> Angelus Novus
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> This reminds me of a brilliant sticker by the group Gender Killer I once saw
> on a lamppost: "Capitalism is Not a Conspiracy of the Few. It Works Because
> You Work."
Dominance and submission as a social relation apparently has effects on the size, shape and functioning of our brains.
full: http://www.abc.net.au/rn/allinthemind/stories/2011/3098328.htm
>From the transcript of the podcast:
"The so called subprime mortgage crisis has sent world stock markets into a spin ... Domestic violence is on the rise, depression is on the rise, anxiety is on the rise, alcohol and drug use are on the rise, so the stress is starting to take its toll ... Tonight the biggest mortgage meltdown ... The thing that makes people most stressed out is when they don't feel like they have any control."
"There is a kind of biological embedding if you will, a biological fingerprint that is left by experiences of growing up in disadvantage, and there are both short term changes in the biology of children who are exposed to those kinds of settings, but there appears to be longer term changes as well. They affect their development and may potentially affect things as distant as when they die, the chronic diseases they develop over the course of their adult life, that their mental health over the years of their adult life."
"Tom Boyce: I think of it as being almost kind of like an archaeological dig, if you will, you begin with the lived experience of the child, the adversity and stressful events that that child encounters, that is experienced by the child within circuitry of the brain. So we begin this archaeology by exploring what are the brain structures and functions that are changed by early exposure. Then you dig down a little further, a little smaller in scale and complexity and there are differences in the cellular level. in the communication between neurons within the brain, the kind of neuro-transmitter systems that are present in the brain.
And then a little deeper are the sub-cellular kinds of processes like the epigenetic changes that we are now seeing that are also systematically different between low and high disadvantaged children.
Natasha Mitchell: And by epigenetic you are referring to not the genetics of a person but the cellular architecture that influences which genes are switched on and off in a body, which is very much affected, as we are finding out, by our environment, by what we are exposed to—our parenting, what we eat."
"om Boyce: That's right, all of the things that we're all familiar with right. What we're finding in our work in the San Francisco bay area among kindergarten children is that kids who within their social groups are more subordinate, who kind of filter to the bottom of the social hierarchy within the group of children within their class, that they have higher levels of reactivity in both of those systems than do children who are dominant and at the top, the leadership, if you will, of the classroom.
We think that a similar kind of thing happens among children of low social class families. A variety of work has shown that kids who are growing up in disadvantaged families have higher cortisol levels, higher cortisol reactivity, changes in immune system, that are greater among kids in disadvantage."
The research presented here should provide plenty of socialist bullets for us to charge our cyber-rifles with. One can even take a 'moral' position for common ownership of the social product of labour now..with scientific backing. However, the problem of agency remains. Class consciousness does not come 'naturally' within the social relation of Capital.
Mike B)
*********************************************************************** "With the seizing of the means of production by society production of commodities is done away with, and, simultaneously, the mastery of the product over the producer." Engels http://wobblytimes.blogspot.com/