[lbo-talk] Dialogue with the Past (was Liberfals)

[Carrol Cox]

On 6/1/2011 8:28 PM, Doug Henwood wrote:
> On Jun 1, 2011, at 9:08 PM, Michael Smith wrote:
>
>    
>> I
>> don't remember Bloom's book well enough to argue with
>> him, but the whole notion is starting to seem like
>> a Modernist predicament, back-projected onto earlier
>> writers.
>>      
> Bloom didn't put it this way, but it is about the bourgeois individual, from emergence through decadence.
>    

I don't believe decadence is a useful concept in understanding 
capitalism. It makes sense in reference to the ruling elites in 
tributary social orders, which depend on each generation of those 
families being able to keep the coercive machinery going. Not in 
capitalism. The third generation of the JP Morgan dynasty apparently 
just enjoyed life as a rentier. That, in a feudal lord or a Chinese 
Emperor would have been disastrous, and the process can be reasonably 
seen as decadence. There is no way that capitalism can "decay."

But the point about the bourgeois individual is certainly accurate. The 
echo of the closing line of PL in the Prelude links the two poems in 
terms of CHOICE -- forced free choice. W not only CAN freely choose his 
place of rest; he must freely choose it, because in this world nothing 
is given. A&E before the fall did not need to make choices; they just 
did what they wanted to do. And a good deal of the enrgy of the poem 
comes from Milton creating for them the necessity to choose freely.

Carrol

Carrol