Bijou Drains
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Perhaps I didn’t make my points as well as I could.
I am not making the case for individualism per se, and I am certainly not saying that we don’t share common experiences, common class relationships, similar experiences of alienation, similar experiences of struggle to live a fulfilled life in a world that aims to mould us into a merely productive unit in the interests of capital accumulation.
What I do disagree with is an over mechanical response to how we develop personality.
I would also say that there are also divergent personalities and that the one size fits all view of personality development theorists such as Freud and Reich is not based on scientific examination or the reality of human life, and is also frankly laughable.
The development of personality is, in my view, far more nuanced than that. I am of the view that early year experiences of nurture and cooperative care have a huge impact on the development of personality, and there is a huge amount of imperical evidence to support that, in huge contrast to the semi mystical ravings of Freud, Jung and his like.
I would go so far as to say that cooperativeness and mutuality are more or less hard wired into us, a bit like a biological version of Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid. I would say there is a “Human Nature argumen”t, but that it supports the socialist viewpoint, rather than the anti socialist viewpoint.
Also I should have explained that the point I was making regarding attachment and polictical viewpoints was based on US research which equates “Liberal” with progressive and more open mind approaches to society.
I was not saying that means that that in itself that this is a positive thing.
Also I was not saying that liberal and progressive views are going to make the world better in any way.What I was trying to say, in perhaps a cack handed way, is that this research indicates that there is likely to be a greater number of people who tend to view cooperativeness, interdependency, concepts of mutualism and affinity as positive and helpful activities for society, as opposed to having views that support self interest, rigidity of thought and individualism. This is despite all of the depridations of capitalism!
My view is that this gives us Socialists fertile ground to build on these attributes, that allows them to understand the class nature of society, and would allow them to see the possibility of creating a society that allows them to fully express their cooperativeness, mutuality and affinity for their fellow human being
I do apologise for the very late reply to questions about the article by Cde Fleischman in the World Socialism Journal by TM.
It has been a while, and I had started my writing my responses to the article, however life has been very busy for me. I have had a chance to compelete my thoughts on the article, so here goes:
Although there are many parts of it I don’t disagree with, to me it is far too deterministic and filled with universal statements about people’s lives. This then leads to, what appears to me to be rather over the top and simplistic descriptions of parts of society but which leave out many other aspects of the lives we live, including many of the positive aspects of human relationships which also characterise our interactions with each other. For example statements such as “There is an enormous amount of shame, self-loathing and guilt.” “Distance and aloneness are typical of life today.” and “It’s man against woman and man against man and each of them resentful of everyone else.”, although this is the case for some people at some points, it is clearly not the case for all people.
There is a tendency to look at the current situation, the way that capitalism operates and how the working class will react which to me is far too mechanistic and far too universalistic.
Yes capitalism invades into our lives, but despite the difficulties this produces, despite the ideology that capitalism promotes, we are still a social creature and for lots of us we gain a great deal from the genuine social interactions that makes. The joy of helping one another, the feelings of connectedness we have when we share laughter with friends, the feelings of closeness at times of difficulty, etc.
Another example is the section which states “A repressive milieu affects you from the moment you are born. The child is subjected to many forms of denial and repression. In fact, childhood is the prototype of all later oppression and coercion. The child’s spirit is deformed by constant restrictions.” I can only report my own childhood in great detail, but I have worked with families for many years and for some of us that is not the experience they had.I lived in the same economic system as the one described by the article, but the way it is described is not what it was for me, from what what I can remember. My childhood was a really happy one, I lived in what would nowadays be described as a typical working class neighbourhood, and I was surrounded by acceptance, care and warmth. Not just the females, but a lot of the males as well. There was my next door neighbour who was like a grandfather figure to me who ran a little shoe repair shop, I spent hours in his wooden hut watching him work as he retold stories of his childhood in rural Northumberland, George who lived at the top of the street who had racing pigeons and showed us how to care for the pigeons and helped us make little wooden go carts, as well as many other examples. My family were supportive and nurturing, and not just my Mam but my Da as well.
As we grew up we formed a football team all from kids from the same street and we watched as we married, sometimes to sisters and brothers from the same street. Their kids came along and for a lot of their children; they have made friendships and bonds with each other. We had a street get together recently, which we do once or twice a year, and there were nearly 30 of us, all lads and lasses that lived together and played together and cared and protected each other. I always say I never worried when I went out as a kid ‘cos I had 15 big brothers and 10 big sisters!
I’m not saying that this means that what happened to me is typical, but I have lots of examples (my partner and her friends included) who can describe these types of experiences. So the description given in the article is certainly not universal and I would question if it is even typical.
