[lbo-talk] Founding myth of capitalism [was going galt]

123hop at comcast.net 123hop at comcast.net
Tue Jun 22 22:51:33 PDT 2010


Carrol writes:

"The myth of capitalism must be a myth which dramatizes the _formation_ of social relations, not the survival of the individual 'outside' of any society."

I don't see this at all. It seems that from the beginning capitalism is concerned to articulate how self-interest trumps social relations, which are portrayed as hide-bound, suffocating, and backward. Think of Prince Hal vs Hotspur. Think of Macbeth's tragic leap into the future.

"The myth must make clear, first, how, given only isolated individuals (recognized by all as impossible and grotesque but nevertheless a necessary assumption) those individuals by free acts of choice _formed_ a society, and of how that formation cannot be a single non-repeatable act but must, rather, be endlessly repeated."

I don't think the idea of isolated individuals is at all grotesque: the period begins with Montaigne's notion that self-examination is the equivalent or even superior to a meeting with the world. There is a continuing and growing rejection not only of man in society but also of man in history. Capitalism's total victory in fact claims a victory over history which "stops." The myth of self-making is the first step in the rejection of social bond and social debt.

"(Unlike in a tributary social order, where the real is the past, in capitalism the real is the future. Odysseus _returns_ to a family: his task is to preserve the past in the present. The hero of a capitalist myth, coming fron nowhere, must _found_ a family, pointing to the future.)) Robinson Crusoe cannot begin to catch that myth, since Crusoe comes from thickly socialized worlds and struggles to return to them. The use of the Robinsonades was to illustrate exchange by showing how Crusoe related his different activities. But Crusoe's story as a whole not only is not the or a capitalist myth, but Crusoe doesn't even _belong_ to capitalism. The book might be seen as dramatizing a subordinate myth, that of petty commodity production as constituting the orign of capitalism.)"

The founding of the family forms a very, very brief moment in the novel. Joseph Andrews, Austen, and that's it. Trollope is fantasy land as is Dickens.

The experience of odyssey and exile in the classical world is a ritual by means of which the hero is able to break rules because he is outside of society. He is a hero because he has the courage to temporarily break away (in a kind of walkabout) and then return to enrich his community with the experience he has gained. He is wiser upon his return; but that wisdom would be meaningless if it were not spent in his own society.

The novel, on the other hand, which Lukacs called the form of "transcendental homelessness," recounts the story of the hero who can never find a home, beginning with Don Q and ending with The Stranger. If the hero's experience of exile has enriched him, it is not a richness that he can share with anyone. Is Horatio able to understand Hamlet's story? What is the narrator of Heart of Darkness actually able to convey to the "intended" except a lie?

I won't argue Milton with you because you know him inside out and I have mixed feelings. I'm more of a Blake type. And I won't argue Richardson because I think he writes pure pornography.

"Remember that Maggie Smith allowed not only individuals but _families_ to be real (as opposed to society which did not exist.)"

She only allowed families to be real because she needed a placeholder for the functions that (nonexistent) society could no longer play.

"Don't build your own resentment of capitalism into the literature of capitalism."

Well, I don't think I am. I think the literature of capitalism enjoys a very, very brief comic period with Fielding and Austen, each writing their own fairy tale version of how the hero's virtue-based rise from poverty paradoxically justifies a fundamentally hierarchic system (with Austen telling a very ironic version of this canard), after which you get the tragic period of Balzac, Stendahl, Flaubert, Conrad, Tolstoy....all telling over and over and over again how it is not possible for the hero to find a place, build a home, or rectify anything.

The solitude of the modern hero is not the solitude of Gilgamesh or Achilles or Adam. It is a blank, empty, resourceless abyss. "Man is in love, and love's what vanishes" wrote Yeats. Maturity and depth is not possible without actual, meaningful social ties. And it is precisely these ties that capitalism cuts at every turn. That's why I would argue that Crusoe's isolated self-making has a mythic dimension.

Joanna ___________________________________ http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk



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