It is certainly not in the interest of "women" to be "heterosexual." :-)
At 6:07 PM +1100 3/15/01, Rob Schaap wrote:
> >>..sez Gallup <http://www.gallup.com/poll/releases/pr010221.asp>.
> >>Though women are also more intelligent than men, and more creative too.
> >>Doug
>>
>>It appears to me that it is not in the interest of "men" to be "male." :-)
>
>Au contraire - men can benefit from being thought aggressive and brave in a
>capitalist society. They're big pluses if life = competition, aren't they?
Competition is not in the interest of the proletariat, "male" or "female."
The problem of commodity fetishism is that it leads a good number of workers to think spontaneously like capitalists & petty producers, adopting their watchword "Apres moi le deluge!" Even overcoming this first obstacle -- competitive individualism -- is not enough to develop the political consciousness of the working class, however.
***** "Everyone agrees" that it is necessary to develop the political consciousness of the working class. The question is, how that is to be done and what is required to do it. The economic struggle merely "impels" the workers to realise the government's attitude towards the working class. Consequently, _however much we may try_ to "lend the economic, struggle itself a political character", _we shall never be able_ to develop the political consciousness of the workers (to the level of Social-Democratic political consciousness) by keeping within the framework of the economic struggle, for _that framework is too narrow_. The Martynov formula has some value for us, not because it illustrates Martynov's aptitude for confusing things, but because it pointedly expresses the basic error that all the Economists commit, namely, their conviction that it is possible to develop the class political consciousness of the workers _from within_, so to speak, from their economic struggle, i.e., by making this struggle the exclusive (or, at least, the main) starting-point, by making it the exclusive (or, at least, the main) basis. Such a view is radically wrong. Piqued by our polemics against them, the Economists refuse to ponder deeply over the origins of these disagreements, with the result that we simply cannot understand one another. It is as if we spoke in different tongues.
Class political consciousness can be brought to the workers _only from without_, that is, only from outside the economic struggle, from outside the sphere of relations between workers and employers. The sphere from which alone it is possible to obtain this knowledge is the sphere of relationships of _all_ classes and strata to the state and the government, the sphere of the interrelations between _all_ classes. For that reason, the reply to the question as to what must be done to bring political knowledge to the workers cannot be merely the answer with which, in the majority of cases, the practical workers, especially those inclined towards Economism, mostly content themselves, namely: "To go among the workers." To bring political knowledge to the _workers_ the Social Democrats must _go among all classes of the population_; they must dispatch units of their army _in all directions_.
(V. I. Lenin, _What Is To Be Done?_ at <http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/what-itd/ch03.htm#03_A>) *****
Yoshie