"Natural Depravity" Re: unions

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

At 7:00 PM -0400 8/14/02, Ted Winslow wrote:
>It follows from all this, by the way, that no "rational" person 
>would be a capitalist in Marx's sense.  The content of the will that 
>defines such a person (M-C-M') is radically inconsistent with 
>rational content ("love" and "beauty").  Moreover, the rationality 
>of the will's ends is necessarily bound up with the rationality of 
>its means i.e. irrationality in the ends will necessarily be 
>associated with some degree of irrationality in the means, including 
>irrationality in the thinking these means embody.  As is true of 
>both the master and the slave in Hegel, both the capitalist and the 
>wage worker embody the same in-itself.  What distinguishes them is 
>the extent to which positive self-development is possible from 
>within the particular form of human self-estrangement each 
>represents.
>
>If this interpretation is correct,  Marx's ideas are inconsistent 
>with the treatment of capitalist ends and means as fully rational. 
>This does not mean these ends and means are completely irrational 
>(mistaken either/or thinking of this kind is, in fact, 
>characteristic of the kind of irrationality dominant in capitalism); 
>irrationality is mixed up with rationality (irrationality, according 
>to Marx, being, for instance, greater in the subjectivity dominant 
>in early mercantile than in that dominant in mature industrial 
>capitalism).  This means that in evaluating capitalist ideas about 
>how best to organize the labour process, how to treat state 
>regulation, etc. some allowance must be made for irrationality as 
>well as rationality (in contrast to the usual approach of treating 
>capital as fully instrumentally rational).

Herman Melville, _Billy Budd_:

*****   But the thing which in eminent instances signalizes so 
exceptional a nature is this: though the man's even temper and 
discreet bearing would seem to intimate a mind peculiarly subject to 
the law of reason, not the less in his heart he would seem to riot in 
complete exemption from that law, having apparently little to do with 
reason further than to employ it as an ambidexter implement for 
effecting the irrational. That is to say: Toward the accomplishment 
of an aim which in wantonness of malignity would seem to partake of 
the insane, he will direct a cool judgement sagacious and sound.

These men are true madmen, and of the most dangerous sort, for their 
lunacy is not continuous but occasional, evoked by some special 
object; it is probably secretive, which is as much to say it is 
self-contained, so that when moreover, most active, it is to the 
average mind not distinguishable from sanity, and for the reason 
above suggested that whatever its aims may be--and the aim is never 
declared--the method and the outward proceeding are always perfectly 
rational.

<http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/bb/Chapter11.html>   *****
-- 
Yoshie

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