Plumbing, consciousness & soc.dem.

["MONGIOVI, GARY V" <YCMGECO%SJUMUSIC.BITNET@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Herb Gintis interprets Doug Henwood's remarks about the crisis
of social democracy to mean (i) that there is no real alternative
to capitalism, but that (ii) we should pretend there is as a way
of pressuring political leaders to make it work better.  I won't
presume to speak for Doug.  But it seems to me that Herb is missing
a rather obvious point, which is that social democracy is in crisis
to a large extent because it has been under sustained vigorous attack
by the right - backed up by all the resources which the owners of
capital can marshal - for close to two decades.  I don't feel competent
to enter a debate on the way propaganda works; often even its best
practitioners understand it only on an intuitive level (Reagan,
Thatcher).  To the extent that western ideology values the individual,
freedom, independence of thought and action, etc., the propagandists
of the right have found it relatively easy to attack any effort at
humanistic (i.e.non-militaristic ) collective solidarity as somehow
opposed to these  (in my view) intrinsically worthy values.Why have
they been so successful?  I don't know.  Access to and control of
resources is probably part of the answer.  One might argue that it's
easier to sell a simple (simplistic) story to the public than a complex
one, that vulgar economics (in Marx's sense of a body of thought which
takes superficial appearances as an explanation of fundamental
processes) has a comparative advantage in the market of ideas.  There
might be something in this; but I think also that capital itself has
primed people to resist deeper explanations: capitalism cheapens
everything, including political and intellectual discourse, and so
people lose the inclination to attend to subtle discussions - even
when what is at stake is their own well-being.

  I'm rambling,  so I'll close with a brief observation about economics
as plumbing.  Yes, we are to some extent technicians who are charged
with the job of solving problems - just as physicists can design flight
paths for a space shuttle, etc.  But simply because that sort of thing
is PART of what we do doesn't mean that it should be ALL that we do.
At the risk of sounding pompous, I would assert that we are intellec-
tuals, and that, as such, one of our jobs IS to raise consciousness:
i.e. to talk frankly about controversial issues, to raise subtle and
difficult questions about the nature of social reality, and TO TAKE
IDEOLOGICAL STANDS AND DEFEND THEM.  I believe that the masthead of
Gramsci's paper "Ordine Nuovo" contained the motto: "To tell the
truth - that is revolutionary".  To define our business so narrowly
as Herb seems to do amounts to abandoning all possibility of playing
anything but a tinkering role in improving society, when what appears
to be required is a radical overhaul.  Some of us (Herb?) may think
that incremental adjustments here and there are enough, or perhaps
that only such adjustments are practically possible.  Fair enough.
But shouldn't we define our role broadly enough that our discourse
has room for the suggestion that a more dramatic transformation is
required?And shouldn't we put these views before the public, as a way
of enriching the quality of public discourse?

I see I'm still rambling.  Time to stop!

Regards,



Gary Mongiovi