> The elimination of the socialist "meta-narrative" has resulted in the
> castration of the left. Even the officially socialist,
> social-democratic and labor parties are screaming, "TINA!" to the
> proletariat. Now, with its hip, new, post-modern ways, the left has
> become a mass of atomised, individualistic, liberals, bouncing around
> in submissive, reformist ways under the domination of Capital,
afraid
> that its own dreams might turn into nightmare re-runs of Auschwitz or
> the Gulag.
>
-------------------
Methinks at least part of this is self-inflicted hen-pecking and analytical circular firing squads; one person's constructive proposals for confronting various fissures in capitalist societies is another person's reformist wankery and only overthrowing everything at once in some sort of big bang is worthy of some sort of allegiance. So we traverse something akin to one of Escher's drawings in our leftier than thou rituals.......... *******************************
Agreed. Sectarian "hen-pecking" has also contributed to left-wing weakness. The strength of the working class movement can be measured pretty accurately by the fights it wins or loses in the class struggle over the social product of its labour e.g. now with Social Security or in the past over unemployment insurance and the eight hour day and so on.
My point was that when the most advanced elements of our class abandon the goal of abolishing capitalist social relations (aka the wage system) then, the despair of atomized liberalism sets in and capital takes more and more...
"Generally, the values of all commodities are only realized by the compensation of the continuously changing market prices, springing from the continuous fluctuations of demand and supply. On the basis of the present system labour is only a commodity like others. It must, therefore, pass through the same fluctuations to fetch an average price corresponding to its value.
"It would be absurd to treat it on the one hand as a commodity, and to want on the other hand to exempt it from the laws which regulate the prices of commodities. The slave receives a permanent and fixed amount of maintenance; the wage-labourer does not. He must try to get a rise of wages in the one instance, if only to compensate for a fall of wages in the other. If he resigned himself to accept the will, the dictates of the capitalist as a permanent economical law, he would share in all the miseries of the slave, without the security of the slave."
Marx, "Value, Price and Profit"
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1865/value-price-profit/ch03.htm
Best, Mike B)
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