|
Individuation is a revolutionary force. The forces seeking to resist change must resist individuation.
Thursday, 20 October 2011 at 20:28
The forces seeking to resist change must resist individuation. In doing so, these forces maintain communal ethics, moralities of citizenship and ‘old ways of life in general’. (Marx, Grundrisse). The nature of the development of capitalism is exposed as being at its most contradictory in its relationship to individuation. In resisting the tendency towards individuation, capitalism posits ‘barriers in its own nature, which will, at a certain stage of its development, allow it to be recognised (by individuals) as being itself the greatest barrier to this tendency, and hence will drive towards its own suspension (Marx, Grundrisse).
Understanding capitalism as a transitional stage, Marx saw that future society came to exist as a possibility in the social formation it is to supersede. ‘Large scale industry’ for example, ‘by its very nature, necessitates variation of labour, fluidity of functions, and mobility of the worker in all directions’ (Marx, Capital 1). The progressive aspect of this, as far as the process of individuation is concerned, is that ‘the partially developed individual, who is merely the bearer of one specialised social function, must be replaced by the totally developed individual, for whom the different social functions are different modes of activity which he takes up in turn (Marx, Capital 1).
Capital itself surmounts the ideology of communality with which it counters the tendency towards individuation.
The interests serving capital might want to resist individuation, however, capitalism itself contradicts this ideological response in the act of ‘tearing down all the barriers which hem in the development of the forces of production, and the exploitation of natural and mental forces.’(Mx/F152)
Capital itself surmounts the ideology of communality with which it counters the tendency towards individuation, because the development of capitalism brings with it the development of individuality as an historical prerequisite for social change. Individuality under capitalism thus becomes a moment in the historical process of the individuation of humanity.
This understanding of the progress towards individuality does not depend upon reaching out to an externally projected ideal, but upon Marx’s own materialist account of capitalism.
Capital’s ceaseless striving towards the general form of wealth drives labour beyond the limits of its natural paltriness, and thus creates the material elements for the development of the rich individuality… (Marx, Grundrisse).
Marx’s materialist analysis of capitalism was primarily concerned with an account of the developing individual.
As capitalism progresses, individuation becomes much more of a requirement as individuals become more aware of themselves and their abilities, powers and needs. The countervailing forces at capitalism’s disposal – educationalists, artists, misguided religious ideologues – might seek to maintain a communal ethic of selflessness, but they cannot resist history and necessity.
In the last analysis, all we have to give is ourselves. Our self is our only gift. If I don't possess myself — i.e., if I let myself be forced to sell myself — I have nothing to bestow upon another individual, another self. In the realised society called communist society, exchange must become visibly and fully what it always was essentially, self-exchange.
With visibility, the independent, material form of wealth disappears and wealth is shown to be simply the activity of people. Everything that is not the result of human activity, of labour, is nature and, as such, is not social wealth. The phantom of the world of goods fades away and it is seen to be simply a continually disappearing and continually reproduced objectivisation of human labour. All solid material wealth is only the transitory materialisation of social labour, crystallisation of the production process whose measure is time, the measure of a movement itself.
Ultimately, wealth is nothing but social activity - society itself.
Under communism I will want also to own you. I will be freed from the obligation to love you in deference to some higher communal morality. I will want you because you enhance my life. There will be no other reason.
The rich individual, the fully individuated human of communist society, will be the one who has discovered how to appropriate the richest thing around, the most interesting and valuable object, the subject, beginning with the appropriation of the self. This accumulator of riches will be the one who has also socially mastered the necessary conditions of the total appropriation of one individual by another, the coherence of whose social life is self-need. This is the secret of what is meant by: the negation of capital is the realisation of real wealth, subjectively and objectively.
The communist egoist wants other subjects. The narrow egoist, the exploiter, only wants something from them.
A society rich in individuated men and women is the only really rich society. Richness in subjects, in subjectivity, in practically and creatively potent human beings, is finally the only real wealth for the subject.
In the end, it is the historical and objective conditions that prepare the way for individuals to escape from the tyranny of others. The individuated person gains sufficient cognitive autonomy which amounts to a capacity for agency and change. The ‘free social individual’ becomes capable of recognising the alienation of subjectivity i.e. recognising that revolutionary practice is subjectification. This individual capability comes through an appreciation of social existence.
The individuated person sees nothing, any cause or ideal, higher than the self does. Nothing external to self is worthy of self-sacrifice – certainly not the generation of surplus value for the capitalist. However, achievement of individuation demands risk-taking. Cowardice is not the refusal of self-sacrifice. On the contrary, the opposite is true. The coward places too little value on the self and on those values and other people, who are part of it. In short, the coward remains ignorant of the value of self, failing to defend the self in the expanded sense, or mistakes mere survival for life – still the lot of workers in the wage-slave economy.
|
|
Whilst capitalism may need and produce people who feel individualised, such individuals may eventually come not to need capitalism.
