[Daktoria]

Interesting how you place the blame square on pragmatism. Probably the first time I've heard you say something useful, clear and direct. I can only sort of agree though. As I see it the problem of pragmatism is that it suggests we can quantify and communicate all the factors as though nothing can be unprecedented or too subtle or interdependent to explain. It consists of the externalization of thinking processes and therefore the bureaucraticization and socialization of personal factors of life. Rather than assume there's more going on than we can bring out into the light - in days of yore the assumption was that only the greatest writers could even get close to a relatively complete description of things. It seems to me there is a connection here with coercion, yes. But I just call it all ignorance or assumption. To call it pragmatism makes it seem like one of several possibly valid choices.

To be upfront, I've blamed pragmatism pretty much forever, Sus, whether on this forum or others or RL. My father was anti-social and concretely emotional, and a lot of the reason I'm so goddamn socially awkward is his refusal to engage me while belaying the responsibility of bringing me up to my mother and school.

In any case, I agree with everything you've said (especially about externalism, bureaucracy, and socializing) except the historicist foundation. Pragmatism bounces back and forth with historicism because both ideas are concretely emotional. With pragmatism, we do what feels good in the moment. With historicism, we only reflect on those memories which give us a feel good vibe.

In order to escape pragmatism, people have to decide to be openminded and complete in analyzing their environments instead of merely acting out. That's the difference between acting out and sublimination. When you really care about the future and can see necessity-possibility relationships, that's when a priori synthesis happens. Quite literally, completeness lets us put things together before we can experience what they look like after the fact of experience. It does this by considering everything that happens, and operating by process of elimination.

This is especially vital as it pertains to family structure because without completeness, we can't define an appropriate duty of care towards children. Children don't ask to be born, yet still, the working class is stuck in this idea that children are servants first, students second.

I guess that's what makes the real difference between the proletariat and bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie cares about its children. The proletariat does not. It's really no surprise when we hear bourgeois clamors for redistributive justice because that perpetuates the social alienation process and social hierarchy structure. The only difference is it transitions the economic center of gravity away from industrial and financial capital towards political and cultural capital.

[Suska]

Interesting, though the bourgeoisie/proletariat divide is probably quite a bit more sketchy in reality than you seem to believe, and I'm not sure there's an easy formula for raising children. Tainari could probably write a few books on the matter and there's still as always - our actual situation, which is not always explicable in a schematic form (as I think we've just agreed). Some of what your saying just goes over my head, but your grief about redistribution doesn't look useful to me. We don't live in extremes, no one does despite the implied extremism of calling it entirely one way or the other. As I indicated in the rich/poor thread my position on that is that we want to have relations that aren't coerced in any way or otherwise everything is a competition and a bribe and going farther with competition life will become a meat grinder. So the liberal idea is to lighten things up for the poor and give them some room for voluntary and creative acts which the market place by itself doesn't encourage (at the very least). There's an extreme to each side which is undesirable though of course and it's difficult enough to know what's real so judging degree of assistance is tricky. I'm sure there's a place in the world for pragmatism if we know that like everything else it has its limits.

[daft punk]

daft, give it a break. Families have existed since caveman times.

I said the nuclear family.

wikipedia:
"The concept of the nuclear family was first noticed in Western Europe in the 17th century. With the emergence of proto-industrialization and early capitalism, the nuclear family became a financially viable social unit."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_family

I don't make this shit up you know.

The issue regarding capitalism is how the family unit's enclosure has been reinforced in order to yield isolation and suspicion among people. This imbues two things: hierarchy and sexual stress. Hierarchy encourages suffering and work ethic which can be used as principles for the labor supply, and sexual stress encourages not only reproduction for emotional release, but also successive generation tension which reinforces demand for intermediated socializing.

Have you lifted this from somewhere?

However, the question you have to really ask yourself is "Who reinforced this enclosure?" Blaming (merchant) capitalism for this is insufficient because isolation, suspicion, hierarchy, and sexual stress go back before the 14th century.

This is a bit mixed up. Merchant capitalism is not the capitalism of the Victorian age I was talking about. The nuclear family came in then for the working class. Capitalism took over from feudalism after the English capitalist revolution aka Civil War. Then came the industrial revolution and people moved into the cities and factories. At first women and children worked in the factories but then the capitalists wanted it to be just the men, and they promoted the nuclear family to the working class.

