Of course, this is the one guy I haven’t read. :-) But if I’m reading this backwards through Hegel your suspicion is that Bannon has found a way to gain political power by reinforcing, that is to say, feeding wage slaves’ identity as slaves … or if I read this backwards through the 1844 manuscripts, turning worker alienation into candy and feeding it back to them?
If I have that right, that makes serious and dangerous sense.
Hey Mark. Thanks for this. Yeah, one of the weirdest developments in the historiography of the US is the return of the repressed notion that wage labor = wage slavery. It's a return to the logic of the Knights and the Pops, and a resuscitation of the "cooperative" sensibility. It denies the fundamental fact of proletarianization, and the new possibilities of subjectivity residing in that history. And speaking of Hegel, it ignores his break with the Aristotelian tradition in the Phil of Right, where he emphasizes that proles can be free so long as they can place limits on the time their employer controls their will. Marx took a while to get around to that point of view: the Grundrisse is the record of his conversion. It all depends on your approach to the question of self-determination: is it self-possession through property ownership, or is it access to the powers of the community? What is property, anyway? Is there such a thing in one's own person? The body? And so on.
Boy, this does a lot of work. :-) The left keeps complaining that all of these proles keep voting against their own interests, but it looks like the left has completely misunderstood what those interests have turned out to be. I can’t help but run this back through Plato as well and notice that tyrannical souls really want a tyrant. Cool.
Aristotle's Politics is probably a better place to start, where he addresses Hesiod, who was presumptuous enough to think that his work down on the farm was consistent with his freedom, whereas A and P and Xenophon assumed that freedom (thus virtue) was incompatible with necessary labor, even if performed by :"mechanics," that is, artisans. Hesiod's position isn't validated until the Reformation and what Hegel called "the modern time" (in the Phil of History), when work was finally understood as the theater of freedom ("character," etc.), when Luther could be named the founding father of modern philosophy, as per Hegel's Phil of Right, the preface. Yikes!
Of course, this is the one guy I haven’t read. :-) But if I’m reading this backwards through Hegel your suspicion is that Bannon has found a way to gain political power by reinforcing, that is to say, feeding wage slaves’ identity as slaves … or if I read this backwards through the 1844 manuscripts, turning worker alienation into candy and feeding it back to them?
If I have that right, that makes serious and dangerous sense.
Hey Mark. Thanks for this. Yeah, one of the weirdest developments in the historiography of the US is the return of the repressed notion that wage labor = wage slavery. It's a return to the logic of the Knights and the Pops, and a resuscitation of the "cooperative" sensibility. It denies the fundamental fact of proletarianization, and the new possibilities of subjectivity residing in that history. And speaking of Hegel, it ignores his break with the Aristotelian tradition in the Phil of Right, where he emphasizes that proles can be free so long as they can place limits on the time their employer controls their will. Marx took a while to get around to that point of view: the Grundrisse is the record of his conversion. It all depends on your approach to the question of self-determination: is it self-possession through property ownership, or is it access to the powers of the community? What is property, anyway? Is there such a thing in one's own person? The body? And so on.
Boy, this does a lot of work. :-) The left keeps complaining that all of these proles keep voting against their own interests, but it looks like the left has completely misunderstood what those interests have turned out to be. I can’t help but run this back through Plato as well and notice that tyrannical souls really want a tyrant. Cool.
Aristotle's Politics is probably a better place to start, where he addresses Hesiod, who was presumptuous enough to think that his work down on the farm was consistent with his freedom, whereas A and P and Xenophon assumed that freedom (thus virtue) was incompatible with necessary labor, even if performed by :"mechanics," that is, artisans. Hesiod's position isn't validated until the Reformation and what Hegel called "the modern time" (in the Phil of History), when work was finally understood as the theater of freedom ("character," etc.), when Luther could be named the founding father of modern philosophy, as per Hegel's Phil of Right, the preface. Yikes!