[lbo-talk] Is Obama Running Interference to ProtectBankers' Pay?

[Philip Pilkington]

> Look at this from a practical point of view: what is important is the
> social transformation that social movements can generate, not the mental
> state of the people involved.  --Thought experiment: imagine that all the
> civil rights leaders in the 1950s were robots, and they were programmed to
> do all the things they did.  The social results of the movement would have
> been the same, even though none of the leaders were motivated and guided by
> moral/ethical principles.  A social movement is an emergent property of
> social interactions; it is not simply the product of individual
> psychological characteristics (beliefs, values, opinions).  Thus speculating
> on the motives of people involved in social movements is irrelevant.  Some
> could be in it because of moral principles, others because of conformity
> pressure, others because of a crush on the hot guy in the Che t-shirt.  It
> doesn't really matter why they're part of the movement, because a social
> movement's impact is the result of the emergent properties of the social
> movement itself; it is not simply the result of the individual psychological
> characteristics of the individuals involved.
>
> Miles
>

First of all there's nothing "practical" about imagining that civil rights
leaders were robots, I mean really... what the fuck? Its a completely
pointless (definition: the opposite of practical) thought-experiment and its
sort of weird. One point I will make is that its based on a
Lutheran/Protestant outlook. Now what was that the Spirit of... hmmm...
trying to think here... oh yeah, it was basis of The Protestant Ethic which
was undoubtedly involved in the historic development of contemporary
capitalism as well as, and this is less recognised, it formed the
ideological basis for Soviet Communism through the medium of, you guessed
it, the "iron laws of historical materialism".

Secondly, and before you say "but that's a psycho-social argument and I am a
robot-man" I have to point out that trying to carve up psychology and
sociology (or economics or whatever) into completely compartmentalised
disciplines is completely pointless. True under certain circumstances
economic/sociological variables are predominant and under others
psychological variables are and its extremely important to be able to grasp
which one should be laid emphasis on - hence why I was complaining a while
ago about the tendency to psychologise the crisis through dubious
applications of psychiatry to people one has never even met - but all of
these things have to be considered together, in their "totality" as Marx
might have put it. Any other way of looking at things is at best a retreat
in dualism with all the religious overtones therein, at worst an adherence
to complete scientific dogma.