Greetings Economists, On Mar 9, 2007, at 11:10 AM, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
Can historical materialism offer itself at a lower cost to the masses?
Doyle; I think your point is quite powerful. In the 19th century the debate was around fideism. To me now this is about emotional connection processes that are mass produced. Religions have no basis for developing the principle of emotional connection in terms of automation. But and this is important Marxist have not had the means to deal with the scarcity of connection related to issues like sexism or racism. Reliant upon the party or face to face processes Marxist have had to accept the old Enlightenment compromise about Religions scared place in the peoples hearts. The religious organizational structures persist even under heavy repression. That said, yes I think Marxist can supplant religious structures by lowering the value of social connection. For example supplanting the suffering of women in their second class citizenship by ending the lack of social connection to the whole community. This is a totalization process, and no other way to characterize the political goal. Religions too have totalized, that's the sectarianism of the book religions. Face to face emotional ties, those which are most related to privacy and family home space are scale issues of emotional connection. In other words production of emotion in those arenas is too restricted to break down disconnects at larger scales. Racism is by far the most familiar example of large scale emotion structure fractures that is a result of small scale emotion production in the narrow private space. Yes this is a real cost issue. The scarcity for example has to do with workers not being able to afford personal services in the home like cooking, washing, baby sitting and so forth. These 'nebulous' quasi religious features of human life are in fact critical to Marxist cultural triumph. Yoshie writes/ Socialism has often functioned similarly, revolving around charismatic leadership, but that's one of the areas that historical materialism has not investigated deeply. Doyle; This to me is a brilliant set of responses to what I have raised here. I think the battle against fideism was too early over writ by seizing state power. Charismatic leaders are a failure of one to many knowledge processes where the emotional connection of the 'whole' working class of a socialistic culture is unclear on the large scale. Let's take Mao and the cultural revolution. He meant to set off a correction of corruption in the party practice. Which if it is cultural has to do with abuse in emotional connection above all. This quasi religious arena was fortified by intense feelings produced by the media in China. And put into practice by organizing red guards. These are emotion structure processes in which the 'cost' of emotion attachment, the scarcity on a large scale of a socialist product of connection was breaking the party's attachment to the people. The shift to economic development was deeply related to a failure to bridge a large scale socialist connection in Chinese society. As it were the avatar of the whole working class society was not functional in every day life knowledge production. That avatar an image of the great leader Mao was not capable of providing socialist emotional connections on a mass scale. The desire for that is expressed in the U.S. at this moment as the so-called, Hive mind. It is clearly an agenda in some capitalist quarters as a part of network communications like advertising which Google thrives upon in an interactive process of planting content in searches. This tells us Marx's original insights about capitalism still have relevance. Developing capitalism requires atomizing workers, and uniting workers at the same time. Where uniting means emotional connection on the largest but also most granular scale of all. Doyle
