Oh, you can't have a class analysis without a psychology. That's a logical impossibility. A class analysis explains human behavior by saying that class affects the beliefs and desires, the psychology, that produces collective action. It couldn't be anything else. I suppose that very hypothetically you might say that talk of mental states motivating action is superfluous and you can just go from class interest to behavior, but good luck making that out, and why would you want to anyway?
The question then is what psychology. If you assume that people act directly on their material interests, you will get the sort of psychology that informs rational choice theory and neoclassical economics, on which people are simple wealth-maximizers. You can have your imaginary person be called "the proletariat" or "the bourgeoisie," and then you get mechanical materialism.
While this way of talking has a certain limited utility, it is deeply and importantly false. Old Whiskers knew better. He knew he needed a deeper psychology although he did not know how to provide one. In some ways the theory of ideology and the theory of commodity fetishism are partial, though true and necessary, stopgaps for a full-fledged psychology.
They are introduced to explain the disconnect between class interest and collective behavior, which, like all behavior, is necessarily manifested through the actions of individuals. The theories can't be dispensed with, but they don't fully and adequately account for how the imputed class interests do and don't produced observable behavior, collective and individual.
I agree with that Doug said about most good psychology being social and dynamic -- in fact the only psychology that comes to mind that isn't is the rat choice psych that underlies neoclassical economics and mechanical materialism.
And I know that Carrol actually doesn't believe what he says he about psychology being a bad thing for class analysis, because he wrote me, during our recent discussion of whether gay rights deserved the attention of people concerned with class oppression, that he agreed with everything I said a while ago because with my psychological account of class as racialized, gendered, and heterosexed. Now, maybe he doesn't consider that sort of thing to be psychology. OK, whatever. But that sort of thing, which is exactly what Nietzsche has in boatloads, is what I think historical materialism needs lots more of.
--- Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
>
>
> andie nachgeborenen wrote:
> >
> > Basically N.'s fans
> > > are saying that N. discovers and deals with
> > > important issues that are
> > > "beyond" class analysis.
> >
> > Is that what I said? No, I said that Nietzsche has
> a
> > form of class analysis that integrates psychology
> into
> > the story in a way that historical materialists
> would
> > learn from.
>
> I'll come back to this sometime in the next year (I
> hope), but let
> state without much defense or explanation now a
> tentative response: A
> class analysis which incorporates psychology can
> only lead to identity
> politics in their most useless form; it transforms
> class from a social
> relation to a mechanical and static conditon which
> shapes individual
> psychologies. This won't do -- but I think it is a
> place to start from.
>
> Carrol
>
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