August 16, 2014

Primitive Accumulation, part 1

Primitive accumulation is a tern that refers to events that resulted in the establishment of a social relation between capital and labor which is specific to the capitalist mode of production, and has to be understood, historically, as a stage in the development of social relations between human beings. Humans haven't always lived, under God, in a world of "winners" and "losers." . I’ll start a long way back, but given limitations of space and of my personal knowledge, it will read like a hundred yard dash rather than a marathon.

Engels’ Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State is a good place to begin. Engels’ main influences are the early American Anthropologist, Lewis Henry Morgan (“Ancient Society”) and the 19th century Swiss archeologist/philologist J.J. Bachofen (Mother Right). In addition, Engels’ ideas about the social/economic structure of ancient societies owes much to classical Greek and Roman philosophy, as well as to the radical criticism of the Bible and the state by 18th century and early 19th century Enlightenment writers like F.C. Bauer, Baron d’Holbach, and C. F. Volney. Socialist, humanist, and feminist writers of our own times like Marja Gimbutas, Martin Bernal, and Sylvia Federici, and many others have extended the investigation into the origins of civilization and of matrilineally organized communist societies.

To simplify Engels’ basic  argument (one that in broad outline is generally accepted by most scholars interested in early human social organization), matrilineal, communistic social orders were universal among human beings at the earliest stages of settled social organization. Enduring mythical evidence, as well as studies of existing matrilineal groups by researchers such as Morgan at the time Engels was writing (1884) indicate a  mutually reinforcing relationship between matrilineal and egalitarian social organization. 

What I have to say here about matrilineal social order is culled mostly from Engels, Morgan, George Frazer’s Golden Bough, and Martin Bernal’s Black Athena. 

Matrilineal society was centered on the female, in the first place, because she created human life, and only through her could the structure of the tribal organization be stabilized, given the polyandric sexual practices of the time and the limits of human knowledge. Beyond that, there is strong archeological and mythical evidence that it was the specifically  female qualities of human genius that were critical in creating the fundamental conditions for the establishment of settled communities and, eventually, civilized life. These female powers are dramatized in myths that circulated throughout the Near Eastern and Mediterranean world, and are best exemplified for us by the goddesses of the Greek Pantheon: to name a few, Persephone/Demeter (agriculture), Arachne (spinning and weaving of cloth), and Athena (the goddess of human thought and knowledge). These goddesses, still paternalistically honored within the pantheon of classical Greek civilization, are later, edited versions of much older goddesses from all over the Mediterranean and the Near East, belonging to a pre-patriarchal, older social order. 

 It’s been argued that the relative peacefulness and productivity of ancient matrilineally ordered, egalitarian society led to rapid population growth, which eventually created conditions of scarcity, which, given the limits of primitive human knowledge and technological development, could not be overcome. The result was conflict, war, warrior bands of males, hierarchical arrangements for control of scarce necessities, and, eventually, early tribal versions of private property in land (for powerful families), and various forms of exploitation of conquered peoples: as serfs or slaves, or “free” tenant labor. 

Private property in the means of production is based on force and results in male-dominated hierarchies that are created specifically to protect the rights of the usurpers of natural and socially produced wealth, which (until quite recently in the advanced capitalist countries) have been passed from one generation to the other in the male line. The biological fact that females control the reproduction of human beings, male and female, must have immediately been seen as problematic to the leaders of what was to become hegemonic patriarchal society. To guard against things getting out of hand, females of the elite, as well as of the subject, exploited population, had to be strictly controlled relative to the needs of the possessing male elite. This control is expressed in the historically documented evolution of morals, property laws, the role of sovereign state, and the ideology of modern religions. Once the ideological hegemony of hierarchic patriarchal institutions was internalized by society at large, sexualized property rights could be relaxed, but over a very long period of time. Women have only very recently gotten the right to vote in “advanced”, bourgeois-democratic societies, and some women--if they have the “balls”--have even achieved positions of power to oppress men (and women) in subject nations. 