Monday, 19 September 2011 at 21:47
(One of a series of blogs in which I consider the work of Max Stirner, ultimately as an influence upon Marx. For rationale, click left on 'Crises of Marxism'.)
For the greater part of Homo Sapiens’s time on earth (about ninety nine per cent of the time), men and women have thrived in hunter-gatherer communities. All members of the community had free access to the things they needed for survival, i.e. the animals they would hunt and the plant food for which they would forage. Men and women were ecologically in balance with nature, with population growth limited by the availability of food. Free access to food negated the emergence of a system of ownership and exchange. This meant there was no incentive to hoard – so no need to lock things up.
In a competitive environment, your success is my threat; your gain is my loss, but in a communal system, your well-being is my well-being, your success is my success, because you cannot own the benefit of your success – you’ve no need to keep it for yourself.
For members of these pre-historic communities, this was how life had always been for all previous generations and this is how it would seem to remain forever more.
What happened to end a way of life that had been so successful over countless generations of our forbears? The answer was the most important technological development ever to occur in human history; the domestication of plants (agriculture) and animals (pastoralism). Together these developments are called the Neolithic Revolution and they allowed the development of urban centres (towns and, later, cities), trade and most of the other things we consider to be components of civilisation.
It has been in the relatively short period of civilisation (the one per cent of time) that men and women have begun to think of themselves as autonomous individuals, an historical process known as individuation.
Men and women were at first wholly communal beings. The conception men and women have had of themselves has changed over history. Their individualisation was a gradual process that took place over time as society became increasingly complex and a specialised division of labour developed. A progressively more developed division of labour increased the capacity of communities to produce a surplus over and above what was necessary to satisfy basic needs. This in turn led to the exchange of goods between individuals and communities. It was exchange that kick-started the process whereby men and women became, and continue to be, evermore individualised. Under capitalism, the process of individualisation has accelerated to reach its present peak. The reason for this is that the exchange of goods and services is central to the functioning of a capitalist economy, where individuals make things or deliver services for sale at a profit. Men and women have had a different conception of self, of ‘I’, what it means to be ‘me’, over time. The individual emerged from the tribe, the herd if you like, to the point where, now, individuals think of themselves as autonomous beings, with their own thoughts, taking decisions, large and small, as they confront issues that affect them as individuals. Civilisation, especially in its later capitalist stages, saw the emergence of a dynamic society, i.e. non-communal society. Every new situation, every change of job, every period without a job, the consequent admissions to new social circles presents men and women with choices and adaptations they must make.
Many of the factors that brought about the process of individualisation served also to end communal life. It was the struggle over their growing wealth which rent asunder the early tribal and village communities and which continues to erode all forms of community and traditional values to this day. Men and women looked back nostalgically from the standpoint of civilisation. They held folk-memories of a Golden Age, a Garden of Eden before man ate of the tree of knowledge, which might have been agriculture. These memories were eventually codified into religious beliefs (the Golden Age in Greek mythology and the Garden of Eden in Christianity), and even the ethics held by many in the present era have their vague communal roots in humanity’s long pre-historical era.
We should not be surprised that the historical process of individuation has reached its zenith in the present era of corporate capitalism, given that this is also the era of commodity exchange. Exchange marks out difference. I have something you don’t have and I want something you have. The more you have to exchange, the more powerful relative to others you are. I am your slave if I have nothing to exchange but my labour power.
But private property's ‘individualism’ is naught but its most cherished illusion. The predominant characteristic of private property is a materialised reification where the egoism of its subjects (capitalists and workers alike) is suppressed and subordinated to the pseudo-subjectivity of the ‘economy for itself’. The ego is fully formed but suppressed, capped, limited under the glass ceiling, kept just short of the revolutionary shift from quantitative development to qualitative change.
Nevertheless, the illusion of individual autonomy under capitalism is strong and it was not long into the nineteenth century before the more advanced thinkers started asking questions about their beliefs and surroundings from an egoistic/individualistic point of view. The individual has sufficient cognitive autonomy, which amounts to a capacity for agency and change, starting from the ‘free social individual’, capable of recognising the alienation of subjectivity, i.e. recognising that revlutionary practice is subjectification. Yet – perversely – individuals first needs to appreciate their social existence.
Capitalism is a dynamic transitional stage between feudalism and communism, i.e. this rules out the transitional stage between capitalism and communism, which was a mantra of Leninism.
