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>>> "rc-am" <rcollins at netlink.com.au> 10/27/99 04:33PM >>>
dear simon (and a ps to kelley),
i'd be interested to see your responses to the questions doug put to you.
> I don't go with the crude materialism of people's "subjectivity" being
> forced on them. We make our own history, but with the conditions we find
> ourselves in, or something like that.
and i don't go along with a crude materialism which says that (eg) the structure of the wage at any given moment is merely a result of objective conditions. it's the materiality of subjectivity that's at issue in the bit you paraphrase from marx, it's not as if subjective and objective 'levels' move along as separate moments.
> The argument above is really a
> backhanded "the workers will never achieve greater than trade union
> consciousness" one, of Leninism and Fabianism. I am not some super
> vanguard, and I can see capitalism as a whole system shoved in my face.
> Why should I hypothesise that fellow members of the working class are
> incapable of the same?
heh. i've been accused of many things on this list, but never of being a leninist. i'm sure charles is chuckling as well.
i don't think leninism or fabianism pay much attention to the structure of the wage. the former denigrates the relations that obtain in the labour process and in the struggles over the proportions between wages and profits as 'economistic', as if the circumstances in which working class lives are reproduced have no bearing on the character of working class politics (the whole question is subsumed to that of joining the right party); and fabianism, well, the less said about that the better. it seems to have morphed into a kind of communitarianism in britain and a neo-liberalism here in australia. and i've never quite beleived the stuff about trade union consciousness. seems to me lenin had to give that up pretty quick in order to move along with the tide of _revolutionary_ soviets. but that's a discussion from a very tired thread.
> Consciousness drives action
umm... no. it doesn't matter if we know that money is a fiction: in order to live, we have to behave as if it is not.
> thus any who try to
> pander to reactionary tendencies will be severely dealt with :-)
there seem to be a proliferation of little vanguards here, all who think they're correct. what are ya gonna do, shoot the backsliders?
ps. kelley,
there might be some strong reasons why leftists in the US reject state planning, but there are i think some strong reasons why in the US state planning is regarded as _external_ to capitalism (which i think is actually what i said). the historical predominance of liberalism and free enterprise stuff in the US makes state planning look like it's something other than the regular operations of capitalism. even if some brit and aust leftists look upon state planning as something worthwhile, i don't think they're as likely to think of it as constituting something other than (at best) an ameliorated form of capitalism.
Angela _________