This should be abc. Mike is sitting in the USA which is currently whipping up a chauvinistic campaign against Iran, ostensibly because of its nuclear programme. Iran is attempting to assert its right to national independence from US/western hegemony. This independence is asserted in nationalist and religious terms and the right to have its own nuclear programme (which Mike and many of us might no doubt find objectionable and repressive). But the right to national self-determination surely implies that individual countries have the right to determine their own internal practices. It's surely for Iranians to sort these out amongst themselves?
***************************************** MB: The concept of reification is bound up with power relations. The human (the subject) *gives* power to an idea or a material thing (an object). For example, a group of humans might create a society, culture and wealth, yet, attribute all of those creations to a supernatural entity or even another human being...a human being invested with the power the orginal creators relinquish during time. Thus, the world is turned upside down, not only in the creators' heads, but in the concrete reality of social relations between humans e.g. masters and slaves; employers and employees.
Gods of any kind are an example of humans attributing their powers of creation to things and ultimately, within the context of the social relations of an historical moment, to the owners of these these things--quite often, some kind of priesthood.
Example: a bunch of Eskimos pray to their totem for a good catch before going out on the ocean to fish. When their catch is large, they give thanks to the totem and when it is small, they blame themselves for not being sufficiently pleasing to the totem. This is reified thinking: the attribution of human power to an inanimate object or abstraction.
The same thing happens everyday in modern industrial society when a person is seduced by ads into believing that s/he will be sexier if they buy this or that commodity e.g. a certain car or a certain body lotion. In reality, only humans can be sexy: cars and body lotions are reified abstractions which have been given human qualities by the priests of advertising.
In this manner, human beings are constantly trained, educated and indoctrinated to live within an upside world view. In our era, there is the all pervasive notion of the commodity, the creation of which is attributed to the owners of the means of the production or an abstract variation of same. An example of this kind of almost automatic attribution would be the sentence, "Mercedes Benz makes the best cars."
Each group of human beings within any particular historical era think their reified way of relating to reality is normal.
****************************************** RG:
Mike says he's for workers freeing themselves from class rule, Russell. In the USA here and now, that surely means distancing themselves from the establishment's anti-Iran campaign? Is it not clear in this regard that it's not particularly useful at the height of anti-Iran propaganda at home in the US to *equate* the problems of Iranian nationalism with those of American nationalism? It's not 'the same the whole world over': clearly Iran is nowhere near the threat to world peace that the US currently represents. Equating the two will only add fuel to the US chauvinist flames rather than build popular defence of Iranians' (and everyone else's) right to run their country as they see fit. Harping on about the backwardness of Iran is hardly likely to help build a movement in the US opposing US intervention there. ************ MB: Mike IS for workers freeing themselves from class rule, Russel. This ideological line your running on me reminds me a lot of the old CP dogma: "Criticism of the Soviet Union is objectively counter revolutionary." I reject the notion that advocating the abolition of wage labour serves the cause of imperialists. In fact, I think that becoming conscious of the servility involved in class rule is the best way for the workers of the world to free themselves from imperialism, among other things.
********************* RG: This argument is of course predicated on the notion that the USA and Iran are not both countries of a similar status (and representing an equal threat) on a world scale, or as some of us used to say: the World is divided into oppressed and oppressor nations. ************ MB: Believe me, I have no doubt that some ruling classes have more power in the world at large than other ruling classes. That does not mean that I think any class conscious worker should turn a blind eye to the idiocies of class rule anywhere on the planet.
And bourgeois intellectuals wonder why it is that the proletarians of the world are so clueless when it comes to their own class interests.....
Mike B)
An injury to one is an injury to all http://www.iww.org.au/
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