Re: [Marxism] Question on alienation and anxiety

[Carrol Cox <cbcox@xxxxxxxxx>]

Jurriaan Bendien wrote:
>
> I am not aware that there is any specifically Marxist theory of anxiety, but
> I suppose you could create one. Anxiety is to my knowledge a secondary
> (derived) emotion (i.e. an effect of the interplay or conflict of more basic
> emotions, e.g. anger, fear, love) and it is usually about something that
> should happen or could happen, but hasn't, or something that might or might
> not happen, a possible situation or possibility that might, or might not,
> occur, or could occur. Then you get uncertainty and indecisiveness, and that
> causes worry and fretting, maybe in a vicious circle. That might undermine
> confidence or the ability to take action.
>

It is worth noting that there are rather more 'things' in the universe
than there are words in English (or any other language), thus requiring
that most words have to carry multiple (and not necessarily even
related) senses. I think we are dealing with two different sense of
"anxiety" here, and that the two senses bear no _necessary_ relation
whatever.

The anxiety that suddently causes tens of millions, for example, to
limit their spending (conditions of rapidly growing mass unemployment,
say) is rather different from the utterly ungrounded anxiety that
eventually forced my retirement (and should have led me to retire some
years earlier than I did) -- and that still, for exmaple, prevents me
from answering the phone unless I know the caller in advance. (We have
both caller i.d. and an answering machine -- which are for me are
virtully medical necessities.)

The one "anxiety" may (and often does) generate the other, but so may
innumerable other factors.

Psychology and/or neurology can explain the grounds of _possibility_ of
anxiety grounded in a rational fear of the future, but they cannot
explain it.

I have no particular positive contribution to make to this discussion
now, but I think it will proceed more usefully if it focuses on the
social grounds of "rational" anxiety rather than on anxiety of the sort
that forced my retirement.

Carrol


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