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SELF IN MASS
SOCIETY
AGAINST ZURCHER*
CHAPTER EIGHT
SELF AND SOCIETY The development of the self system is, usually, a social psychological process based upon symbolic interaction. If we are to understand the nature of the self, it is necessary to examine the forms of interaction permitted and/or demanded by the logics of that society. In mass society, typically the structure of interaction is bureaucratically organized. The need for instrumental control of behavior in capitalist society has led to the bureaucracy as the major instrument of social control.
Interaction in bureaucracy and other formal organizations is so brief, impersonal, and narrowly focused that the development of a socially based self-system is difficult. In as much as rules, orders, and job descriptions mediate behavior in bureaucratically organized societies, the self system is superfluous.
The study and theory of self has not developed much in American sociology since the work of Cooley, Mead and, in more recent times, Erving Goffman. As the indices of personal and social disorganization continue to increase--and as the contributions of social psychology in the West continue to be irrelevant to the development of a competent self system in a decent society, it becomes more urgent to reexamine the state of social psychology, identify its failings and move toward more adequate theories of self and society.
A society moving toward more fragmented and predatory forms of self needs this self-knowledge more than it needs an army; more than it needs automobiles, more than it needs nuclear based energy and more than it needs Monday Night Football.
The writings of Louis Zurcher (1977) provide the opportunity for such a critique of Western social psychology. Zurcher provides us with an effort to make visible a model of self which he sees as appropriate to the times. He locates himself within the framework of contemporary work in the field and aligns his model with the writings of the more popular and more engaging theorists in the field. Zurcher relies upon and departs from the writings of David Riesman, Philip Slater, Charles Reich, Robert Lifton, Victor Ferkiss, Abraham Maslow, Alvin Toffler and many, many others including the three reviewers quoted favorably on the cover of his book.
In that Zurcher has offered what he clearly believes to be a meta-psychology for modern society and in that he anchors himself within every liberal camp existing, it is particularly useful to critique his work. In that Zurcher does not mention The Critical School, Structural Marxism, Adam Schaff, Mihailo Markovic, Jurgen Habermas, Wilhelm Reich, Mao, Herbert Marcuse or Fidel Castro, Zurcher provides the opportunity to construct a clear dialectic in opposition to bourgeois models of self.
Zurcher has committed himself to the notion of a mutable self as a solution to the problem of alienation while radical social psychology, oriented to the writings of Marx, offers a strategy of social revolution as the appropriate approach to the question of alienation.
Zurcher says that alienation can be repaired within the structure of class, elitist society (p. 215; 218, 237): radical social psychology states that these very structures themselves must be eliminated before a competent self system is possible. Zurcher is excessively voluntaristic: in his world, people may choose, select, elect, prefer, accept, or decide which kind of self to create and present (The expository case is found on pages 185-219). In the Marxist analysis of the alienated self, action, will, and choice are variables intimately tied to the structures of domination (Trent Schroyer, 1973). The tyrannies of the state; the labor market; the retail system; the credit system; the structures of racism and gender privilege; the heavy hand of bureaucrats in school, church, and shop all bespeak an array of power not weighed in such 'anyone can do it' view.
In capitalist society, as in other class-based, elitist societies, the means to produce self are limited by the means of material production as well as the modes of distribution. In capitalist societies, the huge inequalities in economic power, physical power, social power and even moral power are deployed against those who would challenge the boss, the professor, the police or the banker.
For Zurcher, the crucial dialectic for a competent self system is one between modes of being: Mode A, Mode B, Mode C, or D. For critical social psychology, however, I suggest the more relevant dialectic is between modes of social organization: between capitalist and democratically organized socialist societies.
Zurcher has reduced the question of human emancipation to a question of choice between jogging, working, reflecting on one's fate or mediating--A, B, C, and D mode activity respectively. For the Marxist, the question of human emancipation is oriented to the reunification of production and distribution; to the reunification of self and society; as well as to the reunification of subjective and objective knowledge--topics which Zurcher does not address.
Topics such as praxis, distributive justice, mystification, objectification, coercion, monopoly, authority, power, false consciousness and class conflict are not the problematics of Zurcher's search for a competent self. What is the central problematic for Zurcher is a self system appropriate to a changing world apart from the direction of that change (p. 35).
