personal responsibility (was RE: American Left)

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

Alec quotes from Patterson:
>Here's the beginning to chapter 2 of his _The Ordeal of Integration:
>Progress and Resentment in America's "Racial" Crisis_
>(Civitas/Couterpoint, 1997):
>
>Most Afro-Americans share, or would like to share, America's and the
>Western world's core value of autonomy, which embraces the twin moral
>imperatives of personal responsibility and self-determination. . . .
>
>At the most conservative estimate, this desire holds for about 60
>percent of the population--the vast majority of that resilient core of
>hard-working, *God-fearing* (my italics) men and women of the working
>and middle classes who have triumphed over racial and class
>discrimination to become models of self-determining Americans.
>
>For the remaining large minority of Afro-Americans, however, the story
>is different.  Among established Afro-American political leaders and a
>growing number of young college graduates--and among the poor and
>troubled bottom quarter of the population for whom they speak--there has
>been a near complete surrender, in their politics, ideology, and
>intellectual discourses, to deterministic explanations and moral
>justifications.

Besides the problem of 'moral' baggage that Alec writes of and how it has
been turned into an instrument of social control of the working class, it
seems to me that what Patterson says is _empirically_ UNTRUE. Both
objectively and subjectively, Americans (or any other people for that
matter) are not and cannot be 'self-determining.' To begin with, capitalism
doesn't allow any worker to have full autonomy. What it seeks to foster
instead is dependency upon the vagaries of the labor market (instead of
so-called 'welfare dependency' + 'dependency' upon affirmative action) and,
with regard to poor women, dependency upon individual men, for instance
through the 'marriage fare' clause of the 'Welfare Reform,' structural
features of the Social Security system, unequal wages, and so on (at least
ideologically so, though in actual practice law has been quite parsimonious
when it comes to determining the level of child support).

Even _within_ the terms set by capitalism, I cannot believe that the
majority of Americans desire 'personal responsibility,' judging by what
they do (instead of what they say). According to the book _Sabotage_,
workplace 'theft' and other forms of sabotage are quite common--what a
majority of Americans do, even though they wouldn't admit it anywhere
except through the surveys that guarantee anonymity. Americans seek to
avoid paying taxes, legally + illegally, if they can get away with it, with
or without 'philosophical' justifications. Americans love entitlements, if
they are not perceived to benefit the poor in general and the poor people
of color in particular. (I teach at a huge state university, and most
students wouldn't be able to attend even this university if it got
privatized + they were forced to pay the full cost of their education.)

And, now, let's get to gender questions. Do heterosexual men take 'personal
responsibility' for their reproductive capacity as much as women have been
forced to do so? If they did, vasectomy and condoms would be vastly more
popular, and men would be jumping up and down demanding the 'male Pill'
instead of Viagra. And it seems to me that many men love being dependent
upon women's domestic labor.

Yoshie