boddi satva wrote:
> If you're trying to argue that production does not betray a large
> degree of psycopathology, I have two words for you: "Hello Kitty".
>
> Look into it.
The whole point was to call attention to the implications of the fact of psychopathology for economic analysis. This fact is also relevant to the analysis of "production". The version of psychoanalysis developed by Melanie Klein and Wilfred Bion has been appropriated for this kind of analysis. The best examples are found in the writings of Elliott Jaques and Isabel Menzies Lyth. (Jaques, however, tignored the possibility that the capitalist organizational structure of the labour process might itself express serious psychopathology.) To analyse organizational forms in this way is to analyse them, as Menzies Lyth puts it, as "containers of anxiety." This approach, by the way, contradicts the premise of the documentary "The Corporation," that the pscyhopathology of the "corporation" is not found in the individuals within it, a premise Chomsky endorses in his segments.
The pscychopathology involved in and expressed by the organization of production can also vary in kind and degree. Though they are not, to my knowledge, based in any way on psychoanalysis (and are in important ways inconsistent with it), Michael Lind 's claims about differing kinds of American business culture lend themselves to interpretation in this way. The following passages are excerpted from an interview with Lind available at <http://www.buzzflash.com/ interviews/03/03/20_lind.html>.
"Despite its Western trappings, Texas has always been part of the South, which provided the ancestors of the majority of white Texans as well as the dominant culture into which newcomers of all races tend to be assimilated. The demographic center of gravity in Texas has always been East Texas, which is cotton plantation country, not cattle country.
"The major exception to the rule is Central Texas -- Austin, San Antonio, and the Hill Country -- where immigrant German pioneers with values similar to those of Germanic Americans in the Midwest and Great Plains were historically more progressive than the dominant Southern conservatives.”
"In 'Made in Texas,' I argue that Bush and Perot represent, respectively, the rival traditionalist and modernist philosophies of political economy in Texas and similar Southern and Western states. The low-investment, low-wage, low-tax, low-regulation approach favored by Texan conservatives is suited to the interests of the resource-owning oligarchy in a region with an economy based on primary production -- cotton, cattle, oil. The Texan modernists, like Perot, want a high-tech, middle-class society. Finding little support from the wealthy native oligarchy in Texas or the oligarchy's business partners in New York and other global financial centers, Texan modernists, including some with conservative social views, have usually been keen on enlisting the federal government -- including the military-industrial complex -- in the role of a public-sector 'venture capitalist' helping to catalyze economic growth in Texas.,"
"From the earliest years of the Republic, the Southern oligarchy feared urbanization and industrialization, because this would undermine their ability to control rural blacks (slave and free) as well as rural whites. They had no objection to machines and technology, they simply wanted it to be located elsewhere and used selectively in a way that did not undermine the South's hierarchical caste and class system."
"The Enron empire is a perfect example of crony capitalism [characteristic of 'the South's hierarchical caste and class system'], at its worst. Enron was as much a creation of Texas politics as it was a creator of Texas politicians like Bush. For their parts, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are not business executives, in the conventional sense. They are career politicians, whose business careers were arranged for them, and their fortunes bestowed on them, by their allies in the Texan crony capitalist oligarchy. Most of George W. Bush's personal wealth comes from a 'gift' to him by his partners in the Texas Rangers investment group."
"Many Washington insiders have assumed that Bush's religiosity is an act, designed to fool the religious right voters he needs to be re- elected. The evidence indicates, however, that his conversion to a hardline version of Protestant fundamentalism during a midlife crisis in his late thirties was genuine. Cynics in more secular parts of the country such as the Northeast and West Coast tend to assume that this kind of religious belief is limited to ignorant, lower-class people. But in Texas and other Southern States, born-again Christians are found in abundance in the country club and the office park as well as the country church and the trailer park."
"The Bush administration is not 'Confederate' in the sense of being racist. While many white conservatives may remain uncomfortable around black Americans, segregationist sentiments like those of Trent Lott and Strom Thurmond are fading. But the Southern tradition, contrary to popular belief, was never defined solely by racism (which was shared by most white Americans). Southern notions of military power, masculine and feminine honor, social hierarchy, religious fundamentalism and free-market fundamentalism -- notions sometimes appealing to nonwhite Southerners, too -- have always distinguished the American South."
"The military values and economic attitudes of the South both reflect the fact that its culture has been profoundly shaped by an aristocratic land-owning elite that considered military service more honorable than participation in trade or commerce. The martial tradition of upper-class Southerners, who have always been over- represented in the U.S. military, combined with the combativeness of Scots-Irish "yeomen," explains the intense martial spirit found in Texas and other Southern states. White Southern men are much more likely than other American groups to support Bush's policy toward Iraq. This is nothing new; from the quasi-war with France in the 1790s until the present, white Southerners have been the most bellicose, and white New Englanders the least bellicose, groups in the population. The difference goes back to the fact that New England was settled by middle-class Puritans with a civilian ethic who disapproved of violence as a way of settling personal or international disputes, while the South was settled by English aristocratic "cavaliers" and their imitators along with Scots-Irish frontiersmen given to feuds, like Andrew Jackson and the Hatfields and McCoys."
Ted