[From the Working Class Studies list <working-class-studies.lists.ysu.edu>. Is it apathy, or is it genuine confusion about what can be done, with GM racking up $10 billion in losses? At the Left Forum in NYC a few weeks ago, I asked Marsha Niemeijer of Labor Notes what they'd do; reading LN, it sounds like all they need is more union democracy and more militancy, but little substantive about how they'd deal with the auto crisis. She sorta ducked the question, saying she's not an ecnomist. If anyone here has some good ideas, I'd love to hear them.]
----- Original Message -----
From: <mailto:rzwarich at gmail.com>Zwarich Sent: Tuesday, March 28, 2006 5:15 PM
Subject: CLNews: Apathy - A Common Enemy
The essay copied below, entitled 'Apathy, The 'enemy' that threatens us all', was originally ....
Lots, except for the quoted below, deleted for brevity:
“Those in desperate circumstances may rise up in riot or revolt, but those who yet enjoy a degree of comfort will simply seek retreat from it all. Have another beer or wine cooler. Turn on the ballgame, or the soap opera, or the latest reality show. Pursue gratification of our carnal appetites. Look for happiness in food, and sex. Convince ourselves that our possessions can satisfy us. Try to believe that free indulgence of Desire can take the place of Honor, and that Justice and Freedom can exist nonetheless.” **************************************** I think a lot of apathy is caused by ignorance of real social relations under the rule of Capital. One doesn’t know what’s happening because one is always either being lied to by the authorities or better yet, told the class prejudiced truths of established authority or, when they look for alternatives, fed on empty abstractions by well-meaning moral mentors on the left, while having their pleasure seeking activities dumped on. I think we should encourage pleasure seeking and associate it with the increase in power which workers would get, if they also acted to organize at their places of employment for themselves.
Apathy is related to a “learned helplessness”which, I think, is hammered into most of us as we develop from childhood to adulthood. It’s not a conspiracy. Our social psychology is stamped by our upbringing. We are punished into giving our authority over to others who “know better than we do”, even if they may not. At the same time, we are taught that mutually beneficial and even pleasurable relationships of equal/mutual authority are most times *silly*, sometimes even evil, while top-down relationships of authority are *natural* and good and will be rewarded. In short, we are taught to give up control of ourselves to the already powerful and that relationships organized around solidarity are naive at best and will be punished at varying levels of severity and moral finger wagging. We learn helplessness by giving up our freedom and this is rewarded by various rights of passage into adulthood. The more we are punished and betrayed for engaging in acts of solidarity, love and caring, the more hopeless we feel. Again, this is not a conspiracy, it is the way most of us are socialized. By the time we ‘grow up” and get jobs, we’re in this state of mind and we think of it and the system we live in as products of “human nature”. To be sure, this conservative mind set explains a lot about the inertia we see around us and which is sometimes labelled, “apathy”.
If workers were told (okay, so a lot of “use” people are trying to do that) how the system worked and how THEY actually produce and reproduce it, they might be able to get angry enough to kick-start their inherent instinct for freedom as opposed to falling victim to the existing social psychology, which encourages obeisance to the current set of social relations, resignation and that sense of helplessness. Of course, I’m working on the assumption that human beings really do want to be free and that it is NOT human nature for them to desire to be chained and prodded by their designated masters.
>From what I can understand, that was Marx’s project. Perhaps, it’s yours too.
Like Marx and those too few others who have learned from works like CAPITAL and
other contemporary statistical evidence, one can show workers that they produce
the wealth and that it is appropriated by the owners of the means of
production. Get them angry about it. Show them that they are being taken for
lottery-fools. Tell them about power and how they’ve gotten it before. Show
them that when they have gotten together in the past, when they have organized,
they have had power and they’ve lost it because they don’t *act* by and for
themselves to develop organization. Power is what they lack and power is the
*safest* way to conquer their own FEAR of established authority. Show them that
their opposition is organized and that is why they have power over individual
workers. Taunt them with the fact that individual workers are weak in the face
of the organized power of the employing class–there is power in union.
Convince them that class-wide power is the key to making established authority
FEAR and RESPECT THEM. It is the key to the realization of their own freedom
from that undeserved sense of helplessness which surrounds the real, actually
existing producers of the world and wealth.
Regards, Mike B)
Read "The Perthian Brickburner": http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal
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