At this point, I think it is  important to distinguish between hierarchal matriarchy, which possibly never existed (except in the minds of feminists trapped in patriarchal society) and matrilineal societies that did exist and continued to exist into modern times. Nostalgia for matriarchy seems to assume that the same violent, political/economic phenomena typical of patriarchy--the usurpation of the  common means of production by military gangs, legitimated and enforced by the controlled violence of religion, the law, and the state--would have been more humane if originated and controlled by females. Matriarchy is the inverse of patriarchy: rule not by men, but by women.

No doubt, organized bands of women fought back. There are ancient artifacts depicting battles between Amazons and Greek males. However, there is no evidence of a matriarchal, Amazon state. Men are better at brute force. Matrilineal society reflected the cultural superiority of women, and did succeed, probably for a very long time, because it was egalitarian. Women’s honored place in the community didn’t reflect their dominion over men, but their unique creative and imaginative gifts, which were freely given to society as a whole, men and women, and reciprocated. During the matrilineal period the basic creations of human civilization came into being: language, art, tools of all kinds, and a settled, ordered social life, capable of creating a surplus, but incapable of maintaining that surplus under the pressure of an expanding population. It is almost axiomatic in human history that civilizations become victims of the contradictions inherent in them, which were exacerbated by their own success. Marx called (written) history the history of class rule. We can learn from past, hierarchic civilizations without mourning their passing. However, the destruction of matrilineal society was a tragedy, one that hasn’t been forgotten.

Bachofen notes four stages in this early human development, each represented by a god or goddess: earth centered (Aphrodite), lunar (Demeter), transitional from matriarchy to patriarchy (Dionysian), patriarchy (Apollonian). There is plenty of Mesopotamian, Egyptian and Greek archeological and mythological evidence supporting such a thesis: myths of a lost golden age, of a war between an older order of gods centered on or beneath the Earth, of a decisive war between such gods and their progeny--for example, in Greek myth, the war between the Titans and the transitional Olympian gods and goddesses, whose progeny of demigods were claimed as  ancestors by the ruling, slave owning families of ancient and classical Greece.  

The Old Testament (which was codified by scribes for the Hebrew elite during the Babylonian Captivity (circa 6th century b.c.) is a testament to the much earlier establishment of full blown patriarchy and the absolute rejection of female right and communal property. The creation story, a re-treatment of early Mesopotamian and Egyptian myths, is noted for its patriarchal propaganda: Jehovah, pointedly male, has made (re-made) mother earth out of nothing and, having no other gods (or goddesses) before him, owns it. “God,” as He is called today in the Judeo-Christian tradition, has all the characteristics of a greedy landlord and demands a ridiculously high monopoly rent from Adam and Eve that must be repaid with endless adoration and infinite ignorance. He rules by fear, because his displeasures are expressed violently. Adam, made in God’s image (except lacking a will of his own), would have been a perfect debtor, but for Eve (a kind of demonized, alienated Aphrodite/Athena), who persuades Adam to think for himself and not pay up. Jehovah jumps up and down like an ape, and throws them out of his gated community, naked into the fallen world where the rent is labor, pain, death, and guilt. (Jehovah’s character translates neatly into Zionist Israel and Imperial USA.)

Read subversively, Eve is the heroine of the story, like Satan is in Paradise Lost. But the lesson for us is: never challenge overwhelming brute power directly. 

Part 2 will move on to an examination of Western Civilization's patriarchal hierarchies that replaced matrilineal society.The focus will be on the main stages in the development of the exploitation of human labor by patriarchy's various elites, which led to the "primitive accumulation" of potential wage laborers and the establishment of the capitalist mode of production.

Historical materialism describes history “dialectically” by positing the dynamic interaction between the two necessary conditions--reflecting our human nature--that determine our human, historical project: (1)Natural necessity-- our condition as natural beings that absolutely depend on our natural environment to sustain and reproduce ourselves, and (2) historical necessity: our condition as self-conscious natural beings, who, in our own minds, objectify the world and are able to create societies to mediate our metabolic interaction with nature--and, when necessary, change them. These changes within and between societies--interacting, contradicting, colliding with one another--constitute the complex, non-linear, often paradoxical story of this evolution--our consciousness of the human condition and its "project": history.  Engels put in this way in a letter to Marx in 1853:

“I have the feeling that one fine day, thanks to the helplessness and spinelessness of all the others, our party will find itself forced into power, whereupon it will have to enact things that are not immediately in our own, but rather in the general, revolutionary....interest; in which event, spurred on by the proletarian populous, and bound by our own published statements...--more or less wrongly interpreted...and impulsively pushed through in the midst of party strife--we shall find ourselves forced to make communist experiments which...[will be]...untimely.  One then proceeds to lose one’s head--only physically speaking I hope--,  a reaction sets in and, until such time as the world is capable of passing historical judgement on this kind of thing, one will be regarded, not only as a brute beast...but also as stupid...  I don’t very well think of how it could happen otherwise...”

