On Mon, 20 Jan 2003 13:42:17 -0500 Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com>
writes:
> Jim Farmelant wrote:
>
> > Even
> >Judis in his Buckley bio, details Buckley's failed effort to write
> >a book offering a coherent philosophy for the right. That effort
> >failed because Buckley simply was lacking in any such coherent
> >philosophy.
>
> One of his triumphs as an ideologue was to finesse the right-wing
> split between the free marketeers and the traditionalists. Most
> people on the right don't like to talk about how capitalism
> undermines Trad Vals - and how most religions find callousness
> towards the poor and the commodification of everything to be
> problematic, even sinful. Buckley managed to hold both camps
> together
> (as Reagan did). Writing that book would have required Bill to
> explore the contradictions, so it's no wonder he never wrote it.
The problem of course if that Buckley's finessing of the split between the free marketeers and the traditionalists was just that, simply a finessing of a fundamental contradiction. As the Bearded One put it:
"The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his "natural superiors", and has left no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous "cash payment". It has drowned out the most heavenly ecstacies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom -- Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation."
"The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers."
"The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation into a mere money relation."
And the Bearded One goes on to write:
"The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind."
Of course some of the more profound thinkers of the right have been cognizant of this contradictiion between capitalism and traditional values, but none of them as far I can tell has come close to resolving it.
Jim F.
>
> Doug
>
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