[lbo-talk] Agency and Capitalism

[Carrol Cox]

The article Mike sends to the list is indeed fascinating and perhaps
important. But to attach it to the sentence Angelus quotes is misleading. As
another poster has pointed out, that statement is neither a moral statement
or even, actually, a statement about persons; it is a statement about
capitalism: a social system which makes living in it, however one lives, is
to contribute to its endless reconstitution of itself. It is not an
empirical statement about actual workers.

Carrol

-----Original Message-----
From: lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org [mailto:lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org]
On Behalf Of Mike Ballard
Sent: Saturday, January 01, 2011 6:51 PM
To: lbo lbo
Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Agency and Capitalism


> Angelus Novus
>
>
> 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/

      

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