Miles Jackson wrote:
>
>
> Nonhierarchical social arrangements are relatively common in human
> societies; people just take them for granted. (e.g., peer groups,
> many family relationships, food co-ops, my local bike repair
> collective, most open source software projects, lots of bands,
> just to draw a few examples from our own society.)
>
> What's natural is the human capacity to create both hierarchical and
> nonhierarchical social relations. What pushes us one way or the
> other is a sociopolitical question.
Also -- usually (as in this thread) hierarchy is automatically equated with hierarchies of _power_. And unequal distributions of power can and usually (not always) do constitute a threat to the well being of those 'lower' in the hierarchy. I'm not sure that all these equations hold. This seems to be part of what Travis has in mind:
T Fast wrote:
> And the consequences for the individuals participating in these very
> different hierarchical organizations should not be conflated simply because
> they can all be shown to have a hierarchical structure.
>
> Travis
Maria's point yesterday is important in this context.
Maria Gilmore wrote:
>
> As I see it, American society has huge "dependency" issues, unlike other
> rich capitalist countries in Europe. I think that's one very big reason we
> don't have a guaranteed income, or national health care. We USers are
> throughly indoctrinated to believe that to be in any way dependent on others
> is the ultimate horror. Europeans in general don't seem to feel that way,
> rather, they accept that dependency is a normal part of life...we are
> dependent when we are very young and again very old, or infirm, and anyway,
> we are all interdependent thruout our lives. How can you be in favor of a
> guaranteed income yet make not being "dependent" on others a point of great
> pride? What is so intrinsically admirable about hyper-individualism?
We had a long but not very satisfactory discussion of "dependency back in February of 2001. The following post from Yoshie summarizes some of the main points at issue at the time.
Sat, 17 Feb 2001 17:16 Yoshie Furuhashi
Carrol: > > Exactly -- that is what the book is about -- >> how
mansfield park (the place) crushes, poisons, >> corrupts the sin qua
non of human as opposed >> to merely animal life, the mutual dependency
>> which defines us as human. >> Carrol
>Bzzzt. Sorry, no. But we do have lovely parting gifts. _Mansfield Park_ >transcodes the Burkean idea of political transformation as _conservation_ >into a family melodrama about marriage and estate improvement. Fanny and >Edmund, the two most noxious prudes in the novel, are held up as the models >of sense and reason (i.e. progress), while everyone who proceeds according >to the idea of liberal (secular) self-interest is represented as stupid and >indolent (the lady Bertram), dogmatically stern (Thomas Bertram elder), >libertine (Thomas the younger), impudent (Maria Bertram) or just cynical >(Mary and Henry Crawford).
>". . . mutual dependency that makes us human"? How Harold Bloom can you get? >Christian
The point that Marxists should get from _Mansfield Park_ is that the Crawfords and Fanny Price/Edmund Bertram, liberalism and conservatism, are evil dialectical twins. Fanny Price, however, has no better choice -- certainly no socialist choice -- in that she is a woman of the early nineteenth century, unlike us. More than any other work by Jane Austen, _Mansfield Park_ allows us to see the horrors of dependence for a poor woman under capitalism, making clear that horrors lie _not_ in dependence as such _but_ in the nature of dependence shaped by sexism & class oppression; Austen could not see any alternative to Fanny's choice -- hence the novel's melancholy tone. (Edward Said says that Austen neglects to take a critical look at the British Empire, though she does make clear that Mansfield Park is dependent upon the plantations in Antigua.) One can't anachronistically fault the novel for not being a socialist & dependency-theorist treatise ahead of time, though. That Austen, while embracing the conservative order, nonetheless did not shy away from portraying in telling details the problems of capitalist society in _Mansfield Park_ is what is valuable for us. Oftentimes, conservatives in the past were better able to see the problems of capitalism & the ideology of individualism it entails than liberals. Today, we have no "conservative" in the true sense of the word, for everyone is committed to "improvement" -- environmentalist sentiments found here and there notwithstanding.
The point that Rob & Carrol have made is that capitalism & sexism make the biologically & socially necessary interdependence of human beings poisonous. [clip]
Human beings will perish if we are to try to live like Rousseau's savages who only existed in his heuristic state of nature.- Yoshie
See: http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/2001/2001-February/002924.html
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In any case, hierarchy need not be identified with the power structures of class societies. And to suggest that numerous kinds of hierarchy will always be with us is by no means the same as saying we must always suffer exploitation and oppression.
Carrol