The individuality that emerges in the transition that moves us from the ‘rural idiocy’ of feudal servitude to the potential for communist individuality – free social individuality. How did we arrive at this tipping point?
It is all to do with the impending subjectification of man. Once reached, men and women will no longer confront a nature ‘which first appears to men as a completely alien, all-powerful and unassailable force, with which men’s relations are purely animal and by which they are overawed like beasts’. (Mx/F125)
And what will push us over the tipping point? The answer must lie in the fact that whilst capitalism may need and produce people who feel individualised, such individuals may eventually come not to need capitalism.
So whilst the historical process of individuation has reached its zenith in the present era of corporate capitalism, the capitalist forces seeking to resist change must resist individuation.
|
|
A freedom born of the diminution of communal ethics. Capitalism is witnessing the culmination of a process of individuation that is as old as civilisation.
Friday, 9 September 2011 at 20:44
(One of a series of blogs in which I consider the work of Max Stirner, ultimately as an influence upon Marx. For rationale, click left on 'Crises of Marxism'.)
The gap and conscious adjustment between the ‘content of man’ and his external and material expression demonstrates a capacity for agency and autonomy. The existence of the gap is evidence of capitalism in a dynamic transitional stage between feudalism and communism. The individuality that emerges in the transition progresses from the ‘rural idiocy’ of feudal servitude to the potential for free individuality. During this progression, humankind makes clear advances over nature
…which first appears to men as a completely alien, all-powerful and unassailable force, with which men’s relations are purely animal and by which they are overawed like beasts. (Marx, The German Ideology)
Individuals grew proportionately to capitalism’s rapid advances. They became empowered, relative to feudal individuals, by a new understanding of the nature of the world and its evolution. They experienced
The discovery, creation and satisfaction of new needs arising from society itself; the cultivation of all the qualities of the social human being, production of the same in a form as rich as possible in needs, because rich in qualities and relations – production of this being as the most total and universal social product, for, in order to take gratification in a many-sided way, he must be capable of many pleasures, hence cultured to a high degree – is likewise a condition of production founded on capital. (Marx, Grundrisse)
Society as well as production generates new needs. The cultural aspects of capitalism will affect the attitudes of individuals towards production as much as it enables them to engage in it. Similarly, individual consumers are encouraged to want more by the capitalist
who seeks for means to spur them on to consumption, to give his wares new charms, to inspire them with new needs with constant chatter etc. It is precisely this side of the relation of capital which is an essentially civilising moment, and on which the historical justification, but also the contemporary power of capital rests. (Marx, Grundrisse)
In the transitional stage of capitalism, Marx saw the general development of humanity occurring, creating an historical role for individuals who are universally rich in needs and culture.
Progression towards the universally rich individual is driven by large scale industry,
which by its very nature, necessitates variation of labour, fluidity of functions, and mobility of the worker in all directions.
The cost to the individual is that
in its capitalist form it reproduces the old division of labour with its ossified particularities…This absolute contradiction does away with all repose, all fixity and all security as far as the workers’ life station is concerned.
But this is the price that must be paid because
the partially developed individual, who is merely the bearer of one specialised social function, must be replaced by the totally developed individual, for whom the different social functions are different modes of activity which he takes up in turn. (Marx, Capital Vol 1)
Capitalism is progressive in that it tears
down all the barriers which hem in the development of the forces of production, and the exploitation and exchange of natural and mental forces. (Marx, Grundrisse)
This destructive development of capitalism brings with it the development too of individuality which, for the first time in history, occurs as an historical prerequisite of social change. Bourgeois individualism is a moment in the process of the individuation of humanity
A gap opens up between the public face of bourgeois communal morality and the ruthless destruction of bourgeois reality that opens the way to individual freedom. This is a freedom born of the diminution of communal ethics. Capitalism is witnessing the culmination of a process of individuation that is as old as civilisation.
|
|
The development of individuals resulting from the needs of capitalism is denied its full or rounded expression in civil society. Bringing Agnes Heller to the argument.
Tuesday, 6 September 2011 at 19:58
(One of a series of blogs in which I consider the work of Max Stirner, ultimately as an influence upon Marx. For rationale, click left on 'Crises of Marxism'.)
Starting from the ‘free social individual’ (or enlightened individual), the challenge is to ensure that individuals cease to be subject to any ordering power that takes upon itself the form of a natural force. It is the ‘free social individual’ who will be the agent of change, the agent of this reversal.
