Milton the Anarchist Re: "post-leftism"

Tahir Wood twood at uwc.ac.za
Thu Aug 22 04:05:00 PDT 2002


Date: Tue, 20 Aug 2002 23:57:49 -0700 (PDT) From: "Brian O. Sheppard x349393" <bsheppard at bari.iww.org> Subject: Re: Milton the Anarchist Re: "post-leftism" As another writer put it: "The worker always has the right to leave his employer, but has he the means to doso? No, he does it in order to sell himself to another employer. He is driven to it by the same hunger which forces him to sell himself to the firstemployer. Thus the worker's liberty . . . is only a theoretical freedom, lacking any means for its possible realisation, and consequently it is only a fictitious liberty, an utter falsehood. The truth is that the whole life of the worker is simply a continuous and dismaying succession. of terms of serfdom -- voluntary from the juridical point of view but compulsory from an economic sense -- broken up by momentarily brief interludes of freedom accompanied by starvation; in other words, it is real slavery."

Again, there are exceptions: we have some welfare measures in the US (always under attack and shrinking daily) and we have the kindness of friends and strangers. But that's about it.

Brian

Forgive me for coming in a little late on this one and maybe repeating some stuff, but I think there is something politically important here that I would like to comment on. I think it is important to retain the distinction between coercion and consent under capitalism. Part of the way capitalism reproduces itself is through 'manufacturing consent'. To ignore this is to ignore the very important role of ideology under capitalism. I would say the worker is compelled rather than coerced to work. There could never be pure coercion under capitalism. To make a mistake here seems to me to seriously misunderstand capitalism and its differences to other modes of production and other hsitorical epochs. The formal freedom that exists under capitalism is real - 'formal' here does not equate to 'illusory' or something similar. If the worker is not posited as 'free' and does not accept and internalise the notion of his/her own freedom it would not be capitalism but something else. Capita! li! sm posits the right of each to struggle for personal happiness within the framework of law; the demand for the rule of law is inseperable from capitalism's history. But what capitalism does is to put the subject between a rock and a hard place, between law as a 'rational' social force on the one hand and the 'natural' conditions of social labour on the other (hunger, the need to reproduce etc.) In other words it creates the 'private life', the world of personal choice, subject only to these constraints, which are posited as either rational or natural. Thus there is a real freedom, freedom from the fiat that used to be expressed through retainers, press gangs, etc., and an equality before the law. Thus very importantly the unfreedom that is experienced by the worker is seen as something that capital can avoid all responsibility for, i.e. it is a product of either the force of reason itself or the force of nature. That is why someone who opposes capitalist arrangements can so ! ea! sily be portrayed as unsound in mind according to its criterion of what is natural. Now it seems to me that the dialectic involved here is essential to the possibility of revolution, which is of course our only reason for being interested in these things. The contradiction between the received definition, which concerns freedom and equality, MUST be contradicted by the experience of inequality and unfreedom, which I referred to earlier as compulsion. Thus capitalism relies on the very notions which are its own undoing, freedom and equality. This contradiction is inherent in capitalism; it cannot be eradicated, it can only be managed. If capitalism could be fully coercive and reliant on slavery it would not have the possiblity of communism within it. Feudalism, for example, does not offer the possibility of communism in the way that capitalism does, in my opinion. Tahir



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