In particular, Zurcher advocates a self able
to move easily between four modes of being and
to integrate these four modes (p. 36).
The central thesis of this essay is that Zurcher's model of self is just that model of self appropriate to a mass, depersonalized society in which the structure of bureaucracy is the central organizing institution and in which the interest of bourgeois freedom permits the continued appropriation of social labor to the benefit of class elites.
Zurcher provides just that theory and model of self which fits any mass society and therefore has a political dimension implicit in it. Zurcher attempts to depoliticize social psychology and to lift the question of human emancipation from the shape and structure of the larger society. Zurcher performs the remarkable feat of stripping social psychology of its sociology.
It is against this model of self and against the effort to consider questions of self apart from those of the larger society that this essay is directed. It is against Zurcher's concept of the self, against his use of the concept of alienation, and against his mutable self which this essay stands.
In place of the mutable self we offer the praxical model of self. Against Zurcher's notion of alienation-as-feeling we assert that alienation involves concrete social relations. Against Zurcher's problematic of social change as a given with a mutable self adapting to it, we insist that social revolution is the central problematic and political struggle central to it. The better question is, What kind of social change?
Against Zurcher's running (p. 211), stock-brokering (p. 211), and Za-Zen mediation (p. 212) we offer resistance, rebellion and revolution. Against Zurcher's four modes of being, we offer the five moments of praxis identified by Crocker (1976) and Markovic (1974) as central to the self structure #f an authentically social person. Against mass society and its inevitable companions; crime, depression, exploitation, demeaning welfare and family violence, we offer a struggle toward democratic socialist society. Against Zurcher, there is much to oppose and to critique.
Self and Mass Society: The Data. The Zurcher data as well as a
number of studies cited by Zurcher suggest
a shift from 'B' mode responses on the T.S.T. toward 'C' mode
responses (p. 51). The T.S.T. is a twenty statement test developed
by Manford Kuhn at the University of Iowa, in which people are
asked to respond, up to twenty times, to the question, "Who Am I?"
The analytic assumption is that the response pattern reveals the structure of self in that people take themselves as an object in ways which closely mirrors their self structure.
"A" mode replies focus on the body in time and space; "B"
modes reflect social relationships;
"C" mode responses are oriented to personal style while
"D" mode reports are detached from either physical or
behavioral attributes. Responses which have abstract
referents are coded "D" mode responses.
While the data are probably valid--the hundreds of T.S.T. administered by my students at Colorado State University confirm the shift thesis--the interpretation of that data is politically loaded.
Zurcher's interpretation is that people are moving from B mode to C mode self concepts because the social structure is unacceptable or unstable (or perceived to be such). The C mode self definition represented a self which tended to be more situation-free (p. 58). C mode persons were more fluid, more able to accommodate change, more tolerant, more open to new experience and more reflective (P. 59). There is another interpretation.
Perhaps people are not deserting a social order which is unstable or in a "state of confusion." Perhaps the social order is more stable but less suitable as a structural basis for self system. Perhaps the four corner posts of the self system: family, work, school and church no longer present a structural basis for a self system. Perhaps the individual is not "stepping back" from the social order but rather a permanent and stable self system is no longer the solution to the problem of order in mass society.
It well may be the case that large scale organizations are better organized than ever...goodness knows they hire hundreds of experts in management science and industrial psychology and time study. It well may be that the way in which society is organized is more the problem than the anomie alleged to mark contemporary life at work, play, church, school and market.
If so, the political consequences are significant. In Zurcher's formula, the solution is a self capable of surviving instability. In opposition to Zurcher, this interpretation requires a social revolution from one kind of stability to another; from an alienating, suffocating stability toward a liberating, emancipating, solidifying stability.
My interpretation of the data (1972) is that the social order in capitalist society, or any managerial society, no longer serves as an adequate basis for the self structure. The instrumental rationality of profit, growth, and control of the social environment which guides the modern corporation renders an interest in a strong and competent self redundant. In fact, a weak and adaptable self, easily shaped to the new roles, new fashions, new demands of monopoly capital is preferable.
Zurcher sees the confused individual abandoning a
social order becoming more unstable. I see the
social order abandoning the individual while the
social order thrives.
