[lbo-talk] Capitalist Domination -- Notes

[Carrol Cox]

***We can start with Plato's three classes (ignoring the ideal state and
tyranny). Each of those three state (and the classes they manifest or who
rule in them) exhibit a sharply different relationship to time. His
"timocracy/timocrats (essentially a state ruled by hereditary aristocrats
with their wealth in land and in domination of a peasantry) represents the
rule of the past. It is the 'obligation' of each generation of rulers to
reimpose the institutions of the past. This of course is a good epitome of
most societies of the last 5000 years. Those he calls "oligarchs
(essentially a merchant class) is at the mercy of the future: the _meaning_
of their purchases today will only be revealed by an unpredictable future.
(Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice is grounded in this aspect of a
pre-capitalist commercial society. The demos, the 'people' (essentially
peasants and artisans) are ruled by the present (and Plato of   course is at
his moralistic worse on this class). These discriminations are of course not
directly applicable to a capitalist society, but they are richly suggestive.
Note that Plato's peasants could live in the present for a number of
reasons, one of which their children (or even their village) were
responsible for their care in old age or sickness. And their children could
do this because they too lived in the present: this year's crop was this
year's food. Technically, they had not been separated from the means of
production. And when the Athenian demos went down, those defending it as one
recent classical scholar has put it, they died knowing what it was they
fought for. (It helps here to have read Wood's Peasant-Citizen and Slave:
The Foundations of Athenian Democracy, and also Arendt's The Human Condition
and On Revolution. (Wood's point re the separation of state power and
economy in capitalism is also crucial here.)

***This fits in someplace. Newman noted that the corrupt 18th-c equivalent
of a dormitory bull session, with no instruction or discipline involved,
produced several generations of treat men. In the 1950s and early '60s
campus leisure increased considerably, and college costs were low enough
that relatively few students worked very many outside hours. Demands on
faculty were relatively light. The phrase "publish or perish" goes back a
long ways, but it is remarkable how many full professors even in many major
schools had published rather lightly. Certainly no pressure to publish a
book for tenure. Faculty had almost feudal privileges in their
classrooms, and many  classrooms were not much more than bull sessions.
There was growing pressure to eliminate freshman composition. (The Harvard
professor who originated that monstrosity spent the rest of his life
condemning it and hoping for its liquidation. "Writing" bears no relation to
even literary intelligence and it is a sort of torture to impose a
standardized skill in writing on students as their passport to a semi-decent
job. School is leisure or it is not school. That is, if freedom consists in
living in the present without being terrorized by the future, and if
learning is in any way linked to the freedom of the learner. (Job skills
simply don't belong in schools; they should be part of the job. Probably
Marx had this in mind when he suggested that child labor would be part of a
good society, that labor of course being plentifully interlaced with
learning and just lain loafing.) When the old recess was replaced with gym
class, part of  what makes school school  disappeared; this is not against
gym classes; it is against the whole day being spent in class. Long before I
became a Marxist I was becoming uncomfortable with the role of the professor
as gate-keeper, standing at the door of western civilization with a flaming
sword to keep          

***Only in developed capitalist nations do old age pensions become a
necessity for a decent life: and what they do is separate, to some extent,
the working life from the future. This is perhaps one of the supreme
cruelties of the present society: men and women must worry all their life to
insure a decent retirement, and leisure in any full sense is only achievable
after retirement.

to be continued, I hope.

Carrol