"In view of these developments, many observers have noted a "fit" between the nuclear family and industrialism."
http://www2.hu-berlin.de/sexology/ATLAS ... amily.html

Heck, even if we look at say paleolithic marriage as a distribution of property rights before the advent of neolithic religion, that's still insufficient because while property rights explicitly demonstrate relationships, they don't isolate. Property rights merely symbolize. Heck, you could have polyamory with property rights if you wanted to.

What property do you think existed in the paleolithic? Polyamory is not a nuclear family is it?

This leaves only one remaining possibility - that the isolation and separation factors are primitivist notions of sexual competition itself. You can observe this even among packs of animals where alphas take pride in controlling the group whereas betas are pretty much dismissed. Contrast this to civilization if you will where betas are actually treated with respect because might makes right isn't an issue. Instead, people are free to intermingle at their leisure.

What this means is that the real increasing isolation we're experiencing today is not a matter of capitalism, but a matter of force. By becoming increasingly pragmatic, people are becoming increasingly divisive.

As I say, the nuclear family was promoted by the capitalists. Their biggest reason was so as to know who were their sons, so they could inherit their businesses and continue them.

[Daktoria]

Interesting, though the bourgeoisie/proletariat divide is probably quite a bit more sketchy in reality than you seem to believe, and I'm not sure there's an easy formula for raising children. Tainari could probably write a few books on the matter and there's still as always - our actual situation, which is not always explicable in a schematic form (as I think we've just agreed). Some of what your saying just goes over my head, but your grief about redistribution doesn't look useful to me. We don't live in extremes, no one does despite the implied extremism of calling it entirely one way or the other. As I indicated in the rich/poor thread my position on that is that we want to have relations that aren't coerced in any way or otherwise everything is a competition and a bribe and going farther with competition life will become a meat grinder. So the liberal idea is to lighten things up for the poor and give them some room for voluntary and creative acts which the market place by itself doesn't encourage (at the very least). There's an extreme to each side which is undesirable though of course and it's difficult enough to know what's real so judging degree of assistance is tricky. I'm sure there's a place in the world for pragmatism if we know that like everything else it has its limits.

Well I won't deny merit entirely from pragmatism. The one application I see for it is craftsmanship as I explained in the language thread before. Pragmatism is tolerable AFTER we've defined what we're setting out to express in production.

However, the application of pragmatism BEFORE definition risks projective identification, and that breaks down organic community because it displaces others' identities with our own. The implication is that we aren't trusting someone else so much as we're just seeing our own reflection in who other people are.

Regarding lightening things up, I'll agree that consumerism does that, but not capitalism. Consumerism seeks to get people caught up in the hussle and bussle of happy chaos so people don't pay attention to what's really going on. That commodification of labor becomes a vicious cycle among the working class because it forgets the values behind traditions and instead, only passes down the practice of tradition in order to comply with hypercompetition in being results-oriented.

However, we can't really say capitalism does this because capitalism depends upon an organic understanding of the relations of production, and that's impossible among commodified operators.

Frankly, capitalists know this because capitalists only become capitalists due to prior social alienation. They didn't fit in with the original primitive/feudal relations of production, so they had to become pioneers and exhibit imagination in order to become valuable. Therefore, the idea of capitalists pursuing commodification via lightening things up doesn't really make sense. It would be a self-destructive philosophy. If anything, capitalists would advocate freedom of association in order to build communities (and families) where they can be included as well as prevent social alienation into the future.

Anything that won't sell, I don't want to invent. Its sale is proof of utility, and utility is success.

Being busy does not always mean real work. The object of all work is production or accomplishment and to either of these ends there must be forethought, system, planning, intelligence, and honest purpose, as well as perspiration. Seeming to do is not doing.

I am proud of the fact that I never invented weapons to kill.

I have friends in overalls whose friendship I would not swap for the favor of the kings of the world.

One might think that the money value of an invention constitutes its reward to the man who loves his work. But... I continue to find my greatest pleasure, and so my reward, in the work that precedes what the world calls success.

- Thomas Edison