This could have been Lenin on the eve of the Bolshevik seizure of power-- despite the backward conditions in Czarist Russian and their isolation following the collapse of the 2nd International. As human, conscious, responsible human beings, they had not choice. Tragedy has been a necessary part of human history. 

Historical materialism, as a scientific tool and a philosophical stance is strongly influenced by Hegel, Darwin, radical (often idealistic) French and English egalitarianism, and the philological anthropology of the 19th century.  

It adopts Hegel’s dialectic and his view that human history is driven by a kind of collective consciousness (a “zeitgeist”), rippling through the human race, unequally, but resolving itself into various settled (often competing) social orders. It discards Hegel’s idealistic belief that the process is divinely directed, and adopts Darwin’s notion of evolution through adaptation and natural selection, to human social and intellectual development, human history--viewing the motivating drive in human social development as both the desire and the need of human beings to shape the societies (through which they mediate their metabolic relationship with the natural environment) to secure and enhance their lives, individually and collectively.  

Historical materialism’s philosophical stance can be traced to many strands: Greek materialist and epicurian philosophy; radical Christian antinomianism (anti-baptist, egalitarian Christian peasant revolts, Levellers, Diggers, etc.); the Enlightenment, and the French Revolution; romantic poets like Shelley and Heine; French utopian socialist thinkers; pioneering 19th century work on anthropology by researchers like Bachofen (Mother Right) and William Henry Morgan (Ancient Society). 

All these intellectual and spiritual currents, came together in the minds of serious thinkers in Europe faced with the effects of the early industrial revolution: what to make of the power of the new capitalist elite, of the political and social power they wielded through their ownership of incredibly productive (and destructive) machinery, of the social disruption and misery unleashed on the working population. 

Marx wrote Capital as a critique of political economy, but mainly in order to understand how the capitalist system worked--in order to find a way of changing it that would succeed.  He admired the spirit and morality of the anarchists, but not their nihilistic methods. He was Hegelian enough to know that one did not create something new from nothing, but, for better or worse, out of the old, for the old is what we inherit, materially and spiritually. The mind of a child is not a tabula rasa, it is the physical/material potential of the child to absorb the world and come to understand it through the experience of those who have gone before us, and, as circumstances suggest or demand, to imaginatively form something new out of what is still progressive (rather than destructive) in that intellectual and material inheritance. I think it was Istvan Meszaros who first named this dialectical process, out of which history is created,"historical necessity." Certainly there is a dire "historical necessity today.

No one who has read Capital will have missed the footnotes, accounting for what seems to be half of the book. These are full of detailed reports of the actual lives of uprooted people. Capital provides the necessary figures and calculations, but this witnessing of the human costs of industrial capitalism is the heart of Capital, the heart of this heartless, profoundly described and rigorously analyzed, world. Marx condemned mainstream followers of classical political economists like Adam Smith for treating surface market phenomena (and their calculations of “value”) as if they represented eternal forces of nature rather than merely reflecting--and obscuring--historically created, very unequal, social relations. He considered most of the work of their followers to be “vulgar,”  bad-faith apologetics, and not science. They returned, and their modern mainstream followers return the favor, dismissing "marxism" as “history” or “philosophy” or even “religion,” anything but economics. They are wrong. The economics in Capital is profound and rigorous science.  But bourgeois apologists are also right: an unshakable egalitarianism based upon human sympathy is the driving emotional force behind Capital and historical materialism, not cold calculation. 

Primitive accumulation--how industrial capitalism came into being will be taken up next. That will conclude my failed attempt to explicate basic marxism in 100 words or less.

