Wednesday

On the schedule it says to discuss Canada Lit…but i have nothing on say on such a flat and outdated topic…instead let us turn to Marx:

from Manifesto of the Communist Party

Party Ryazanoff edition (New York 1930) pp. 25-54 First published in 1848

“Wherever the bourgeoisie has risen to power, it has destroyed all feudal, patriarchal, and idyllic relationships. It has ruthlessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound men to their “natural superiors”; it has left no bond between man and man but a crude self interest and unfeeling “cash payment.”

It has drowned pious zeal, chivalrous enthusiasm, and humdrum sentimentalism in the chilly waters of selfish calculation. It has degraded personal dignity to the level of exchange value; and in place of countless dearly bought chartered freedoms, it has set up one solitary unscrupulous freedom—free trade.

In a word (or two) it has replaced exploitation veiled in religious and political illusions by exploitation that is open, unashamed, direct, and brutal. 

The bourgeoisie was the first to show us what human  activity is capable of achieving. It has executed works more marvelous than the building of Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has carried out expeditions surpassing by far the tribal migrations and the Crusades.

That which characterizes the bourgeoisie epoch in contradistinction to all others is a continuous transformation of production, a perpetual disturbance of social conditions, everlasting insecurity and movement.

All that has been regarded as solid, crumbles into fragments; all that was looked upon as holy, is profaned; at long last people are compelled to gaze open eyed at their position in life and their social relations...

The newly formed becomes obsolete before it can petrify.

Urged onward by the need for an ever expanding market, the bourgeoisie has given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every land.

The workers are forced to sell themselves piecemeal as a commodity like any other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition and to all the fluctuations of the market.

They are not merely the slaves of the  bourgeoisie class, they are in daily and hourly thralldom to the machine, to the foreman and above all to the owner.

When the worker has been paid his wages in hard cash and momentarily escaped the exploitation by the factory owner he is set upon promptly by the landlord, the shopkeeper, pawnbroker…etc.

Out of the manifold national and local literature…

a world literature arises…”

Marx felt the capitalistic system was unfair…he believed the seeds of its destruction were inherent to its structure…

as the bourgeoisie had replaced nobility he believed the proletariat  would rise and replace their masters…this has not occurred.

Maybe because the lines between the working class and the owning class are blurred…and maybe because in the west materially things have gotten better…there is of course alienation where the people don’t feel connected to anything…beyond a cost benefit analysis…and this where we get into post modernism which is a continuation of Marxist thought and the inherent problems with capitalism…that is an intuitive guess…but his writing and thought has been critical in the formation of the social sciences.

Bataille speaks of the disembodied eye      

2.

This quote coincides with my personal experience.

“The economic basis of a society determines its social structure as a whole as well as the psychology of the people within it.”

Having been born into a poor family, that became rich, i had, in retrospect, a privileged upbringing. Though my parents were relatively frugal the basics were well covered and i did not want for much.

In Marxist language i was raised with bourgeoisie values with some proletariat ideology…thrown into the mix…

The thinking of people who are poor is much different than the thinking of people who are rich…as Camus notes there is nothing similar between a master and a slave…

3.

I attended various self help groups in my twenties and more sparingly in my thirties.

I was interested in the inner workings of the mind and curious about a soul.

Of course these groups have no leg to stand upon except perhaps occasionally they make you feel good…

But street drugs work just as well and the lifestyle is more varied…

The rant

you meet the same sad stupid faces in the self help movement…mostly people from the rising middle class who complain about their parents or their husbands or their inability to lose weight, or their inability to express themselves—

their lives are empty and meaningless and they want some one to tell them that they matter—but fortunately they don’t—their net worth is greater than their self worth which could be partly explained by the parasitic nature of their existence…and in Marx parlance they are doomed…now we can turn off Oprah and go about our lives… 

to engage in any of it you do so at your peril…know this…

you will never get better…and if you want to succeed in that world just take lots of classes…learn the lingo and appropriate behavior and maybe one day you can be a group leader…

forget about ever being whole…

umm…I mean let’s heal…         

An Aside

though one should not overlook the contribution of Freud and other scientists of the psyche…ego is I, id is it, and super ego is super I

Going Down

Then i found myself in a lower socioeconomic reality and …

most of what i learned at the various self help groups did not apply…

in all my travels i did not find one liberal in the entire quagmire

though i did meet some people with personal dignity intact.

2010 The Death of the Liberal Class by Chris Hedges my ass

As was reported by C Wright Mills in the early 1960’s

“Liberalism is with out coherent content , that is that its goals have been made so formal and abstract as to provide no clear moral standards, that in terms genuine conflicts of interest and ideal can  no longer be stated clearly. Used by all interests, classes, parties, it lacks political, moral and intellectual clarity, this very lack of clarity is exploited by all interests. Politicians, professional liberals and intellectuals make a fetish of indecision, which they call open mindedness; of the absence of moral criteria, which they call tolerance; and of the formality—and hence political irrelevance—of the criteria which they call speaking broadly.”

On a Personal Note

I’ve been snowed in and have had no coffee, no cigarettes, no beer and no weed…food is running low…and if it doesn’t stop i’ll have to eat the budgies.

Budgie is an Australian aboriginal word for “good eating”  so there is mercy.

One final note from Marx

The members of the bourgeoisie, not content with having the wives and daughter of the proletariat at their disposal (to say nothing of public prostitution) find one of their chief pleasures in seducing one another's wives…

did you know the commies wanted to abolish families…my…my…

Ahhh….family values in America…now i understand…