Work and Self The world of work is a central anchorage point for
the self system across the human history. In the
past four hundred years, especially the last 50, there have been
structural changes in the institutions of work. Agriculture, which
until lately provided a stable behavioral framework over all the
centuries of pain we have seen, has become a giant corporation
using capital intensive means of production. Farmers are
redundant.
Industrial production has undergone great change as well--in the pursuit of stability not away from it. Capitalists have moved their production from northern towns where wages were inadequate to southern states where wages are lower. The profit picture improved. Capitalists have moved many lines of production to third world countries where labor conditions are "favorable" and where neo-fascist regimes guarantee stability (Chomsky and Herman, 1979).
Capitalists involved in the production of apparel, shoes, watches, cars, television sets, computers, and food stuffs have abandoned the U.S. for countries with low wages. Capitalist flight is hostile to a linkage between self and society for those who want to work.
In the work setting itself, an instrumentally rationalized productive process rejects the self-system as the primary mediator of behavior. Persons are not expected to organize their own behavior using a permanent occupational social identity as the mediator of any given line of activity. Instead, the worker sells his/her labor power and is required to use the order, the directive, the instruction from a supervisor as the mediator of behavior. The supervisor has effective control of worker's behavior (Braverman, 1974).
For a worker to stand upon his or her rights as a competent person and to mediate the boss's command violates the control rationality of a division of labor which gives a monopoly to management over the behavior of the employed worker. Imagine what would happen to an employee at Lockheed who protested openly, morally, against overcharging for military goods. Imagine, if you will, what would happen to an employee at Dupont who suggested dropping Napalm from the catalog; imagine what would happen to an employee at Hooker Chemical who refused to dump tons of toxic chemicals into the Niagara waterway. The use of a morally informed self system to shape the production plans of profit oriented companies would be economic suicide and most employees understand that as they understand the logics of profit itself.
Business colleges at Harvard, Michigan, Stanford and Ohio State are busy producing managers who have "better" administrative schemes. The modern industry has little interest in a competent self system. It is interested in hydraulic systems, assembly systems, computer systems, accounting systems, electrical systems and legal systems--not self systems.
The modern university follows, mindlessly, the interests of capitalist economics. The retail industry selects, uses, and discards employees even as the retail corporation expands. Fast food stores use thousands of young people who bear no permanent relationship to their place of employment. Good business practice avoids commitment to people.
The corporation has title to the social position upon which social identity rests and discards people as they become unprofitable (Young, 1979). Braverman (1974) also reports how the world of work has been degraded for lower and middle echelon employees as considerations of profit shape the white-collar world. Ward's and G.M. have adopted a policy of using part-time employees and overtime to avoid permanent commitment to people. The modern university offers the same terms of employment for its faculty. Labor costs are reduced by hiring part-time people who, then, become part-time, fragmentary selves in their world of work.
The industrial, business, financial, educational and religious institutions have increasingly moved to the bureaucratic format as a mode of social organization--both employees and clients are better controlled--and better discarded--within bureaucracy than with smaller, more intimate work systems. We have moved from a society in which the primary mediating structure has shifted from self to bureaucracy.
The competent, self-directing, self-organizing, self- motivating self system is enemy to the bureaucratic administrative echelon. It is precisely the structural features of the bureaucracy in particular and the formal organization in general which produces a mass society. It is the processes of self anchorage which disappear in mass society: not the formal organization and certainly not social organization.
As human behavior became rationalized in schools, shops, factories, offices and churches, the control of behavior becomes shifted to a managerial cadre and away from the self as a mediator of situated behavior. As the needs for profit and control continues, the self system is an obstacle. Depth psychology, behavioral modification, enlarged police forces and cash incentives come to supplement the administrative order as the mediator of behavior in mass society.
Millions of persons are surplus to the productive process as the quest for profit encourages high technology, high energy, capital intensive production. Millions more become surplus as markets are lost to socialist liberation movements as well as to German and Japanese competition. Millions more become surplus as capital moves to the third world. And millions more are surplus as welfare rolls are trimmed and war on poverty programs discontinued.
These persons cannot report socially anchored self attributes since they have none. They are deserted by capitalism and even by family and by church.
