
The discussion that follows was prompted by the article: Report on the class struggle. The discussion was initiated by Fred.
Below is the discussion so far. Feel free to add your own comments!
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The discussion that follows was prompted by the article: Report on the class struggle. The discussion was initiated by Fred.
Below is the discussion so far. Feel free to add your own comments!
This enormous article. The second half so full for me of new ideas hammering home. The paragraphs about "morality" which altogether change the meaning and significance of the word.
The bourgeois has little understanding of morality beyond making sure not to get fiddled in monetary transactions. But, as the ICC points out, workers bring a different point of view and an extended dimension to this matter, having a wider grasp of the moral way of being than do their uncritical exploiters. This is because workers, not being exploiters themselves, think differently from the bourgeois as Pannekoek noted. Workers think differently and with a different methodology than the bourgeoisie. (But how to back up this assertion?) The working class isn't shackled for ever to the belief that money is all that matters and that its acquisition is the final and only purposive aim of life. The working class bears the new revolutionary seeds of the future in its very being, and this serves to change its outlook, producing its warm feelings for life and for all other people and nature as part of it.
.In this same article the ICC mentions the enormous creativity of Hegel, Beethoven and Goethe at the dawn of capitalist expansion. But in thinking about where actual assertions of human dignity and acts of morality by workers themselves might be found in artistic expression, I remembered the 19th.century works of English literature in the novel form, called by the critic F.R. Leavis the great tradition. For this tradition is a moral one and the morality therein is expressed often by characters of working class background, or those rendered impoverished by fate.
I can refer to George Eliot's working class character Adam Bede is all his simple honesty. Adam has great dignity in himself and the work he engages in. Or naïveté as the bourgeois would say. And Dr. Lydgate in "Middlemarch" strictly committed to medical science till misled and rendered undignified by his sexy wife, only interested in the power yielded by money. Or Gwendolen Harleth, the rich girl turned harlot upon losing her fortune in "Daniel Deronda" and selling herself to the highest bidder. But coming to realise sadly her painful fall from grace and the loss of moral standards that underpin self esteem, but which money doesn't automatically ensure.
Then there's the dignity and self-assuredness expressed by the circus workers in Dicken's "Hard Times"; in contrast to the hard nosed money making activities of the factory owner Gradgrind. And the painful morality learned by Pip in "Great Expectations" when he learns that riches can be tainted too and seeks a return to honest work. To honest wage labour that is. The assertion of human dignity by the exploited class.
To finish. I feel I have not made my case, whatever it is, very well. I apologise. But this is a new area of thought and speech for me as I think it is too for the ICC. We must continue to consider this. I look forward very much to reading the ICC's Theses on Morality fairly soon.
For what it's worth I cannot recommend this admittedly long article enough. It contains remarkable and unexpected plums such as the following inspirational paragraph.