I have to insert one last digression from my attempt to capsulize essential marxism in a few short essays. I hope to complete this task in my next blog, which will cover historical materialism and primitive (primal) accumulation. If you are reading this, thanks for your patience. If not, thanks anyway....          

Tyrone

There had  been two phone messages from Fed Ex that they were holding four dining chairs I had ordered from Overstock.com. We had just driven 300 hot miles northeast from the coast. I was excited to see what the chairs would look like with the oak table we had found at a yard sale and I had sanded and stained. Tired as I was, I decided to go get the chairs before the local Fed Ex store closed.

For the past couple of years my wife and I have met my sister and brother-in-law at one of the beach towns on the coast half-way between Los Angeles (where they lived) and Sacramento. As usual, we talked mostly politics, a grim subject these days for those on the “left,” since the subject has come to revolve about the absence of any effective “left” political movement in the US--or rather, even a proper language with which to analyze the cause of the absence of any politics at all--except the politics of the hegemony of  monopoly financial capital, not only here, but throughout the world. 

My sister and her husband had devoted their lives to labor organizing and political activism. And there I was, sitting in a restaurant chair (though I had done my bit working for civil rights and protesting imperial wars)--repeating the obvious: the industrial working class of the United States lives in China, etc., and we Americans eat courtesy of guest workers mainly from Mexico. Centuries of slavery, racism, and the crumbs of imperial rent have emasculated the average, ethnically divided, American wage earner. Nothing but false consciousness is to be expected from most of them for now, not even the anti-imperialism that basically motivated our generation. We had grown old. My brother-in-law had just retired, and my sister was about to do so. I might as well have told them that they had wasted their lives. Yet I did not think so. I continue to admire them--I suppose, for the same reason that I don’t feel I had wasted more than three decades teaching mainly Afro-American children so that Condoleesa Rice (it would seem) could have an oil tanker named after her. One day that stinking tanker will sink under the sea that floated it. 

The Overstock.com chairs weren’t made in China, they were made in Vietnam. I was stunned, not surprised. It was my particular store of grief evoked by that particular criminal war. Then weakness dressed itself up as irony: should I give up bananas, coffee, underwear? To be honest, the moral miasma I created for myself was a blind that obfuscated good reasons for sending the chairs back, but not my desire to take them home to see what they looked like around the yard sale oak table, which was maybe 100 years old and real oak. These Vietnamese chairs, as I knew, were composed of laminated scraps of oak-finished, tropical wood, processed in high tech factories controlled by the very imperial forces that had murdered millions of the parents of the young people who now had to work for almost nothing in these satanic mills.  

But the price was right: four for $400 rather than about $3000 for real real oak chairs I wouldn’t have to bolt together myself and made in small batches. As far as the business of living and getting by in the United States goes, I’m in the same boat as the patriot across the street running up a flag on Veterans’ Day. Except that his political morality is blindly unproblematic. He looks where he is told to look and sees what he’s told to see. He powerlessly identifies with power. I view my daily existence as a political and moral dilemma.

The woman behind the Fed Ex counter was tiny and wiry, and alone, running around serving customers. She managed to drag my four large, heavy cartons out from somewhere in the back, but I was not going to ask her to load them into my car across the lot. So, respecting the uncertainty of my bulging disks and sciatic feet, I began awkwardly trundling the first carton toward the opened hatch of my “vice Versa”. Then Tyrone called out: Can I help you?

My wife later told me that he had been hanging about Peets for some time with a spray bottle and rags, washing car windows. But I knew Tyrone from a previous encounter a couple of weeks before. It was 6 a.m. and I’d been hobbling along to get us a couple of scones from the local cafe around the corner that had mysteriously started baking good pastries--no more Peets or Starbucks for me! ...Someone called out. --Isn’t this a beautiful morning! I was about to turn my head when Tyrone slowly rolled into view on a decent mountain bike. --Thank the Lord! I am blessed, brother.  And so are you! Isn’t this a beautiful morning! I looked at him carefully. His face was round and brown and smiling and wonderful to behold at at six in the morning. I did feel blessed. I told him so... as he rolled and I strolled toward the intersection. 

