... or this?
Gonna be door number two every time, says 'brewman', in a comment on an earlier post here:
"Scratch a hippie, you find a fascist. At least that's what MJS's multi-point plan reveals.The "multi-point plan" in question was actually a different Mike's, not mine, but the line of argument here deserves some consideration.I actually enjoy this site a lot, but cannot shake the feeling that you folks are just tools for corporate power. Deconstruct the Democratic Party --- or follow through on the tantalizing Lefty's Pledge --- and what do you get? Right-wing populism run amok, or fascism (I promise you, should the revolution come, this land won't become the People's Republic of anything...it will be more like the Fatherland), or good old-fashioned corporate authoritarianism.
Like it or not, lefties, the imperfect, lumpy, too-often-feckless Democratic Party is the only hope for the working man and woman in the USA. It needs continually to be pressured and cajoled to do the right thing, and it usually only half does it. But the alternative would be much, much worse. And that's not a scare tactic --- it's a realistic appraisal of politics in the USA. Give me FDR, LBJ (the butter, not the guns) and BHO anyday over what you folks have in mind."
brewman concedes, in effect, that the Democratic Party's function is to block the General Will. But he concludes that that's a Good Thing, since the General Will is... Hitler!
Of course we don't know anything about brewman's own background or history. But this is an argument that I've heard a lot from merit-class types of my own acquaintance. What follows then is directed not at brewman specifically, but at a more general social phenomenon.
Fear of the mob has a long history. The precise form it takes depends on where you're coming from. The rich generally worry about Bolshevism and expropriation. The merit class worries about irrationality and atavism and the ever-looming dark intoxication of Fascism.
(For some reason, the rich aren't so worried about Fascism. In fact, they sometimes seem to be... promoting it; and we might add that the Democratic Party has been right there with 'em, on every step down this path in my lifetime. But I digress.)
The rich don't want their money taken away. That's understandable enough.
The nightmare of the meritoids has a different basis. Their amour-propre depends on the sense of being better, not just richer. They're an intellectual/cultural aristocracy, not a stupid inbred aristocracy of blood, or a coarse Philistine aristocracy of wealth. They're not richer than the mob, or even better-bred -- less, if anything, in my experience -- but they're more conscientious, more enlightened, kinder, less prejudiced, more rational and critical, and of course better-informed than the mob.
So by a process familiar to everyone who's ever heard the word "structuralism", the mob must be the opposite: bigoted, chauvinistic, irrational, ignorant, uncritical, and in short, the inevitable prey of a Hitler redivivus, unless they're kept in line.
Enter the Democratic Party, which we can depend on to keep 'em in line, and throw 'em a crumb every now and then to gratify our tender enlightened merit-class hearts.
Win/win!
Comments (17)
Wait...when was it that the DP did half the right thing? I seem to have missed that, not having been alive in the 1930s.
Posted by Michael Dawson | April 1, 2009 8:18 PM
Posted on April 1, 2009 20:18
You know, that earlier commenter has a point -- I'd rather live under a corporate controlled faux democracy than a brown-shirted republic of goons and cops. However, that "rather" is a very contingent thing, like saying "I'd rather pay my taxes later than now."
Obviously anyone on this site is a member of the meritocracy (the symbol-manipulating class). How much better to be a member of it, and a critic of it at the same time.
Posted by hce | April 1, 2009 9:18 PM
Posted on April 1, 2009 21:18
hce:
No such agonizing choice will be required. You can have both -- and in fact, you already do.Posted by MJS | April 1, 2009 9:50 PM
Posted on April 1, 2009 21:50
MJS - as usual i'm in full agreement with you, although, obviously it's not just the liberals who exhibit such fear of the mob. If I remember correctly, you posted on this same topic a year ago or so and linked to a discussion on LBO Talk, where the same fears were being expressed. AND THOSE PEOPLE MOSTLY CLAIM TO BE MARXISTS!!!...*sigh*
Posted by dermokrat | April 1, 2009 9:53 PM
Posted on April 1, 2009 21:53
the theory of Demo fascism applies
obama
"after us ...the cajun klan "
Posted by op | April 2, 2009 8:23 AM
Posted on April 2, 2009 08:23
Who gives a damn what people who have absolutely no faith in the working class have to say about anything? Anyone who came up out of the dirt end of the economy knows what a bunch of spineless renegades the "progressive" wing of the ruling class is from hard experience. They can go ahead and make their peace with the "democrats". Many of us decided a long time ago, having seen the hash their stupidity made out of living social movements, that we have no unity with them. Yes, they are absolutely right, given the atomization their system has inflicted within the working poor, fascism is a direct possiblity. And it's a much higher possibility because of the "democratic" party realists, because they're arrogant and stupid, and they don't learn a bloody thing from history or political practice. So. I'll take my chances on the dictatorship of the proles. Brewman and his crew can go fall in a hole. I'll be more than happy to help shovel them in.
Posted by MIchael Hureaux | April 2, 2009 10:10 AM
Posted on April 2, 2009 10:10
...it's not just the liberals who exhibit such fear of the mob.