Individuals are at once mystified by apparent nature (perpetuated by cultural and educative reinforcement), but are also subject to an economic and social system with an internal logic that disregards materialistic and fatalistic interpretations of the world. Individuals have also developed the capacity to think more abstractly than ever before. Advanced capitalism renders the individual several times removed from the production of anything. We confront little in our productive lives directly, head-on so to speak. In our daily lives we have to deal in abstractions far more than our ancestors ever did. There is no reason why some individuals should not have the potential to apply abstract reasoning to the functioning of the social system.
However, the social system allows no space for individuals to express their potentiality, despite capitalism having extended that potentiality.
The modern age, civilisation…isolates the objective essence of man, treating it as something purely external and material. It does not treat the content of man as his true reality. (Marx, 1844 Economic and Philosophical MSS)
Capitalism has cultivated the ‘content of man’, but the advance over less developed societies is negated by the treatment of the ‘content of man’. This ‘content of man’ is that aspect of the individual that is imprisoned within the limitations set by civil society for personal development. The ‘content of man’ is thus at odds with his external and material expression. The gap between the two is where an understanding of the need for change will emerge. As a consequence of the gap widening, individuals have to consciously adjust themselves to the institutions and the way they must operate, without regard to their actual needs. Indeed, the latter are not considered legitimate by civil society.
There appears nothing higher in itself, nothing legitimate for itself, outside this circle of social production and exchange.
(Marx, 1844 Economic and Philosophical MSS)
Whilst there is no legitimate space outside civil society within which the individual might develop, the pressure to burst the bounds of civil society grows.
The greater and more articulated the social power is within the relationship of private property, the more the egoistic and social man becomes, the more he becomes alienated from his own nature.
(Marx, 1844 Economic and Philosophical MSS)
In short, the development of individuals resulting from the needs of capitalism is denied its full or rounded expression in civil society.
|
|
In choosing to rebel against his condition, the free social individual chooses himself autonomously. This is subjectification.
Sunday, 4 September 2011 at 19:00
(One of a series of blogs in which I consider the work of Max Stirner, ultimately as an influence upon Marx. For rationale, click left on 'Crises of Marxism'.)
(Heller’s free individual is a person who has recognised that self-production can only be social. A preferable term to Heller’s is free social individual.)
Agnes Heller argued that through the act of contemplation, which has burst the bonds of reified everyday life, the free social individual realises that this act of exceeding the socially proscribed and prescribed limits of thought is good ‘for himself’ – and it may be good for others.
‘Good’ – Heller cannot escape metaphysics and ethics!
Marx points out that man is a ‘sensuous being is therefore a suffering being – and because he feels what he suffers, a passionate being’. Passion does indeed move the free social individual; passion that arises from the understanding that one’s own radical needs are being manipulated and neglected in everyday life. This passion is fuelled by the indignation that arises from the recognition of one’s own complicity in this process.
The free social individual’s suffering can be described as a lacking – and the free social individual has come to understand that this lacking cannot be rectified within his given political circumstances. The experience of this lacking on the part of the free social individual can best be characterised as what Ardorno called angst. Ardorno describes angst as ‘the claustrophobia of a systematised society’. It is the anxiety and discontent that arises from a person’s growing awareness of the system’s power over his or her everyday life – a power that simultaneously delimits and reproduces subjectivity according to its own (i.e. not the individual’s) needs. This experience of angst is the juncture at which the unhappy consciousness wakes the individual form his dogmatic dream.
The unhappy consciousness is nothing but a person’s own consciousness – split into two opposing sides, the reified consciousness and an emerging critical self-consciousness.
It heralds a difficult but necessary decision. On the one hand, should the person choose open revolt, he faces the possible wrath of the social and political elite as well as the disdain and resentment of his fellow subjects who have not yet broken free of their own particularity. On the other hand, in undertaking this rebellion he takes his first steps towards actualising his autonomy and human dignity.
It becomes evident that just because a person gains a critical perspective on his existential and political situation, it does not necessarily mean that things will change. (This is as far as Stirner got!!) But by taking the leap into revolt, the free social individual affirms that he is more than the party, or system, or society, permits him to be.
Individuality is a development; it is the coming to be of an individual. Jung called it individuation. Whatever form concrete individuality, or its ideal, takes in a given age, individuality is never complete but is always in a state of flux.
Becoming a free social individual is an historically contingent event that shows real political contradictions between a person and his or her society. In choosing to rebel against his condition, the free social individual chooses himself autonomously. This is subjectification.Subjective rebellion against alienation is a necessary precondition of man overcoming alienation socially. Revolt is grounded in the experience of angst arising from the self-conscious awareness of one’s own unfulfilled autonomy. Revolution becomes the first opportunity for the person to articulate his ‘true self’ on his own terms.
