[lbo-talk] "Capitalists" and "the rich"

[bitch at pulpculture.org]

At 10:06 PM 6/5/2007, you wrote:

>So defined "capitalist" is a far better term than "the
>rich" (your alternative), an ahistorical category that
>fails to distinguish between Crassus and Carnegie, and
>is not anchored to any theory about the way society
>works or why "the rich" are, in any particular
>instance, rich.

boy, do i really hate the use of the word rich. i suspect ravi doesn't use 
it this way, but in common parlance, a lot of people seem to like to use it 
is that it's used in just an individualistic way. particular people -- the 
rich -- oppress other particular people, the poor. and the most important 
thing about that is, the speaker is almost invariably neither. people 
position themselves like golidlock's porridge, in between (and just right)

they also see it as about the amount of personal wealth or income someone 
has -- and so the term "rich".

and also, the whole anti-commie,redbaiting strain in our culture. people 
don't like saying "capitalist" or "capital" because they've been taught 
that it's a sign that you might be one of those commie pinko fagz. i had 
problems with misunderstandings around tis issue recently, so i wrote a 
post, "Mighty Quare Cunt" and "Immanent Critique" where I tried to 
concretize what I mean and how you'd use these tools in every day life -- 
after some questions and confusions made it clear that I had to straighten 
things out.

Speaking of which, did anyone ever read this article from Ellen Willis. 
It's quite wonderful and I'll have to take a stab at Jacoby some time.

A clip:

To this end, Jacoby distinguishes between two categories of utopianism: the 
dominant "blueprint" tradition, exemplified by Thomas More's eponymous no 
place or Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, and the dissident strain he 
calls "iconoclastic" utopianism, whose concern is challenging the limits of 
the existing social order and expanding the boundaries of imagination 
rather than planning the perfect society. While he does not simply write 
off the blueprinters­fussy as their details may be, he regards them as 
contributors to the utopian spirit and credits them with inspiring social 
reforms­his heroes are the iconoclasts, beginning with Ernst Bloch and his 
1918 The Spirit of Utopia, and including a gallery of anarchists, refusers, 
and mystics ranging from Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert 
Marcuse to Gustav Landauer and Martin Buber.

<...>

These questions are an obvious project for a third book, though it's one 
Jacoby is unlikely to write: he is temperamentally a refusenik, like the 
iconoclasts he lauds, more attuned to distant hoofbeats than to spoor on 
the ground that might reward analysis. It is perhaps this bias that has 
kept him from seeing one reason why the anti-utopian argument has become so 
entrenched: although there is perversity in it, and bad faith, there is 
also some truth. Jacoby is no fan of authoritarian communism, but he is 
wrong in thinking he can simply bracket that disaster or that there is 
nothing to be learned from it that might apply to utopian movements in 
general. The striking characteristic of communism was the radical 
disconnection between the social ideals it professed and the actual 
societies it produced. Because the contradiction could never be admitted, 
whole populations were forced to speak and act as if the lies of the regime 
were true. It is not surprising that victims or witnesses of this spectacle 
would distrust utopians. Who could tell what even the most steadfast 
anti-Stalinists might do if they actually gained some power? Who could give 
credence to phrases like "workers' control" or "women's emancipation" when 
they had come to mean anything but? Jacoby persuasively analyzes 1984 to 
show that it was not meant as an anti-socialist tract, yet he never 
mentions the attacks on the misuse of language that made Orwell's name into 
an adjective.

Communism was corrupted by a scientific (or more accurately, scientistic) 
theory of history that cast opponents as expendable, a theory of class that 
dismissed bourgeois democratic liberties as merely a mask for capitalist 
exploitation, and a revolutionary practice that allowed a minority to 
impose dictatorship. Similar tropes made their way into the sixties' 
movements, in, for instance, the argument that oppressors should not have 
free speech or that the American people were the problem, not the solution, 
and the proper function of American radicals was to support third world 
anti-imperialism by any means necessary, including violence. A milder form 
of authoritarianism, which owed less to Marxism than to a peculiarly 
American quasi-religious moralism, disfigured the counterculture and the 
women's movement. If the original point of these movements was to promote 
the pursuit of happiness, too often the emphasis shifted to proclaiming 
one's own superior enlightenment and contempt for those who refused to be 
liberated; indeed, liberation had a tendency to become prescriptive, so 
that freedom to reject the trappings of middle-class consumerism, or not to 
marry, or to be a lesbian was repackaged as a moral obligation and a litmus 
test of one's radicalism or feminism. Just as communism discredited 
utopianism for several generations of Europeans, the antics of 
countercultural moralists fed America's conservative reaction.


the rest:
http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=190


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