I agree that more aspects of life are affected or deformed by class difference and power than many think. But if you are claiming that someone who practices S/M therefore is an authoritarian personality, I'd have to disagree, and I think the empirical evidence to the contrary is abundant. The desire for sexual domination or submission does not necessarily lead to the desire for complete social order that--at least as I understand it--is characteristic of the authoritarian personality, i.e., the strong desire for societal norms to be enforced, intolerance of social difference, rage at ambiguity.
I am not trying to claim that consensual S/M equals political and social enlightenment; there are likely plenty of reactionaries who practice it, too, and like as not, some who do exhibit the classic traits of the authoritarian personality. But given that there are those who do not, you'll have to drop or qualify what you mean when you refer to the authoritarian personality here.
A reasonable restriction--although not one I would hold--of your thesis would be this: that consensual S/M is authoritarian urges or traits restricted to sexual behavior. What then? You say below that "knowing about how this dynamic operates in our daily lives may help to spur a rebellion against submitting to being ruled." But since engaging in consensual S/M is not mutually exclusive of an acknowledgement of and opposition to class-based domination, it simply amounts to something that is a by-product of class domination and yet does NOT reproduce it.
> But why do workers accept that arrangement when it is
> their labor which creates the social wealth?
Not all workers do accept this, and the conditions of organizing differ around the globe. I don't know the stats, but my impression is that unions are holding steady in the Eurozone, while they're been declining for a while in the US.
It's also not clear to me whether you need an understanding of social wealth, surplus labor, etc., to organize effectively or to be part of a labor movement. I'm not even sure if it's a necessary condition for an overhaul of the relations of production that would end class oppression.
> Perhaps they feel that dominance and submission are
> natural and that Lordship and Bondage have always been
> around and that maybe if they submit to the power of
> the bosses as they have submitted to the power of
> other social and political authorities in their lives, they
> will someday be able to work their way up in the
> hire-archy to become a boss/dominant themselves.
I don't dispute this in general, but I have to ask you this: --what contributes more to the ideology of unchanging human nature and domination today: on the one hand media basis, a torrent of propaganda from think tanks organized by the right, right demagogues--or, on the other hand, consensual S/M?
> I think that knowing about how this dynamic operates
> in our daily lives may help to spur a rebellion
> against submitting to being ruled and contribute to a
> consciousness desire for self-rule, grassroots
> democracy and an end to class dominated society.
I share that hope. But I think that labeling someone's intimate behavior as somehow an adverse consequence of class oppression is not helpful.
I see from your sig that you like Adorno, and so do I. I'm also sure that he personally would agree with you on this. Yet he did write that only those thoughts are true that do not know themselves, and that those who can situate utopia in bodily pleasure have a stable notion of truth--these are both in _Minima Moralia_, IIRC (and they're probably inexact because I don't have the book at hand). I take the first to mean that what is true does not exhaust itself in an identity, i.e., cannot be reduced to a self-same dogma, and I take the second to mean an awareness that whatever the right state of life might be it does not deny bodily fulfillment to be a necessary condition for grasping the truth, and therefore the injustice of current conditions. If you admit that, then you have to admit that people who are fulfilled practicing consensual S/M and who grasp the injustice of current conditions have something to contribute to the project of self-rule precisely because of what they have learned in their sex lifes.
Finally, if the distortions of capitalism are so pervasive that they reach into the bedroom, you have to acknowledge that they also touch on every mode of human interactions-- email lists on left politics and culture, for example. I can't rule out the possiblity that there is an adverserial tone to what I'm writing because preening for dominance is what I know and I can't get rid of it. But in so far as we ultimately look forward to the same ends, we can and should also try to assist each other. If noting how we might be different when we get there--if we get there--is divisive, let's drop it.
Curtiss