> ***** _Savages are not more noble_. -- There is to be found in African
> students of political economy, Siamese at Oxford,...a ready inclination to
> combine with the assimilation of new material, an inordinate respect for
> all that is established, accepted, acknowledged. An uncompromising mind is
> the very opposite of primitivism, neophytism, or the 'non-capitalist
> world'....It has been observed time and again how those recruited young and
> innocent to radial groups have defected once they felt the force of
> tradition. One must have tradition in oneself, to hate it properly
> [Yoshie: An 'uncompromising' elitism from an 'uncompromising
> mind'!]....Late-comers and newcomers have an alarming affinity to
> positivism....It would be poor psychology to assume that exclusion arouses
> only hate and resentment; it arouses too a possessive, intolerant kind of
> love, and those whom repressive culture has held at a distance can easily
> enough become its most diehard defenders. There is even an echo of this in
> the sententious language of the worker who wants, as a Socialist, to 'learn
> something', to partake of the so-called heritage....There is some reason to
> fear that the involvement of non-Western peoples in the conflicts of
> industrial society, long overdue in itself, will be less to the benefit of
> the liberated peoples than to that of rationally improved production and
> communications, and a modestly raised standard of living. Instead of
> expecting miracles of the pre-capitalist peoples, older nations [sic]
> should be on their guard against their unimaginative, indolent taste for
> everything proven, and for the successes of the West. [Yoshie: Adorno's
> condescension toward workers is intertwined with his racism & orientalism.]
> (52-3) *****
Hardly. The exact title of this excerpt is something like "Wilde sind nicht besser", literally, "wildmen are not better". The translation tends to mandarinize Adorno's prose, which is quite punchy in the original German.
Adorno's point is well-taken: subjectivity is a concrete reality, the product of empirical experience with the marketplace. One has to fully experience consumerism in order to really hate it; folks who haven't, like the Eastern bloc countries, are learning this harsh truth as we speak. They threw out their one-party states, assuming that since their own Governments lied to them, CNN must've been telling the truth; they were easy prey for neoliberalism, now weren't they? Adorno is also dead on target about the Third World revolutionary movements, which often imported a dogmatic Marxism from the West and blindly applied such, the mirror image of the comprador bourgeoisie they allegedly opposed. The PLA and Vietminh accomplished miracles, but they were structurally limited by where they were in the world-system to doing exactly what Adorno feared -- merely administering the expansion of capital, instead of challenging such. Nowadays, it's a global consumerism which holds the global proletariat in thrall, of course, but the principle is the same.
Adorno is also correct about the conservative tendencies of ordinary working folks, who, because they've been excluded from the consumer culture, are suckers for consumerism. I see this all the time as a union activist: officers in other AFT unions drive the nicest cars, dress smartly, hold conventions in ritzy resorts, etc. precisely because they were made to feel inadequate before the images of corporate power and omnipotence projected by the mass media, for their whole life. Class oppression is a deeply psychological thing.
Finally, why is Adorno's insistence that we shouldn't fetishize the capacity of non-Western peoples and cultures to resist capitalism racist? Or were you expecting the Chinese agrarian proletariat to organize Seattle temp workers as a pro bono deal?
-- Dennis