Capitalism is brutal, vicious and cut throat, however, from my observations, humanity, cooperation, nurture, caring for each other, or at least tolerating each other, always comes to the fore.
For example thinking about the sacrifices that took place during the miners’ strike, as one example, still make me reflect on all of the good that humans can do. The collection centre for food parcels was overwhelmed at times, and despite all that could be thrown at people by the system, when people were starved back to work, they went back with their heads held high and with the support of their community. Over the road from where I live there is now a food bank collection centre held on Mondays and there are people dropping food off all day.
Another example, I have worked for many years with foster carers, hundreds of families who have sacrificed so much of their lives to have the opportunity to care and nurture children who came to them as complete strangers. Not doing this for money (the fostering allowances given are generally pitiful) but to give some stranger’s child a chance to live a better life.
The examples I am giving are not to detract from other people’s experiences, but to make the point that lots of people appear to have a generally happy life, have reasonably friendships, with some close ties with family and often experience warmth and love in several aspects of their lives, despite the depredations of capitalism.
This fits in with one of the several issues I have with the approach that Freud and Reich take, to me it relies very much on the assumptions that everyone has the same experiences and that we all react to these experiences in the same way. We don’t have the same experiences, we all have different experiences and as a result of those differences we create slightly different understandings of the world around us.
For example the early Freudian idea of the Oedipus complex would be laughable if it hadn’t been taken so seriously. That male children fall in love with their mothers and want to eliminate their fathers is so prescriptive and fantastic. What happens if you are brought up by your father on your own because your mother died in childbirth.
Take the idea of penis envy, what about little girls who only have sisters and don’t encounter a brother’s “little friend” to be envious about? We all make different conclusions depending up on our experiences and also to an extent because of our genetics, but also happenstance plays a part. My older brother genuinely had a phobia of giraffes when he was a toddler, the reason for this only became apparent when he was about 3 years old, my mother asked him to close the back door in the kitchen and he said back to her, “yes and keep the giraffes out”, my mother had a stock phrase, shut the door and keep the drafts out, he had misheard what she had said. Although this is funny, it was also the cause of a small amount of trauma for him at the time, and it demonstrates that individual perception is exactly that, individual.
People often say that two children are brought up in the same way and end up with different personalities, but this is not the case. No two people have exactly the same upbringing. Take the example of me and my brother. He is five years older than me and although we had the same genetic parents, we had different experiences of the same people. Just for starters my brother’s parents were five years younger than the parents I had. I shared their love with two siblings from the start of my life, whereas he started life as an only child until the birth of my sister.
Even mono zygotic twins (identical) have a different experience even from the moment the egg splits into two. The two eggs will implant in different parts of the womb, the levels of nutrients will be different, the way they attach through the umbilical cord will be slightly different, the level of hormones shared by their mother’s blood will be different. That’s even before they are born.
That is why the whole idea that we will all react in exactly the same to the same social stimuli is a fallacy. We can also say that generally there is a tendency in most people to respond in certain ways to certain situations, but there will always be some that react differently.
Again I’ll give an example of how genetic difference can make a difference to how we comprehend the world. Back in the 80’s I was involved in the care of a young man who had severe autism, learning difficulties and who was abandoned into the hospital system at the age of 6 months old. Understandably growing up in this strange and uncaring world he developed very challenging ways to protect himself. As he had no language and because he was scared, he responded by biting people if he was scared or if he was threatened. In the early 70’s one of the “therapists” came up with what was described as a “behaviour modification programme”. The programme was that if this lad bit someone the nursing staff would put Tabasco sauce into his mouth. Apart from the fact that this was cruel, abusive and despicable, the “programme” also had another difficulty. People who have autism often have hyposensitivity to taste, to him all tastes were quite bland. So, to him having a splash of Tabasco sauce was an absolute treat. Instead of discouraging him from biting people, they were actually rewarding him!
Returning to the article in question the author quotes Reich as saying “The father represents and teaches authority . . .The family in capitalist society . . . protects the woman and the children, but its cardinal function is … to produce a bourgeois outlook and a conservative personality”, again I can only speak of the men in my family, this was certainly not their role.
They taught me to challenge the system, cooperate with each other for the good of others, to love and be loved. This, I suppose, is the real problem, reducing the experiences as billions of millions of individual people to form of psychological determinism.
Eric Berne, who developed the concept of personal script, told the story of two brothers, the two brothers had been told by their mother for many years that they would both end up in a lunatic asylum. When he met them it was in an asylum, they had both followed the message given by their mother, however one was a patient and the other was a psychiatrist.
