Horner's Corner

Fast Tube by Casper">Money makes the world go round (From \’Cabaret\’)

It’s not just about the bankers, despicable though they are, is it? the real problem has a name: ‘capitalism’

An Interview with Marshall Berman

Tony Monchinski

… there is a paradox in fundamentalism. Every religion in the twentieth century is polarized: on the one hand it’s more humanistic and inclusive, on the other hand it’s more tribal, rigid and exclusive. Part of the exclusion is that not only does it exclude people from other religions but it also excludes most of the people from the religion itself. For example, to a Christian fundamentalist, most Christians turn out not to be true Christians; for a Muslim fundamentalist, most Muslims turn out not to be true Muslims.

All fundamentalisms have a depressingly similar structure. It’s easier for them [varying religious fundamentalists] to talk to one another and they have more in common with one another than they do with other Jews, other Hindus, other Christians, etc. But Fundamentalism is a very modern idea. It takes traditions that are thousands of years old and rejects almost all of them, conceptualizing a few of them and putting them into a system. It then judges all life according to that system.

Fundamentalism uses very modern forms of cognitive operations: it’s not the only modern way to see things, but it is certainly one of the ways to see things. Fundamentalism is also open to modern technology. It’s extremely avant-garde, so that in many religions the most sophisticated computer technologists are fundamentalists. In a sense Fundamentalists are more willing to buy into certain forms of modern technology more uncritically than secular humanists like myself. Willing to buy into anything if it will put forth their idea of the faith. (….)

T.M.: Your All That Is Solid Melts Into Air is a ringing defense of modernity. For many segments of the left, Post Modernism is a specious concept. What, if anything, should we (the left) take from Post Modernism?

M.B.: I guess the most attractive quality in it is skepticism towards everything. That’s something we should always carry around with us. We should always be self-scrutinizing and self-critical.

But I don’t think many of the Post-Modernists themselves have actually done that. Part of the thing that is so infuriating to me about the Post Mods is the total lack of self-criticism, so that they can see how all previous thought was complicit in this and that — which is often certainly true — except for them. The idea that is impossible to tell the truth about anything except this. The naiveté with which they did this was attractive to many people, except me. I think Nietzsche is a very good teacher in that way, in that he shows we must say to ourselves, what if the opposite is true, instead of what I think?…(more)

Freedom and Fetishism

Marshall Berman

“The world,” says Wittgenstein, “is all that is the case.” Labour power, capital, commodities, surplus-value: these Tatsachen encase the world of the bourgeoisie. But there is something odd about this world: its “atomic facts” serve as its basic values as well. All possible descriptions have prescriptions built in; words themselves define the “proper” attitude to be adopted toward all the things they describe — and thus save men the trouble of morally making up their minds. But if, as we said above, freedom is logically bound up with choice; and if the capitalist outlook on the world tends to evade choice; and if, as Marx wrote in 1842, “Morality rests on the autonomy, religion on the heteronomy of the spirit” — then it is clear that it is as a religion, and not as a morality, that capitalist fanaticism must be understood.

This is precisely the sort of explanation Marx is attempting in his discussion of the “fetishism of commodities”:

… we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and with the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands … (Capital, 83).

The function of fetishism, and of religion in general, is to relieve the believer of responsibility for his actions. It is not he who is acting, it is the God (or daemon) who is acting in and through him; he cannot criticise, modify or change the world; he, like the world itself, is merely the vehicle of an alien Will. Similarly, the capitalist denies that it is in his power even to try to alter the ruinous processes of the market: it operates according to “eternal laws” to which he and all men are helplessly subjected. The fiction of Natural Law — which plays on all the ambiguities of both “nature” and “law,” and through which descriptive and normative discourse are fused — is immensely powerful in keeping men riveted to their roles. …(more)

All that is solid melts into air: the experience of modernity

Marshall Berman

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via ::: wood s lot ::: “the fitful tracing of a portal”.