[lbo-talk] Moore's Sicko Analysis

Rakesh Bhandari bhandari at berkeley.edu
Sun Jul 22 15:32:27 PDT 2007


Haven't seen the movie yet, but do look forward to it.

B aka docile body wrote:


>And what's
>depressing is how this observation really does ring
>true. Emma Goldman wrote: "I insist that not the
>handful of parasites, but the mass itself is
>responsible for this horrible state of affairs. It
>clings to its masters, loves the whip, and is the
>first to cry Crucify! The moment a protesting voice is
>raised against the sacredness of capitalistic
>authority or any other decayed institution. Yet how
>long would authority and private property exist, if
>not for the willingness of the mass to become
>soldiers, policemen, jailers, and hangmen?"

Perhaps we do deceive ourselves about reality, but ignorance is not only willful. And let's leave aside willful ignorance about one's own willful ignorance. Bad infinity... willful ignorance about one's own willful ignorance about one's willful ignorance...

Yet reality also deceives us just as a straight stick submerged in water does objectively appear bent.

The wage contract appears to be an exchange. Workers appear to be paid their marginal product, the rate of profits seems only to reflect the advantage of substituting capital for labor in the production process. What Marx calls the trinity formula--capital/interest; land/rent; labor/wage--is a practically valid illusion, each factor paid according to the contribution it apparently makes to output.

Western Marxism could be defined as the search for the roots of subjective delusion and the abandonment of the science or dialectics of penetrating beyond objective illusions.

Yet sundered from a critical science of society, Western Marxism has too often been given to ultra leftism and contempt, a belief that revolution awaits only a fast approaching subjective purification giving way to contempt for the subjective unreadiness of the masses.

Of course facts alone are not the answer. There has to be a critical science of society, an attempt to understand why things are not the way they in fact often appear to be. And to that understanding there is no royal road.

But after May 68 there was revulsion at the aspiration for such theoretical knowledge as a wish for epistemological superiority over the untutored masses. Jacques Ranciere has perhaps most powerfully expressed the revolt against intellectualist dictatorship.

Rakesh



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