I do assume with ``Milton... that the `ordinary person,' from his/her isolated position, can (or should be able to) make correct abstract judgments...'' because that's the basic premise of enlightenment democracy and good government absolutely depends on such public judgments.
When that public judgment is constantly thwarted by systemic lying and deceit as the principle means of political rule, then there is something drastically wrong with government and even more so with those who say they believe these lies, and who vote for and then celebrate such rulers. Social atomization is no excuse and neither are the purported difficulties of living and thinking clearly under the massed trivia of consumer capitalist America.
``I don't see the grounds for making this demand...''
In this day and age, after literally decades of official lying and disclosures, it is no excuse to claim `we had no idea', `who knew?' These pretenses are as unconvincing as the good Germans who `had no idea.'
As the old saying goes, fool me once shame on you. Fool me twice shame on me.
I am not sure I understand how it is reactionary to demand that people be held to account for government actions that we are told through endless popularity polls, they apparently celebrate with complete abandon.
I assume you consider my assessment and demands reactionary because these assume people are responsible for the society they inhabit, when we all know that it is the evil capitalist system itself that is at fault.
The point to assigning civic responsibility to people en mass, makes it potentially possible to overthrow the capitalist system, because without mass public judgments and consequent support, there will be no such overthrow. So, any mass reform movement has a requirement a priori that people be held accountable for the lives they lead, specifically in order to empower them to change the system under which they live. The alternative as far as I can see, is to follow a few grim faced cadres---and we all know where that leads, straight to the heart of business as usual. The Bush regime is exactly that sort of grim faced crowd.
I can't see any other way to `generate the collective determination' to change without reminding people they have political duties to society which depend precisely on their making enlightened and abstract public judgments and carrying out the political and economic implications of those judgments.
There are more concrete reasons to have to depend on developing these mass public abstract judgments, since our society is much more homogeneous than it was even in the post-WWII period.
In the classical Marxist view, class antagonism was supposed to be the historically created engine of revolution. But what if, as now, class interests and identification is no longer a collectively held identity, but has become some amorphous and abstract theme that is endlessly criss-crossed with other more heartfelt identifications and concrete interests?
We say, workers, but who isn't a worker? It is a social anathema to say you don't work for a living. Sure we all work. But none of us look like we stepped out of a Kathy Kolowitz drawing.
Then there is the division of blue collar work and white collar work, but thanks to three decades of de-industrialization there are fewer and fewer blue collar workers around identifiable as such. Hell I am probably one of a very few on this list who actually does blue collar work. Almost everybody else is a white collar worker of some sort.
Then it is said, well its all of us against the capitalists. But who isn't at least an honorary capitalist or wannabe?---maybe through owning an inherited house, renting out a small apartment complex, having some money in stocks and bonds, or an investment in land or property somewhere they don't live?
Sure, it's all about the relation to the means of production, but nobody produces anything any more but paper, remember? In a world where workers are producing paper and capitalist are producing paper and the vast managerial class is producing paper on others who produce paper, the material relationships of means to production of paper get mighty murky, neigh on abstract to say the least.
Let me illustrate this confusion of interests and roles and their dissolution as concrete determinants of people. My landlord is an immigrant Chinese cook who was a farmer in China. Do I address him as a farmer, a restaurant worker, or the rentier, my landlord? He himself can't decide and I don't bother. He works around the place like a hired farm hand on his days off, while his Americanized sons pretend rather unconvincingly to be property owners, collect the rent, and run the books. But they are hardly the haute bourgeoisie oppressor, since one is a free lance photo-journalist and the other is still in state college.
I got some insight into a traditional class society from watching my Chinese landlord interact with one of my Chinese neighbors. The neighbor was straight from Beijing, professional class engineer, and by heritage part of the upper class. They barely understood each other because of the difference between Cantonese and Mandarin. The engineer was tall, very flat faced with mongol features like the northern elite he was. Meanwhile the landlord was short, squat, heavy build with round faced features like the southern farmer he was. When the engineer addressed the landlord he rarely used the landlord's name. When the farmer now landlord addressed the engineer, he almost always said Mister Liu. The difference shown to Mister Liu by Mister Yee, the landlord was remarkable. I almost expected Mister Yee to bow to Mister Liu. On the other hand, the landlord got the engineer his first job in the US, as a cook! The great American racialized economic equalizer is evidently that all Chinese begin life as cooks.
In the US, with the dissolving of distinct socially identifiable economic classes, the cultural dissolution of various ethnic and racial minorities, the blending together of regional distinctions, erasures of urban-rural differences, and the broad based socio-economic homogenization of people into a mass, many of the political economy's antagonisms that should be driving social and economic change and also form the basis for collective determinations for change, have been thwarted and dissembled. Without a doubt this is the primary success of the US system. It is also a centrally planned and maintained reactionary tactic of the US political economy as a mass consumer society.
Therefore, from all of the above, I consider that going back to the enlightenment ideal of developing an educated and committed mass of people, performing exactly those theoretical and rational abstractions and judgments about their lives and society, has to be the primary means to any collective determination to change.
It seems to me a consummate irony that as the vast bulk of people in the US, do have their most dire material needs met in some haphazard way or another, that a freedom from want is also an unexpected vulnerability to fall pray to any or all other, completely immaterial ideologically configured needs and wants. And, that both the capitalist consumer status quo as well as all ideological systems that compete with and against it can on longer depend on the people to follow their self-identified material interest, but must instead depend on some combination of illusion, persuasion, coercion and raw fabrication of those interests. And hence we return to the ever illusive self-sufficiency of fraudulant or manufactured illusions of interest.
Chuck Grimes