Americans are turning to new sources of self (Young, 1972) to replace those short episodic interactional encounters which mark social contact in mass education, mass sports, mass market, mass medicine, mass politics and mass industry and business. Some of those identities are adequate and some less adequate.
The Zodiac, eastern religion...especially Buddhism which denigrates the self as the source of alienation; pop movements in psychology, personal attributes, animals, features of nature; and, very importantly, ethnic identities previously discarded are embraced once again by fourth and fifth generation Americans as the stuff out of which self is made and made known. It is less shameful to be Black, Jewish, Polish, Italian or Chicano than just thirty years ago.
The important thing to note is that the structural basis for self is eroded--not that social institutions are evaporating or that people are turning away from the social order as Zurcher holds. A person could not have a self with the option of a strong, permanent set of social identities anchored in work, play, school, church and family even if s/he wanted such a self.
One does have A, C, and D mode bases for self structure. One can emphasize muscle, thigh and breast as the defining character of one's persona. One can deploy clothing, car or cosmetic as the essence of one's being. There are deviant identities available. One can identify with the cosmos, the universe or the ineffable but these have little behavioral meaning. A mass society is hostile to self as well as to the human process. The adjustments proposed by Zurcher are pathetically inadequate.
Alienation and Mass Society. Zurcher properly identifies social change as his problematic and erroneously pushes the mutable self as the solution. The central problematic remains that identified by Marx. It is not that people are dropping out and doping us as much as it is that people are alienated from the process by which human being is constituted. Some turn away from so much sorrow; some turn on to less painful worlds.
The problem is not social change per se but rather the use and discarding of people for purposes of profit. That problem would remain even if social change ended this moment or if everyone had a mutable self.
Central to the process by which people become human is the unification of subjective and objective knowledge (Applebaum and Chotiner, 1979). By this is meant that the acting subject knows the "truth" of the physical and social world to the extent that person participates insightfully in producing material and social reality. The acting individual must be the subject as well as the object of the productive process else knowledge is diminished.
The student must be acting subject of her/his
own education rather than the object of
another's purpose else the educational
experience is alienating. The same is true for
work, religion and medicine.
A division of labor in which one echelon has effective control over subjective purpose while others can only act as objects of another's will constitutes alienation from the human process. Yet this is precisely the format of mass education, mass medicine, mass industry and mass sports. Without participation, the individual has no self since the individual does nothing of consequence which elicits responses of others in the first instance.
All social self theory is based on the assumption that self is constituted in the process of acting; of others responding to one and one's appraisal of the response of others. In mass society, it is not the individual which is the object of interest but rather the mass undifferentiated except in terms of profit or interest group. The very assumptions of Mead, Cooley, Blumer and the Symbolic Interactional camp about how social reality occurs and continues are rendered false by the conditions of interaction in mass society.
Unless others routinely take the individual into account and respond to that individual in ways which validate the individual, the individuating process does not occur. For mass sports, mass socialization, mass education, mass production as well as mass medicine the individuating process cannot occur. Persons cannot take themselves as the subject of their own actions since the routines of the bureaucracy require standardized routines applied impersonally to the flow of persons through the system and since persons are often treated en bloc rather than individually.
This bloc treatment is, of course, "rational" in terms of the sad rationality of profit and efficiency but it defeats the process by which a stable, competent self emerges capable of mediating behavior across a wide variety of social occasions.
If the individuating process does not occur in the context of adoption of a socially esteemed social identity, self and society are no longer twin born and both deteriorate to the savage world of privatized survival. The technology of control required to solve the problem of order distorts all political, scientific and therapeutic processes.
In such a society, politics, science, and medicine
take a frightful path . . . a path which leads to
the new sciences of technological fascism.
Techno-fascism Techno-fascism involves behavior modification, various forms of "chemotherapy," psycho-electronics as well as police, psychotherapy, guidance and "counseling," secret policing systems, wiretapping, electronic surveillance and a wide variety of prisons, group "homes," and halfway houses controlled by the state.
These directions in fascism are justified in terms of the deterioration of behavior unmediated by a self system oriented around a fairly permanent social identity anchored in a network of productive social relations.