Most people live near freeways, Taco Bells, and Rite Aids in Sacramento. There are homeless of every description in our neighborhood, and you cannot expect to go walking about scot-free. So that morning I was wondering if I had some loose dollars in my wallet for Tyrone, as we approached the corner, still sincerely exchanging glad tidings. To me it was clear that Tyrone would have said what he said the way he said it whatever his situation. Nevertheless, his timing was as exquisite as an expert con-artist. The light obediently turned red, and Tyrone said quietly --I’m blessed to wake up and be alive and meet good people like you. ...I could use some money for breakfast. I figured five dollars would be o.k., and he took it graciously.

I don’t think Tyrone remembered me. I insisted on helping him load the cartons, which must have weighed 30 pounds each, but he wouldn’t allow it. He was just happy to help and he didn’t ask for any money, but I handed him two dollars and asked him where his bike was. Stolen he said. (I had three mountain bikes in the garage.) --That’s too bad, I said and mentioned the Bike Kitchen. He said he knew about the place and might try them again. It took a minute to get the cartons on the folded down back seat, and I was impatient to get home. But Tyrone wanted to talk more. Obviously the two dollars were not enough. He asked to wash my windows for a couple of extra dollars. I told him no. I had to go. Actually, I was too tired to stand around while he washed the windows of my car. Tyrone didn’t press the issue, but he wanted to tell me more: about how ill he was, about knees and kidneys. I mentioned a free clinic I knew about. Tyrone knew all about free clinics.  No, he was going to the emergency ward. They’d take care of him. ...Then one last quiet, friendly try: didn’t I have something he could do so he could have some supper?  

I put my hand in my wallet pocket when Tyrone, in way of giving up and saying goodbye, came closer and began to sing--beautifully--a few bars of a spiritual--there, between Fed Ex and Peets, about 3 inches from my face. I was lifted so high out of my nonsense and weariness that I forgot the wallet in my pocket. We shook hands, Tyrone walked back to Peets with, hopefully, more than my two dollars for supper, and I drove home, my spirit lifted, but with a back seat full of grief and stolen labor.

Postscript: Home at last, I ripped one carton apart and blindly convinced myself that the chairs’ color was o.k.  The next morning I tried to bolt the parts together. The directions were quite simple, so I didn’t bother to check the hardware against the illustrated number of parts in the directions. There seemed to be enough of everything, but alignment took some wrestling and the last bolt wouldn’t cinch down, seemingly stripped. I took the chair apart, and checked the hardware against the instruction sheet. There were supposed to be four long bolts and eight short bolts. Somebody had packaged eight long bolts and three short ones. The short bolts were way too short to grab anything but air (and I could find no use for any of them). The long bolts (of which there were many) seemed to work, except in the last hole. 

Could it have been that some eighteen year old worker was sending me a message of human resilience? sort of what Tyrone represented for me? But Tyrone and I had seen each other up close. He could see that (despite my decent pension and nice house that he could certainly have guessed at ) I was far from being the enemy. Quite the contrary. Nor would anything he didn’t know have made any difference to him: we were, in good faith, playing the fool together at this point in time, in this social situation. 

I hope some eighteen year old worker sabotaged my chairs. If she did, it would have been an act of audacity and defiance and proof of the resilience of the Vietnamese people. If so, I hope the defiance (if that’s what the screwed up bolts represented) was not directed at privileged victims (or our common enemy) like me. Rather, I hope and believe, that as a daughter of a revolutionary people now brought to their knees, she--and a host of others like her--intended to create disruptions along the chain of profit growing from the theft and misuse of their labor. They have nothing to lose by such audacity, nor did I. I sent the chairs back.

I hope Overstock.com lives up to its name, when all the factories and land in Vietnam are re-occupied by its workers. That might wake workers in the US to the real price of our illusions, and inspire them to come out on the streets and occupy all our public spaces, especially our bailed-out banks.  That will take the courage and audacity of the Vietnamese. And also, the love and wile of spiritual troubadours like Tyrone.

Amen.

