we each of us need to articulate and validate our particular needs (with reference to the 'like freedom' category), because I may not speak for you. Multivocality is of course a necessary function of the freedom of speech (a Liberal imperative). And just as I may not treat you as an object (bastardised but recognisable Kantian imperative), so must I relate to you as a subject. And you can only give your subjectivity content intersubjectively - ie. by relating to me as a subject. Arguably, for instance, I may not employ you (for you'd then be a means and not an end, an object and not a subject) ...


>I want to rehab them too, and I'm not an LC (note how Brown spent a
>paragraph or three defining herself as a conservative in many ways). But
>it's a pretty hard job, isn't it? Maybe it's living in the American
>paradise that biases me but I see that these categories don't resonate with
>many people. I hate to keep quoting Stanley Greenberg's polls, but the U.S.
>public seems to have no notion of social solidarity, believing that only
>one's own efforts helped by family (but not friends, unions, or parties, or
>political action in general) are the only key to success. That's a very
>strong headwind to fight.

Yeah, that's true. But you gotta be a few lengths up the straight if you employ recognisable Liberal points of departure and 'enlightened self interest' in your rhetoric, doncha? And solidarity is a little easier to sell if individual freedom is the carrot, eh? I mean, Yanks have done this sort of thing in living memory, and by the hundreds of thousands too.


>Europe has managed high unemployment rates, and the U.S. 23 years
>(1973-1996) of falling real wages. VISA and TINA are our social structure
>of accumulation.

If and when the Visa card hits its limit, there bloody well has to be an alternative! Bankruptcy is the individual way out, but only an available route while everybody's not doing it. Is consumer debt not a mounting problem? For my part, all I can afford to do with my Visa is scrape the ice off my windshield when I go home at 4.00 in the #*! morning ...

G'Night, Rob.



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