BACK (A Social Approach to Individual Psychology)
In political mass organizing, the socialist propagandist and individual organizer in effect strips away a critical aspect of the persona of the worker, and so momentarily implicitly reduces that worker to the wretched state of a "little me." The general possibility of that negative aspect of mass-organizing work varies in effect to the extent that the practical habits of the workers' bourgeois ideology have ceased to work. Trade-union forms, for example, have ceased to provide efficient means within themselves for securing the worker the circumstances which coincide with his bourgeoisified illusions. More generally, depression conditions, unpopular wars, etc., have undermined the authority of those apparent "fixed laws" which correspond to the workers' bourgeois-ideological "respect for law." The anxiety which the workers have experienced through the failure of acts corresponding to their bourgeoisified ego-ideal has weakened their sense of identity (passivity) and has undermined the authority of the bourgeois-ideological ego-ideals. These are circumstances in which aspects of the persona may be more readily stripped away.
Stripping away such elements of the persona, by itself, obviously does not produce socialist impulses in workers. Quite the opposite; it produces an alternation between pathetic passivity and wild, imbecilic heteronomic rage. Oppressive conditions, etc., absolutely do not make workers class-conscious, revolutionary, etc. Nor could stripping away the persona in itself accomplish this.
Socialist organizing is directed to the mobilization of workers around a new sense of social identity replacing the "little me," a new sense of identity which the propagandist and organizer must synthesize. What is to be done is, in effect, to realize to the extent possible the possibility for reconstructing an actually human individual from an adult accultured by capitalist society. The partial stripping away of the persona is at best merely a precondition for the positive work; moreover, this stripping-away should be carried out only to the extent that the debridement is accompanied by the beginnings of a new sense of social identity in the worker. This new sense of social identity is an approximation of the creative identity.
The object of organizing is to replace the old persona-determining ego-ideals with new criteria, formally identifiable by the concepts of class-for-itself and of socialist expanded reproduction. This transformation cannot be accomplished by a mere pedagogical relationship to the workers involved in this program of personal reconstruction. The advancement of the process depends upon the individual's acting in such a way as to establish such criteria through acts which approximate the realization of class-for-itself and expanded reproduction. The new qualities of the worker's identity can be developed only as his developing human powers for actualizing those qualities in the outer world.
The solution to this apparent difficulty appears in the understanding of the point that all abstract (formal) ideas, to the extent they reflect or are susceptible of actuality, are nothing but concentrated social relations. In this view of the tasks of mass organizing, the two conceptions, class-for-itself and socialist expanded reproduction, reduce to a single process-conception as follows.
The immediate practical basis for developing rudiments of the class- for-itself conception in the worker is that otherwise identified by the term motion. The socialist cadre induces the scintilla of a change in the individual worker, who replicates that by inducing a scintilla of change in other workers. The spread of this process, under the conditions that the affected individual workers are being brought together to "reenforce" the tendency by unifying their forces on this basis, is the deliberate determination of a movement of social forces corresponding in principle to a mass-strike process. The psychodynamics of the relationships among workers in this process are those of love (e.g., "comradeship"); the individual realizes his inner identity by positive developments in the conceptual powers of other workers, and depends upon them in turn, for development of his conceptual powers. These are not abstract conceptions as such, but sensuous conceptions, in the sense that the conceptions in themselves imply and demand appropriate collective action and represent the potential basis for common such actions otherwise impossible.
In this process, up to a certain point, the process of organizing a broader force is itself the sensuous activity which feeds the development as a whole. The elementary laws of mental life demand superseding that condition. Since the failure to execute an appropriate collective act destroys the will and weakens the conceptions associated with new social identity, the organizing process under capitalism must become the basis for a strike process. The conception must be sensuously actualized.
Once we consider the sensuous acts corresponding to this mass-strike organizing process, the importance of the notion of Freedom/Necessity in this process becomes obvious. What is the conception that properly demands actuality? Essentially, the mass must act to realize the necessary acts corresponding to the potentiality of its actual powers. The mere impulse to "free" itself from the objective chains of capitalist oppression, which would ordinarily be an irresponsible, suicidal act, represents only the pathetic notion of the new creativity of the worker's identity. Freedom must be realized as a scientifically known means for developing the powers to overthrow existing, oppressive laws.
The practical point for the socialist cadres is identified by noting the bourgeois- ideological idiocy of the typical members of Progressive Labor, International- Socialists, etc., which prompts them to limit their efforts to exciting the workers to greater militancy around linear slogan-impulses. If one instructs the workers that militancy is what is wanted, then how can one restrain the militant group of isolated workers from undertaking almost any sort of premature, futile, heteronomic act of suicidal desperation? The idea of mass-organizing cannot be a simple linear notion of freedom; it must be introduced and constantly reestablished as a concept embracing Freedom/Necessity, such that the criteria of the mass-act are presented as subsumed by the notion of Freedom and vice versa.
Already, we have identified a rudimentary approximation of the tasks of organizing. We have eliminated the problem of the pathetic monad- self by giving the worker the sensuous realization of the real inner self of his creative life. This is socially located (and thus reflected) for him, to become an actuality, through his activity of reciprocally advancing the conceptual grasp of the situation with a growing number of workers. Instead of "little me," as a fixed monad, the worker begins to locate his inner self as the socially-reflected self-perfecting activity of increasing his mental-sensuous powers. In practice, he begins to realize this advancement in his mental and social life by working in concert with socialist cadres to effect the rudiments of similar changes in other workers.
The instant this begins to occur, the worker becomes virtually class- conscious and revolutionary. The instant he breaks with the notion of his inner self as a monad-like thing, he has also broken with the "organic" epistemological outlook on the world around him as a world of fixed laws. He is open to judging possible ways of effecting even sweeping changes in the way society is organized, the way "things are done."
The change which occurs in this way is efficiently illustrated by reviewing the bourgeois myth that the axiomatic principle of individual human behavior is "individual material greed." It should be obvious that the person who accepts such a false axiom is giving prima facie evidence of his own state of internal mental life; he obviously has a bourgeois character-structure, with its reductionist monad- persona dynamics and its cohering reductionist outlook on the universe of the monad's experience. This pathetic element of the worker's usual bourgeois character-structure is at the same time an axiomatic basis for rationalization of the inevitability and permanence of capitalist control of the productive forces. A society of individual-greed optimizing monads could only be a pluralistic parody of a capitalist form!* "Human nature will never change." "I'm minding my own business." "We can take care of our own interests by ourselves without outside interference." "That's his problem; I've got to get mine where I can." "You couldn't understand, since you're not black and not a woman." "Local control." These and similar prima facie evidence of a bourgeois character structure more or less directly indicate the reasons why no socialist transformation could occur without an accompanying and preceding destruction of the personality characteristics reflected by such alienated, anti- human rubbish as these commonplace slogans. Indeed, precisely as the cynical critics of socialism charge, to have socialism it is first necessary to "change human nature," or, more exactly, to conquer the bestiality of the bourgeois character-structure. <snip>