At 04:46 PM 2/4/2010, James Heartfield wrote:
>Doug, to Michael:
>
>'Michael, you devoted a few hundred words to a critique of how many/most
>Americans think and act. Then you say we should write as one of them. But
>you don't make membership in the group seem very attractive. Though this
>may sound blunt, I ask this with a great deal of admiration for what you
>do: how are you one of them? '
>
>Is this not a familiar problem, I mean philosophically, at least. It is
>the similar to the approach Marx and Engels lay out in the Manifesto where
>they talk about the relation of communists and proletarians. Roughly the
>point is that they are not separate from the proletariat, but that 'In the
>various stages of development which the struggle of the working class
>against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere
>represent the interests of the movement as a whole'.
>
>The same question is in Hegel's different stages of thought, where he
>distinguishes between natural thought and scientific though. He insists
>that they are substantially the same, but that scientific thought is a
>distillation of the essential meaning that remains intuitive in natural
>thinking. Or it is comparable to Rousseau's distinction between the
>General Will, and the many disparate wills of the mass.
>
>It is not possible to 'represent the interests of the movement as a whole'
>without abstracting oneself from the spontaneous consciousness of the
>mass, which remains mired in partial and one-sided preoccupations. So to
>get to the heart of the thing, in the first instance you have to take a
>step away from it.
>
>Elitist thought (like Nietzsche, say, or Kierkegaard) fetishises the
>initial step away from existing consciousness, assuming that the mass is
>hopelessly lost to illusions, losing sight of the fact that its own
>thought is only a distillation of that consciousness, higher in form, but
>not substantially diffferent. Those solipsists made a virtue of their
>separation from the mass, and wandered in splendid isolation, beautiful
>souls, their ideals to perfect to be realised and therefore corrupted in
>the mundane world.
>
>The important thing is not to lose sight of the fact that if socialism is
>anything it is the subordination of social production to the democratic
>control of the mass. It certainly implies a transformation of the masses
>in their outlook. But without the masses, what is it but a lot of smug
>platitudes coined to make you feel superior.
>
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