  

I'm interrupting my presentation of my understanding of basic marxism to post my letter to the London Review of Books on Zizek's piece on Ukraine in the May 8 edition.  Here it is:

Reading Slavoj Zizek is like trying to follow a pingpong game on a merry-go-round: it takes concentration, which makes you dizzy, and then you stumble off where you got on.

But lets see if I get it. ...Zizek favors the little western-created Kiev oligarchic bully against the big western-created Russian oligarchic bully led by Czar Stalin-Putin, not only because little is cuter than bigger, but because Big Bully oligarch Putin is pushing his western-oriented cronies toward the East and barbarism; whereas the cute little Kiev oligarchic bullies are very happy exploiting their people to death for western, capitalist barbarians, who really aren’t barbarians--they are barbaric only because they have to fight barbarians, like Putin--and are really, deep down in their essence, true Judeo-Christian, liberal bourgeois children of Socrates, the Church, Voltaire, Hegel, Lenin, and Karl Marx. O.K.! ...fair enough.  Seeing things that way, it’s understandable that Zizek would end the ride with his “utopian” hope that true Hegelian communists, like himself, might eventually shame the global financial community into repenting its lapse into petit fascism at home and imperial/barbarian ways abroad, and into taking up anew the necessary, historical task of establishing Global Liberal Bourgeois Democracy (after Greece, etc has been starved, Russia humbled, Africa cleansed of black people, and China Nuked).  ...Then, sometime in the future, the Zeitgeist will have led us all the way to true communism, and history will end. Amen.

O.K. I’ve missed a couple of spectacular backhands, but I think I got much of the action. ...However...now that I’m a little more sober after my ride...I’m thinking--what about the coup? Did the embarrassing Victoria Nuland, funnel that 5 billion to Putin to make a coup on the Maidan in order to create a pretext to invade Ukraine?  More bizarre things have happened. It’s worth considering.  ...But, again--why does Zizek praise the Maidan protestors as “heroes” without mentioning the fascist militias that shot them down and cleared the streets of those “heroes”, living and dead, so that the old Kiev regime of little oligarchic bullies could step in dressed as a new regime of little oligarchic bullies? --Czar Putin-Stalin, of course. ...But ,now--and here’s the rub!--why does Zizek seem to have gotten lost in the gap of his parallax view and to not even have noticed what might be the real cause of crisis in Ukraine: the enraged workers in Southeastern Ukraine? They want to throw out both the little bullies, the big bullies, and the bully-masters of the EU and the US! 

 The only answer to these questions has to be that Zizek is part of the post-left dunciad of public “left” intellectuals and “socialist” politicians in the West. He even quotes Christopher Hitchens from the days before he took to nakedly posing with Rumsfeld in Iraq (after which he died of drink, not shame). These dunces see themselves as the saviors of Western Civilization against Eastern Barbarism. Most of them do well being good. But it seems to me I heard that song before, in Nuremberg, I believe. 

blog 2

There are four terms I have to define before taking up the topics of historical materialism and primal accumulation. If I make the meaning of these terms clear to you, everything else will follow much more easily.  The terms are subject, object, natural necessity, and historical necessity:

Subject

This is both a psychological and a philosophical term. If you can imagine yourself writing this and trying to figure out how best to define this term, you are the “subject”  of this activity. Unlike in rhetoric, where what one is writing about or interested in is the “subject,” “subject” in psychological and philosophical discourse is simply a thinking mind. This is simple enough, but at this point we are not talking yet about a human subject, about human consciousness. The conscious mind of the human subject is the product of the potential ability of human beings (which I’ll call mind in itself) to create language, which is the medium through which the subject/mind does its thinking and through which human animals become conscious beings. The mind in-itself is unknowable. When we use language to think about what it is, we merely create an “object” to think about: the mind-in-itself. However, when we feel alive (without thinking that it is we who are alive) we have glimmerings of this deep being in-itself: the ground of our natural ability to create and understand language. 

Descartes proclaimed:  I think, therefore I am.  Marx reversed this to “I am, therefore I think”. This notion that being (as potentially thinking human matter) precedes thinking itself  is the foundation of dialectical materialism, the dialectical counterposing of the dynamic unity of mind and matter to explain the conscious activity of human beings in sustaining and reproducing our lives.

