"Beyond Psychoanalysis, " by Lyndon LaRouche

[Michael Pugliese]

http://209.204.231.190/BeyondPsych/BeyondPsychoanalysis.htm
http://209.204.231.190/BeyondPsych/PsychologyofMassOrganizing.htm
>...9. The Psychology of Mass Organizing

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.
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