Reminds me of something Ashis Nandy, one of the more astute commentators on India once said:
Posted by sk | April 2, 2009 11:41 AM
Posted on April 2, 2009 11:41
I guess my comment above was too nuanced. What I meant was it's a natural tendency to not want to rock the boat (live through a revolution, for example), but the price for that is to live in a faux democracy controlled by corporate power and looking more and more like a police state. I was trying to undercut "brewman"'s greater evil in the mob argument by saying there's evil in the lesser evil too.
Posted by hce | April 2, 2009 12:45 PM
Posted on April 2, 2009 12:45
sk, why do you despise Marxists so? Did one of us shoot your dog or something?
My theory of music is that 80 percent of every genre is crap to listen to.* But that leaves 20 percent that's worthwhile.
The same seems to apply to political camps.
*Country-and-western is 98 percent dung.
Posted by Michael Dawson | April 2, 2009 1:25 PM
Posted on April 2, 2009 13:25
hce -- I took your argument up wrong, obviously. Sorry about that.
Posted by mjs | April 2, 2009 1:42 PM
Posted on April 2, 2009 13:42
To the extent that Marxists tend to be recruited (at the moment) from among the offspring of the white-collar class. sk has a point. Fortunately, this is a curable disorder -- if you hate something other than the proletariat even more.
Posted by MJS | April 2, 2009 11:42 PM
Posted on April 2, 2009 23:42
I think many on the left, including anarchists, are guilty of what sk describes to a certain degree, and his behavior isn't unique to socialists recruited from the upper-middle class, either; we think, "Why won't these people understand what's good for them"?
If the working class were adequately revolutionary, the revolution would be happening, no? I think we all obviously wish more people would agree with us, or we wouldn't be at this site; but we can't elect a new proletariat, so we have to educate an propagandize. You can't take that as meaning Marxists hate the working class.
Seriously, condemning Marxists as a whole, especially here of all places, gains you nothing. If you hate Marxists so, why do you keep posting here?
Posted by Save the Oocytes | April 3, 2009 2:44 AM
Posted on April 3, 2009 02:44
Such tightly wound folks! You guys of all people should remember what happened to Lenin. Dead of hardened arteries before his 54'th birthday. Here is what he had to say about Beethoven's music:
Some lenten entertainment would do do good all around (as the Reader's Digest never fails to remind it's 38 million readers).
Posted by sk | April 3, 2009 3:16 AM
Posted on April 3, 2009 03:16
good stuff
sk on the other end of your lenten link
thanks
i'm working on a tract
with Super Al Shooman
prolegomena to any future phenomenology of class conciousness
working conjecture:
like the owl cc won't fly till
the dusk of an age arrives
motto:
cut the fuckin prole cats some slack
for karl's sake
its enemy class hegemony
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L86AAGZ9BBg
Posted by op | April 3, 2009 6:39 AM
Posted on April 3, 2009 06:39
Seems like all parties concerned, the worry- warts who fear the Rushite mob, as well as the stalwart defenders of the proletariat's heroic potential, have a rather reified idea of who the hell the working class is, what its members look like, and where they bowl. There are a lot of nabobs out there, there are a lot of incipient radicals too, the two crowds aren't mutually exclusive, and they all aren't pasty-faced slobs who drink Bud and live in Indiana. One doesn't have to be an effete post-modernist to recognize that the utility of fast and frozen categories is overrated.
Posted by gluelicker | April 3, 2009 9:44 AM
Posted on April 3, 2009 09:44
I'm working on it, Owen. My first hurdle is the same working class question I've been getting for a couple of decades. "I like you, Al, but what can you do?"
It seems that the working class, by and large, consists of people who are subjected to rip-offs, fees in general, fees to process their complaints about the rip-offs, lost paperwork on the rip-offs, with fees to find it, bank charges —both "legitimate" and callously opportunistic—short commons as a result of the fees and rip-offs and no material relief, unless they can organized it themselves and when they do, they get ripped-off and charged fees. Self-advancement out of misery is usually an extension of the process, but it can work out if you have a lot of self-discipline and focus. Even then, there are fees upon fees upon rip-offs. The short list of what's needed consists of: union apprenticeships with jobs at the start and finish of them, help starting a business that can be run out of a car, cheap, may barter-based medical services for the kids and the grandparents, some system navigation guidance from effective, talented street lawyers, cultivable land that can't be immediately stolen by developers, shared entertainments, festivals and safe places to go for them and some protection from coming home to find a kicked-in door and a looted dwelling. And no dewy-eyed charity or "empowering" or "consciousness-raising" reading material, thank you very much, because that always comes with soul-sucking (and fees, and rip-offs).
Class consciousness, it seems, follows from the time-free-of-horrors available to develop it. The more that relief can be delivered and expanded, the better.
There's also this:
In talking about the over-class and their middle managers, either with or amongst the working class, a joke that never fails to get a chuckle goes, "once we see them as human, we're doomed". It's funny because it's true, and because that regard will never, ever, be reciprocated.
Posted by Al Schumann | April 3, 2009 1:40 PM
Posted on April 3, 2009 13:40
Forgot something: veterinary care too.
Posted by Al Schumann | April 3, 2009 1:48 PM
Posted on April 3, 2009 13:48