I suppose what I am saying is that the world is full of difference and different people, with different experiences may also lead them to similar conclusions. For example, no doubt, the oppressive nature of society and of some family and family relationships may lead some people to seek out a freer and more humane way of living, this may also lead them to understand the constraints which capitalism places on them and may make the idea of a Socialist transformation of society an urgent necessity (and good on them for it).
Others may see the cooperative and caring family they were brought up in and the nurturing and supportive community they experienced as a model which demonstrates practically the way in which a sane society could operate, if only the constraints of the capitalist system were over thrown.
There may also be other individuals who see things from a very logical and methodical way who see the irrationality of the current system, the waste, the futility of reform, etc. and as a result develop a Socialist consciousness.
The one dimensional approach to the human mind of people like Freud, Reich, Jung, and others is based not on scientific study but is based purely on personal conjecture and the unsupported claims of these theorists. Have some of them developed useful insights, undoubtedly. However if their supporters wish to celebrate these insights, they must also accept the damage and destruction their work has gone on to cause. With Freud’s theories (with all of their difficulties and useful contributions) there is also Freud’s approach, the great psychiatrist who cannot be questioned, whose word is law. To gain an insight into the trauma the great man/woman approach to psychiatry, psychology and therapy, have caused you only need to read about the life and times of Bruno Bettleheim.
This is not to say that Freudian approaches haven’t been part of the development of current understandings of the human mind, you couls say probably in the same way that Hippocrates laid the foundation of modern medicine. However I wouldn’t expect my GP to base their treatment of me by following the ideas of Hippocrates, and neither would I expect to any serious student of the human psyche to base their outdated and unscientific ideas of Freud.
As I have said several times on this forum, far more interesting and scientifically tested approaches exist. For example attachment theory, which began from an early attempt to empirically examine object relations theory, and has played a pivotal role in linking psychoanalytic theory with its social and neurobiological correlates. It re-focused attention onto the primacy of actual relational trauma and the importance of the interpersonal dimension of human relatedness as opposed to fantasy and the intrapsychic environment. I would recommend reading up about it.
This leads me on to Wez’s question “what have all of your establishment experts got to say about the relationship between political ideology and psychological development/character?”.
Interestingly to the Socialist point of view, Attachment Theory is based upon the idea that early infant experiences of care and nurture, or the lack of it and also puts forward the idea that the more cooperative, connected and available the care giver is to the child, the more likely the child will develop a secure attachment and also be able to develop cooperative interdependent behaviours and personalities themselves. As most studies state that between 55-65% of children develop a secure relationship. It would seem that the nature or our attachments would predict a higher number of the population held postive viewpoints about the imporance of cooperation and interdependent activity. This has been indicated by several studies in America that generally those with secure attachments were far more likely to have “liberal” rather than Conservative views. People with insecure avoidant attachments (usually rated as between 25-20% of the population) held a mix of liberal and conservative views and that insecure ambivalent attachments (usually rated as between 20-15% of the population) were more likely to have conservative views.
Although that is not in any way an exact science, it is certainly a solid answer to the age old “human nature” argument, i.e. attachment makes the point that human nature is actually hard wired in to us to be cooperative and interdependent, and that anti social behaviour is the exception, rather than the rule, usually occuring where there has been early years trauma and neglect (that is not to say that all people who experiecned trauma and neglect will become anti social).
I have had that happen to me when my reply has been the first post of a new page of posts. I would just repost it again .
“Without them the task is not hard but impossible (at least if we care that we have a factory full to the brim with useless tartan paint while the fertiliser factory down the road goes without key raw materials)”
It’s a good job the capitalist system of production doesn’t lead to mass shortages of key materials such as food, housing, power, clean water, etc.
I’m pretty sure the goods discussed in the article below will be available in tartan, ironically
Am I the only person who finds it amazing that Von Mises’ argument is even consider worthy of debate (I know it still has a high profile in the US).
Von Mises argued that in the capitalist mode of production, the law of value, money, financial prices and the impact of capital goods and private ownership of the means of production is more efficient and productive than a system of production based upon common ownership.
The reality of this mythical system is somewhat different.
Me and my mates buried a friend of more than 50 years yesterday. He died because the Company he worked for, from the age of 16, thought it was more efficient and productive for welders not to have proper masks, and that that the cost of effective safety equipment would reduce their levels of profit and make him as a worker “inefficient”.
Prior to his early death he spent 10 years using an oxygen cylinder to breathe.
The company he worked for have, predictably, gone bust. The insurance companies who covered the company have also gone into hiding. They have accumulate their capital, distributed their dividends, and they and the share holders have fucked off and are never to be seen again, or to hold any kind of liability. Very efficient.
