Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> Gordon Fitch wrote:
>
> >Doug Henwood:
> >> I remember a quote from Durenmatt's play The Physicists, which I read
> >> in high school German class long ago, which runs something like:
> >> "Every attempt by an individual to solve that which concerns all must
> >> fail."
> >
> >Hence, every attempt to solve that which concerns all must
> >fail, since it would have to start with one individual or
> >another -- unless you postulate some kind of group mind,
> >which seems rather in the right-wing bag.
>
> No, that's not what it means at all. I pressed it into service to say
> that there's no way that individual consumption practices can
> extricate oneself from an exploitative society. You can use free
> software, but you've got to run it on machines made by evil large
> corporations. You can shun meat and spare animals, but what about the
> migrant workers who pick the cucumbers?
>
> One of my favorite little factoids: organic produce requires more
> stoop labor than the ordinary kind. So is it more "moral" to eat
> organic food?
>
> Doug
We need to go back to an earler thread Gordon introduced, when he queried:
"What can we prove, scientifically speaking, about the degree to which humans are necessarily social animals, and the degree to which they are individuals, as dictated by their _material_ characteristics?"
None of the answers satisfied Gordon, primarily because the very questoin denies the possibility of an answer. We have to start from the premise of actual individuals as we find them, that is already always caught up in a complex of social relations, apart from which they have no existence as humans.
And from this viewpoint, it is simply incoherent to say that every action "would have to start with one individual or another?" All actions (all "individual" thoughts) emerge from an ensemble of social relations and within such an ensemble. For the most vigorous attempt (glorious but a failure) to conceive of action or thought as emerging from an "individual," see in Book VIII of _Paradise Lost_ Adam's account (as he speaks to the seraph, Raphael) of his own creation.
Nothing, ever, begins with an individual. Thought independent and prior to language exists (and is the basis for thought in language), but social thought can only come into being in language, and language occurs only within social relations (Milton to the contrary).
Carrol