Objects

The thinking subject produces ideas. All ideas are objects: notions in mind of the subject: notions about anything that can be thought--about the subject’s thinking mind, notions about the mind-in-itself, our body, our “soul”, about morality. Even our illusions and fantasies are objects created by the subject. Things become complex now. The objects we create are not things in themselves, but language’s symbolic representations of our experiences, past and present. One’s own ego--consciousness of ourselves as separate beings--is merely a complex of representations in our minds of our experience of living as a being separate among other beings. Since objects are not things in themselves, but mental representations of them, it is clear that the human subject, in creating objects in order to think, creates a kind of gap between the material world and ourselves (as objectified in the mind). This gap represents our freedom to act, to question even our own instinctual responses to things. This notion and its social ramifications are explored in Satre’s Being and Nothingness. 

Object producing consciousness in the thinking subject,however, is double-edged. it is positive in the sense that it allows us to look at nature (including other humans) as  objects existing “outside” ourselves. This frees us to act in non-instinctual, consciously purposeful ways that tend to expand the boundaries of our animal nature and shape our environment to satisfy our needs according to circumstances as they change.  Animals evolve or become extinct. Human animals create history. 

The negative aspect of human consciousness concerns its relationship with the real, substantial world outside our (objectifying) mind and independent of it. Subjectively motivated physical activity upon an objectified but real world can never be certain in its performance or its outcome. Unintended negative consequences (both physical and social ones) have been inevitable, from our primitive beginnings as barely conscious, social animals to the present. In this dialectic, between mind and matter, practice doesn’t make perfect. Practice corrects unintended consequences resulting from the physical limitations of the material world relative to human knowledge of those limits. The physical world (including other human beings) isn’t just the object of the subject. It exists outside of us, and determines what we can and cannot do (or should not do).  Subjectivity relative to the Other--other people as objects whose own subjectivity has to be taken into account, sometimes positively (trust) and sometimes negatively (exploitatively) is the basis of social evolution, but also reforms, wars, and revolutions. 

Marx extrapolated the subject/object relationship within individuals to larger social ones. For example, in the relation between the master and the slave, it is important for the master to dominate, not only the body, but the mind of the slave in order to make the slave more willing to obey. The master is the “subject” (the dominating will) in this relationship, and tries to implant his own values within the conscious mind of the slave, that is to make the slave the “object” of the master in the slave’s own mind and view his own degradation as good. If the slave accepts his condition and does not struggle against it, he becomes his slave-owner’s caricature of himself. The same sort psychological/ideological domination or “colonization” of the minds of “subjected” (objectified) groups of people occur under patriarchy (where women are forced to accept the male’s view of what women should be in a given patriarchal society), and under capitalism, where workers are the object of the owners of the means of production--and not only during working hours. Many moslem women willingly wear burkas and many western women willingly put on heels and power suits and grow “balls” to get ahead in the “peace” and wars of Western patriarchal imperialism. Hegemonic capitalist consumer culture has succeeded in emasculating working people by subverting their class consciousness with imperial racism and the notion that if one has a job one is “middle class” and a member of the ownership society. I’ll return to the notion of the domination of the minds of individuals within subjected populations by dominant groups and classes--Antonio Gramci’s the notion of “hegemony.” 

Well, I’ve worked hard to be clear and not get ahead of myself. The next posting will take up the epistemological tool of marxism, historical materialism, which will include a definition of two important ideas: natural necessity and historical necessity. Then I can lucubrate more freely, knowing that my virtual reader knows what I really mean. Then he or she can inform me.

What I write here will be opinion. I’m starting this blog because of the encouragement of certain members of my family, who, I think, hoped to deflect my opinions from them and onto the deaf keys of this computer. Well, I’ve taken the bait. ...Unfortunately, I don’t like typing on a computer, nor do I like the idea of blogs.  Both are inducements to glibness and vulgarity. (Those who know me know I'm not immune.) Also I’m uncomfortable entering the internet, which, like t.v., films, and newspapers, is formally owned and controlled by personifications of finance monopoly capitalism, yet pretends to be “democratic” in content because (unlike t.v., etc.) all sorts of factual material and political opinion are allowed to circulate somewhat freely in its closely watched precincts--and will continue to circulate as long as the profits come in and the system of production for profit is not endangered. Obviously, the plug will be pulled--sooner, I hope, than later. Then my blog will be curtains. The keys of this computer will go from deaf to dead. And so will illusions about "democracy." That would be the first step to imagining a real one.

