Re: Empire and Its Servile Masses (was Felix Morrow on religion)

[Carrol Cox <cbcox@xxxxxxxxx>]

Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>

> What inspires servility today, more than anything else, is integration
> into the US empire.  That's what pious American workers and unpious
> Japanese workers have in common.  Japan is far more deeply
> economically integrated into the US empire than Europe is.  When
> servile masses think that their fortunes are tied up with the
> empire's, they don't arise, let alone wish to fight the "final
> battle."

I'm not sure "servility" is the right term to describe political
consciousness of the populace in any of the advanced capitalist nations.
(I use "populace" rather than "workers" because now workers make up over
85% of the population, so that empirically "working  class" and "people"
have pretty much the same content. Independent farmers [let alone
pessants], small shopkeepers, independent artisans, independent
professionals are no longer demographically important.) And ascribing
consciousness directly to other ideological forces (political or
religious) is iffy.

In the U.S. capitalism is pure and unadulterated. We are a nation of 300
million (270 million workers) described above all by one of my favorite
phrases in Marx: "the dot-like isolation of the mere free worker." There
is no visible link between what we do and who we are -- hence the
irrelvancy to us of the command of the delphic oracle, "Know Yourself"
-- which meant Know Your Place in a visible social structure. Each
morning as we awaken we are as Adam awaking in Eden, free of social
relations except those continuously recreated anew by direct will,
unattached to any ongoing action, cursed to stand bewildered in the
supermarket aisle trying to choose freely among 4 different variations
in Del Monte Green Lake Oregon beans (just that, just that saltless,
just that with garlic, just that with some other variation), our
energies scattered by the need to learn how to operate the newest
wrinkle on some technology which is no better than it was 4 versions
ago, no visible connection between our own action and the events in the
world around us, bombarded with the messages of the sheer variety of
things (without counting the explict messages of newspaper, tv,
billboards, etc) -- how survive meaningully in this isolation for
members of a species whose ancestors going back a million years (and
several species) have lived and survived only through collective group
endeavor, eventuating a hundred thousand years or so ago in survival
through collective group endeavor reflected in shared symbolism.

Item from yesterday's WSJ: If the question "What is your sex?" were
placed at the end rather than the top of the advanced placement test in
calculus, 4700 more women each year would qualify for advanced
placement. That must mean something in addition to its illustration of
the crippling effect of sexism; something like the crippling effect of
the ideology arising from daily practice & not just the ideology
preached from the media and the state and the church.

Carrol