Re: Dallas Smythe student

[timework@xxxxxxxxx (Tom Walker)]

Yoshie wrote,

>Tom, we can't "focus on the individual's role when discussing
>solutions to the planet's problems" (as Shawna Richer says Sut Jhally
>does) such as the individual's consumer choices.  That's not a
>dialectical critique of capitalism.  That's more like a program of
>Global Exchange, Oxfam, Simply Living, and so on.  All staffed and
>supported by well-intentioned people, I'm sure, but that's ultimately
>a liberal dead end.  Socialism's point is not so much to oppose
>commodification as to take collective control of _what has already
>been socialized through commodification_ by abolishing the private
>ownership of the means of production.

May we allow for the possibility of more than one dead end? I agree that
individual consumer choices, no matter how well-intentioned do not "add up"
to social transformation. However, "taking collective control" and
"abolishing private ownership" are actions. As verbs they demand nouns. Who
is the we to do the doing? The party? The state? The masses? Organized
labour? A bunch of folks who show up at demos and read theory? The
p-p-p-proletariat?

I ran into a former colleague this morning on his way to deliver a talk
about his organization's "Community Development Institute", a high-minded
enterprise that teaches folks social skills for the world of the 1970s. I
admire such dogged . . . well doggedness. I guess. Organized labour? Don't
get me started. Unions are my bread and butter (not to mention rent and all
the rest). Despite occasional rhetorical flourishes, they are not in the
business of fundamental social transformation. If Doug can be cynical about
anti-consumer hairshirts, allow me my reservations about the class in
itself, of itself and for itself.

Funny you should mention the individual (or the Individual). My sandwichman
project and my graphic dwell on the mythos of the self-made man. Can't get
more individual than that. Note I said _mythos_ not myth. The OS is crucial
and conveniently suggests precisely an operating system. That operating
system can perhaps be better understood through a series of thought experiments:

1. Take simple living for example. Read Benjamin Franklin's prescription for
self-sufficiency, the locus classicus of the self-made man genre. What you
will see is that voluntary simplicity is pure, unadulterated Ben Franklin.
Those other guys, Horatio Alger, Andrew Carnegie and a host of 19th century
success touts represent a digression.

2. Take Aunt Jemima. Now think of Oprah Winfrey. What do they have in
common? How are they different? In what sense could one imagine Jemima
morphing into Oprah? I'm not the first to make the connection. See
http://www.cegur.com/html/oprahimage.html. What's the point? Oprah shows
that even a woman -- EVEN a woman of colour can become a "self-made man,"
provided she's willing to lose enough weight. That is to say to renounce
that which, by its excess, signifies her otherness -- her "mammytude", shall
we say. No personal offense intended to Ms. Winfrey, but her celebrity in
racist America (like pre-Bronco O.J.'s celebrity) rests on her being the
"exception that proves the rule".

3. Do a google search on "self-made man"; next do a google search on
"autonomous subject"; finally do a combined search. With only a very few
exceptions, there isn't an overlap between texts that use the terms. Why is
this so when the pair of terms is virtually synonymous (leaving aside
connotations)?

Isn't it, then, precisely the relationship between the individual and the
collective that remains the problem? If that's so isn't it begging the
question to pre-emptively reject individual solutions and posit a collective
revolutionary subject to do all the abolishing, socializing and taking
control? Doesn't even the possibility of a collective revolutionary subject
come down to a matter of individual commitments to build such a collective?
Aren't these all rhetorical questions?

>Criticisms of commmodification make sense mainly when what's being
>commodified, that is privatized, is _already explicitly publicly
>owned or customarily in the public domain_, like air, water, electric
>power, public education, public transportation, public broadcasting,
>and so on.
>
>When a housewife becomes _a wage laborer_, her labor power becomes,
>well, _commodified_, but socialists don't object to that, do we?

I don't know where to begin to respond to a question that assumes socialists
don't object to the commodification of labour power. It was not Marx's
position that wage labour represents the pinnacle of human emancipation. I'm
inclined to agree. And it is not the case that the commodification of
women's labour is a recent innovation. It also is not the case that
"socialists" (including women) have always, unequivocally supported full
participation of women in the labour force.

Nor can such positions be dismissed on purely ideological grounds (against
patriarchy) without also taking into account the strategic and tactical
considerations behind claims about the unique "delicacy" of women with
respect to certain kinds and conditions of labour. This is not to say that
the strategy and tactics *justified* discrimination against women any more
than racism against chinese immigrants at the turn of the century was
*justified* by employers use of immigrant labour to undercut wage rates. It
is to point out that one dismisses such pragmatic consideration at the risk
of discounting the integrity of "the collective subject". And that places us
right back in the puzzle of the relationship between individual and
collective action.

To conclude, IMHO wage labour long ago served its historical purpose and has
only one thing positive left to offer to humanity: the struggle to overthrow
it. It makes little sense to disparage the effectiveness of individual
consumer choice while extolling the emancipatory virtues of the individual
sale of wage labour.

Tom Walker