All forms of fictitious democracy (including the governmental kind), because they are based on money power and hierarchy, inculcate a suspension of belief in the real. For example, political opinion is characterized by neo-liberal apologists as  “narratives” in “the market place of ideas”--neglecting to point out, of course, that this very notion is purveyed in the interests of those who own the stage and the production and distribution of “narratives.” The narratives of the owners are center stage 24 and 7. Views expressed by blogs like mine make the fiction, capitalism=freedom, "real". It's like voting.

Nevertheless, I’ve decided to take the bait. I’m too old to care about being hedgemonified, having ancient anti-bodies. Probably nobody is going to read this anyway.  So I'll write to an imagined, virtual reader. Together we will free ourselves of dependence on corporate hospitality. --This will be the people's internet and we will begin by eschewing cute names for ugly things: no google, no apple, no utube, no facebook,  and above all, no more blogs!  This is not a blog.

Most of my opinions will be political  (isn’t everything having to do with people political--or, rather, social?)--and, obviously, marxist. Capital's expanded wars against humans and nature at the center and especially at the peripheries of its imperial system have re-awakened an interest in marxism. It's ok now to call yourself (and let the all the agencies know you are)  a marxist, and marxists are currently all over the internet.  But “marxism” is not a school, it is a political tendency based on a few central ideas and a method of analysis. My object in the first couple of blogs is to explain what basic marxism is and which tendency I tend to take in my understanding of things. Most people who make the effort find marxist analysis liberating, because it explains human experience better than the Bible (or the Free Market). Before I begin, it seems to me I should place myself in a certain historical context.

I was born 76 years ago into a family of working class, thoroughly liberated (from Judaism) Jews. At that time, most of the American Jews from Eastern Europe had escaped both pogroms and rabbis.  Almost all were “socialist” ( in the vaguest sense), but had missed the boat by getting on one to America before the Revolution in Russia. 

By “working class” I don’t mean proletarians (wage earners). There were few proletarians in Eastern Europe, where most people were either peasants, artisans, or petty traders. Jews weren’t allowed (fortunately and tragically) by history to be peasants. But many were anxious to become “proletarians’. My mother’s father became a roofer/sheet metal worker/naval yard worker, and ultimately a butcher in a small shop.  My father’s father got to the US via a caravan trip (that took years) across Central Asia, China, and eventually landing him in Yokahama, from where he shipped to Glasgow. He spoke a good brogue-inflected English. He picked up some Chinese, with which he conversed with the laundryman on 5th and Winton Street in South Philadelphia. He went from Scotland to Saskatcewan (where he met and married my grandmother), ventured to Atlantic City to make money and brought his his wife and three kids to South Philadelphia. He had picked up baking while caravanning as a youth, and worked in a bakery in Philadelphia he was proud not to own. Both grandfathers, finally, in America, became proletarians. (Ironically, marxists hope to free proletarians from wage slavery.)

The baker grandfather’s wife was a large woman that he called the “Soldat.” The Soldat  taught herself to read and write. She was a secret romantic.  A superb cook, but a disgruntled housewife, she had 6 children, and, in later years inherited the problems of two of her daughters, and the care of their children too. She would have understood very well the radical feminist notion of unpaid domestic labor for the production and reproduction of workers for capitalist exploitation. My maternal grandmother was illiterate, and remained so, like many poor Eastern European women. She was squat, not very attractive, with the varicose veins of the diabetic. She was the kindest, wisest, most humane and open-minded human being I have ever known. I learned egalitarianism and tolerance at her weary feet. I was a good student of half of what she taught.

That is context enough for the reader to know where I’m coming from. My next two blogs will concentrate on what I have come recently to believe are the core concepts of marxism: the diagnostic method of “historical materialism” and “primal” (originally mistranslated from the German as “primitive”) accumulation. I’’ ll try to keep things simple and clear.

Maiden Voyage

This is the Pastriarch.  And this is a test!