>[RB] ... Yet the Golden Rule seems realized in the free market, not
>contravened.
[CR] The actually existing free market, of course, presents the negation of the Golden Rule. Even as a teenager 40 years ago I had deep doubts about free enterprise, and decades of intimate experience with the corporate world have more than validated those suspicions. Basically I wasted years amassing eyewitness proof of truths I already knew intuitively as an adolescent, viz., that free enterprise is neither moral nor efficient nor necessary but a barrier to human progress.
Being an Emerson diehard, I am convinced that the vast majority of people have at least a spark of awareness that the Golden Rule and free market are not identical but polar opposites. Even that tiny spark, though, can trigger a revolution -- can avoid being doused by the vast streams of corporate propaganda that flood the post-Cold War world -- if people put more stock in their own intuitive understanding and less faith in establishment-sanctified experts.
As RWE himself memorably put it: "To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, — that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense .... A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. ... Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string."
>[RB] ... But are you saying we don't need
>an explanation of surplus value, the internal relations among the
>different forms of wealth, an understanding of the causes of boom and
>bust, etc? On the basis of what do you defend working class struggle?
>Simply that workers should enjoy a fair or just wage? What would the
>unscientific mind say that to be?
[CR] Heeding the first principle that the aim is to change the world not just understand it, I don't think any contemporary mass political movement can be energized by tough reading assignments, no matter how brilliant the texts. The foremost objective now must be to rekindle popular outrage toward the wealthy, something that's been missing from the popular culture since the Reagan years. F. Scott Fitzgerald has a wonderful line in The Great Gatsby about the rich being "careless people [who] smash up things and then retreat back into their money ... and let other people clean up the mess." What is that but a description of G. W. Bush in action? For the first time in decades, the public is primed to see the wealthy not as public benefactors but as self-indulgent monsters bent on social destruction. Right now I think it's essential to inflame that incipient outrage and not get too technical about the analysis offered.
>[RB] ... And visceral outrage has
>its problems. Have you studied the career of Georges Sorel?
No, but I've read Melville's "The Confidence-Man." I would guess the stories are similar :)
Carl
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