I’m sure his family will love to hear the modern day Von Mises and his devotees explaining how it is that capitalist production is the only efficient and effective way of producing the things we need to live and that the only measure of that efficiency is price, the price of lives.
Even if, in a socialist society, we produce too many cigars and cigarettes (to use Von Mises example), even if we end up with stores of things that we do not require, so what? It will be a scratch on the surface of the inefficiencies of capitalism.
Inefficiencies? What about all of those futile years of labour spent in the banking industry, brokerage, buying and selling. All of the buildings used as cathedrals to the exchange and sales system (banks, building societies, etc.). All of those wasted lives spent as administrators of capitalism (invoice clerks, account managers, wages staff, insurance arrangers, stock brokers, etc. etc.).
And all of this is before you even start to look at the massive waste of the armaments industry, the killing machines of the state, the environmental degradation of the planet.
If a socialist society ends up producing a few too many school uniforms, a few thousand left handed screw drivers that aren’t used and a few too many tins of tartan paint taht sit on the shelf, I’m pretty sure we could be easily be forgiven. Esspecially if fewer welders die in the process.
Rest easy Geordie, your marras miss you, keep a’had!
Milburn used to work at a left wing bookshop in Newcastle which was called “The Days of Hope” usually known as “The Haze of Dope”.
He caught a mate of mine, who was a 17 year old Trot at the time, shoplifting a copy of the collected work of Enver Hoxha. He didn’t call the law but asked him to work voluntarily in the shop for a few hours to recompense.
A worse punishment would have been to make him read the bloody book!
Not wishing to be critical of the internet department, but if we have qr codes going out as part of the campaign material, would it be possible to update the Socialist Standard page to show the July standard. Although the front cover is online, the content is from June (really good cover cover by the way)
“Ah bless Timmie.”
So you try to find out the first name of an obscure member up in the north, but of course you’re not obsessed.
Looking at the figures, assuming things have not changed is the last thing I would be doing!
Given the gap between 18-29 year olds believing in creationism 28% and the numbers in other cohorts
Between 44 to 50%, depending on cohort, I think it is reasonable to expect that after 10 years that trend would continue.If the current 18-29 year olds follow the trend and there is a halving of creationist belief they might be at around 15%, a very promising statistic.
I think astually what you are seeing is not a rise in the religious right, it’s a sign of the desperation of religion in the US, trying to recreate their previous power.
Thankfully they are pissing wind:
I think Lizzie is a bit like a soppy teenager who doesn’t know how to express their love interest. Instead of making their feelings known, they run up to their object of desire, punch them on the arm and then run away and then feel bad afterwards.
I think we should just accept the love she shows us, even if she can’t express it.
We love you too Lizzie
And continue the real life solutions such as the ones Kier Starmer has put forward, i.e. – “I’ll just magically create economic growth”
p.s. don’t spend the extra 33p a day you will have to play with due to the generosity of Octopus, straight away. A mate of mine (who usually gets it right), works in wholesale energy sales and he says the reduction is short lived and prices will go up again steeply very shortly.
Might be good idea to lock your price in now if you can and then you can, with confidence, deliberate on how you are going to splash out on your 33p.
I might suggest a Curly Wurly (much diminished in size and quality since the 1970s, in my opinion) available at 25p from Azda (but you’ll have to walk there, as you don’t have enough left over for the bus)
You must be proud of being bought off by a Curly Wurly
The question isn’t what the SPGB have achieved, the real question is, what has been achieved by all of the so called socialists who told us there’s was the way to the promised land?
The Fabians and the soft leftist have told us for decades that to elicit change we need to be in government and that capitalism will disappear like the Cheshire Cat’s grin. (Looks to me like the Cheshire Cat has only stopped grinning because he’s busy pissing his pants laughing)
The “hard left” have told us that we need to promise reforms to show that capitalism can’t be reformed and this will lead the Working Class to throw off reforms and become revolutionary, that’s worked well, not.
Perhaps more importantly, what would have happened if those who claimed that they agreed with the idea of common ownership and “from each according to their ability to each according to their need”, had actually joined us to campaign for such a thing?
The reformists claim that they have achieved a welfare state and progressive social changes, yet if you look at The Republic of Ireland, it has all of those things yet always been governed by centre Right governments.
It looks suspiciously like all the reforms that have been achieved are reforms that benefit the accumulation of capital.
As to Phil Hammond’s article, he should have asked “what has 100 years of chasing every bandwagon available achieved for him and has like”.
Then we have the Trots deride us for our achievements over 120 years, good job for them Trotskyism has been such a roaring fucking success!
