19thC Philosophy

Before you begin this reading this post, I want to direct you toward a video that was originally disseminated through upworthy.com. Youtube picked up the link, putting it here for all(ish) to see: 

First, I'd simply like to applaud the architects of this film. Within a rather alacritous epoch, concision is one of the greatest swords. By combining a lucid and visually compelling aesthetic with a very matter-of-fact terminology, these visionaries tossed out a pretty compelling and resolute representation of where 'we'--Americans--are within capitalism's teleological progression. From reading Marx, these graphics shouldn't surprise anyone. The poorer are becoming more so and more numerous. The richer are becoming more so and more sparse. The epistemological gap between what we thought we knew about income disparity and how vast the income disparity actually is may be more surprising to us. Looking down into the comments section, I didn't have to go far to see exactly why that is. The first commentator said, "I don't believe in socialism, but [, I] gotta be honest, we don't live in a capitalistic society, we live in an oligarchy." Of course, we [students of Marx] all know exactly why this comment is somewhat misdirected: this is, in fact, exactly what capitalism is supposed to look like. Perhaps, as an intra-subjective group, our misunderstandings about capitalism coextend with our misunderstandings about socialism and communism. I want to take a short look at a few of the possible reasons for this pervasive mis-directed-ness. 

American Atomism: Known by the more common signification, "American Individualism," American Atomism describes, negatively, the way in which the average american tends to view themselves not as a member of a collective but as an individual. Underscored by the subject's ontological framework (isolated consciousness, and all that), this vantage-point implicitly denies group responsibility and tends to ignore the causal connectedness of social spaces--town, schools, workplaces, etc. So, when an individual has success, it is their success and no one else's. Similarly, when a subject fails, it is their failure and rarely the social structures around them causing the failure. This institutionalized isolationism stems, at least in part, from the way in which America conceives its own history. Individuals colonized the Americas; specifically, individuals who shirked the status-quo in their own countries, or simply believed that hard-work and ingenuity would be enough to hurdle any obstacle. Of course, every historian knows that these anecdotes and universalized dispositions are merely aspects of the American mythos. However, time and political ambition have reified those myths into misperceived realities. The result is a systemic pathology that insists on independence while awkwardly and inefficiently relying upon governmental and communal support. The never-ending states-rights / central government debate shows the intransigence of this problem. The public's relationship to these two issues mirrors a tennis match, with their sentiments oscillating from one end of the court to the other without any apparent conviction. The failure in the analogy stems from the inability for the populous to see the transition between the two poles in the same way a tennis player sees the ball going back and forth. When one political position fails in its descent form abstraction to practical application, the populous flips out and jumps ship forgetting that they in fact voted in the very players that they now vilify. The individual's capacity to cognitively distance themselves from responsibility, in whatever way is necessary, would be worthy of applause if it didn't lead to so much misery and decay. 

Ideology over Class: Given the statistics, its hard not to ask, "what the fuck?" And, "why the hell haven't the lower classes colluded to burn this mutha- down, pitchforks and all?" My diagnosis spins off from the issues stated above. As far as atomism is concerned, the white version tends not actually to be an individual belief but in fact an unconscious collective belief in the inherent goodness and betterness of whiteness. In other words, the kinds of groupings endorsed by American institutions tend to deviate away from class consciousness toward 'social issues,' like white supremacy, puritanism, christianity, et al. These fractures supersede class issues. In the mid-1950s, when the SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Committee) attempted to organize a union for factory workers in an industrial town, many of the labor leaders insisted on the meetings being segregated. Even though all these cats were in a position to benefit from class solidarity, they could not, even for their own economic benefit, suspend racial prejudice and myths of essential otherness to strike a deal (bad pun intended). A really interesting analysis of how this tendency played out in post-war France can be found in Anti-Semite and Jew. 

In conclusion: we discussed, on Tuesday, whether or not Capitalism is a moral or amoral system. I am still committed to the amorality of the system's logic but I must concede that it nonetheless creates institutionalized justifications for its own economical aims and social impacts. In her post, Maggie points out that, "We brought up a few of the "moralities" which seem to result from a capitalist mentality--that the poor are underemployed because they are lazy, for example--but demonstrated that these kinds of moral pronouncements are in no way essential to capitalism." She goes on to concede, what I also believe to be true, that these don't seem to be necessary appendages to or consequences of capitalism. The more I think about it, however, the more convinced I am that, in practice, capitalism needs some kind of overarching framework that explains why so few should have so much. Within America's case, the public's belief in what ends up being a merely nominal meritocratic system combined with racial, religious, and locational differences does just this, distracts from the interrelatedness of economic, social, and political issues.