In choosing to become a free social individual, one stands in opposition to the given structure of moral and political choice. The free social individual takes up this antagonistic position toward the given hierarchy of values because those values reinforce the illusion that the present alienated society is ‘good’ and ‘just’.
The autonomous free social individual must be part of a pluralist society. The existence of many competing and conflicting hierarchies of values may be messy, but the alternative – their homogenisation under capitalism’s collectivising power – has only led to oppression and totalitarianism in the modern world.
|
|
Enlightenment liberates the individual from the religious, moral and humanist abstractions identified by Stirner as oppressive.
Friday, 2 September 2011 at 21:56
(One of a series of blogs in which I consider the work of Max Stirner, ultimately as an influence upon Marx. For rationale, click left on 'Crises of Marxism'.)
As Marx identified, each individual is shaped by the oppressive power of existing social conditions. However, he famously said that man makes his own history, even if he does not do so under conditions of his own choosing. These conditions do allow a space for critical reflection, or how would both he and Stirner have drawn their conclusions about the power over individuals of oppressive abstractions like religion. Indeed, it is the process of history that individualises man to the point where he can and must recognise the nature of his oppression as an expression of his humanity, i.e. respond to the economic conditions that render his existence inhuman. Capitalist society reproduces itself within and through us, whilst individuating people sufficiently for them to recognise, understand and free themselves from that same society.
Even the pursuit and protection of a degree of autonomous life within the prison that is society give life meaning to the individuated thinker. It is a condition of remaining human amidst the forces of brutalisation that is capitalist society. This leaves open only one future course of action to those who would express their humanity in the future, i.e. the removal of those brutalising forces.
The individual’s recognition of the nature of his oppression is a counter force to the totalising and homogenising forces of capitalism. According to Kant, enlightenment is the process by which people, through critical thought, liberate themselves from society’s tutelage (e.g. the dogmatic mystifications of religion and myth). Resistance, mental or physical, to being subsumed by capitalist society is also a struggle against that same society’s passive and actively systematic processes that serve to de-enlighten the individual. The process of de-enlightenment, as Heller would have it, is a subtle and pervasive force, which undermines the possibilities of isolated expressions of individuality other than those channelled into the safe area of consumerism where, even here, individuality is neutered by the dictates of fashion. If enlightenment requires the use of one’s own reason, de-enlightenment requires that one should never use it, instead relying on conformity to the collective. If enlightenment requires that one should reflect before acting and find out whether one’s option is right, de-enlightenment requires that one should never reflect, but unhesitatingly conform to society’s norms. Enlightenment liberates the individual from the religious, moral and humanist abstractions identified by Stirner as oppressive. De-enlightenment requires that we exchange our reason for faith in these abstractions.
In political terms, the self-conscious pursuit of enlightenment would imply a world in which plurality triumphed over totalitarian processes, economic coercion gives way to individual and conscious choice and the autonomous will of the individual is freed from the will of the people.
|
|
Emancipation emerges from the tension between the demands of the social and the desires of the individual.
Friday, 26 August 2011 at 21:46
(One of a series of blogs in which I consider the work of Max Stirner, ultimately as an influence upon Marx. For rationale, click left on 'Crises of Marxism'.)
For this to happen, we must first recognise that the pseudo-object is ruled by the pseudo-subject. This is rendered difficult by the fact that our social existence is obscured by the illusion that our subjective lives are under the control of the self. The conditions that must be changed are protected by the illusory understanding of self that is generated by those very same conditions.
It was not that Stirner failed to offer a critique of the illusion, i.e. capitalism as a closed system, which did not allow for revolutionary consciousness. Clearly, this did emerge in a spophisticated way with Stirner. Lucidity is Sisyphus’s torture. But Stirner did not share Marx’s understanding.
As Heller explained, men and women are born into a world in which society confronts them as an autonomous power, with a set of postulates and demands to which the individual must submit or fail to survive. Individuals must fit in and meet the expectations of society in order that they might support themselves, negotiating society’s requirements in order to acquire the means to living.
This process of fitting in, a learnt process, is socialisation. It involves becoming a product of the social system’s mass production of subjectivity.
However, opposed to this is each individual’s uniqueness and non-repeatability. A field of tension is created in which normalised patterns of behaviour facilitate the smooth reproduction of social norms are at one pole, whilst at the other are the desires individuals feel about the need for a meaningful life, in which they can express their uniqueness and humanity.
The suppression of a plurality of autonomous expression is inhuman, but remains a feature of capitalism’s collectivising process and globalised monoculture.
However, emancipation emerges from the tension between the demands of the social and the desires of the individual. It is the revolt of the subject against himself.
|
Previous Entries
|
|