Fascism is the price one pays for a mass society--a society where profit and class advantage; where bureaucratic authority; where mass processing take priority in the social allocation of resources and where retributive justice displace distributive systems of justice.
Praxis in the 'B' Mode It does not suffice to the human project
that one is able to shift between A, B, C,
and D modes of self as Zurcher suggests. The B mode must be
central if self and society are to emerge in dialectic
relationship. However it is not just any B mode is adequate. The
social identities central to the self systems must be of particular
kind. They must be socially honored, they must be adult in terms
of having full rights to participate in the construction of forms
of social reality and in the forms of culture. They must be
productive in terms of socially necessary goods and services.
To hold, as does Zurcher, that the mutable self is fully adequate as the basis for human behavior within military societies, class structure societies or to societies oriented to change, however senseless that change, bespeaks a fine indifference to the human condition. The self process is distorted in a wide variety of societies Zurcher accepts uncritically.
In class societies, those whose labor is exploited come to have poor self conceptions as they are mystified about the worth of their labor while being and doing. Presumably persons in a slave society need only to jog, meditate or seek to be the perfect slave as a solution to the problem of self. The women and men who live in a society marked by the degrading gender politics of power and subservience need more than a mutable self to cure their interactional problems.
It is not a mutable self which is the answer to a good and decent society; it is a good and decent inventory of social roles, their associated social identities, supportive social relations as well as a socialization process competent to inculcate those social identities into the self system. Beyond this is the necessity that those social identities be used by the individual to mediate behavior and that the presentation of a productive social identity be honored in the course of everyday life. The growth of self requires the affirmations of self.
Of Time and the Man The use of a stockbroker named "James Tempus" as an example of the mutable self underscores the uncritical character of Zurcher's effort to solve the existential problem of being in class society. A stockbroker is not a produc-
tive worker. S/he does not add value to the resources found in nature. A stockbroker is an instrument by which the wealth produced by the social power of workers is extracted by an unproductive social elite. The stockbroker contributes to all the problems which destroy the self process for lower echelon workers and/or the surplus population in class structured mass societies.
That Zurcher cannot make that connection does not, by that fact, obviate that connection. Indeed, the chief function of the new middle class is to manage a variety of problems of capitalism ranging from the realization of profit to the management of alienated students, workers and many, many sectors of the surplus population. The existential solution to the problem of self is to establish a social anchorage as well as the material resources for the self process of those sectors; not to manage that disoriented behavior after capitalism has excluded people from productive labor and from the cultural process.
Praxis and Socialist Models of Self In opposition to the mutable self, critical social psychology is oriented around praxis and a socialist model of self-hood. Markovic (1974:64-69) has abstracted five moments of praxis central to a competent self system in an authentically socialist society. It is not required that one shift from one mode to another as Zurcher urges but rather that one incorporates all five moments in the same activity. It is not that one abandon one's social identity (B mode activity) as Zurcher recommends but rather that all praxis moments orient and constrain the embodiment of all social identities as they become situationally relevant.
Praxis behavior centers around sociality as its primal moment. In work and in other productive activity, people who are oriented to sociality are careful that their activity enrich the lives of others and contribute to the socially necessary production of goods and services. In contrast, in alienated labor there is only concern for wages and personal security. In capitalist society, what one produces is irrelevant as long as one has a job.
Sociality precludes the use of one's human abilities to produce harmful goods, dangerous drugs, ecological poisons or cater to false needs. In capitalist societies, work is oriented to profit motives and encourages such insult to health, economy and environment.
In praxis, self-realization is a second essential moment. It is that activity in which one realizes the full wealth of one's best potential. Self-realization realizes the self in that one takes great pleasure in one's own activity however much energy, time, and effort is involved. Self realization stands in contrast to motivational schemes which program behavior by external rewards: bonuses, prizes, rewards, wages, positive reinforcement or the manifold forms of sanction and coercion.
Self realization without sociality results in the soliptic behavior endemic in a privatized society. Men who use their wives as a homemaker while at university and then discard them to take a younger woman; women who abandon family to 'find and to realize' themselves; children who take and take from their parents only to leave them to the tender mercies of the cheap-jack welfare state; corporations who demand loyalty and dedication only to fire employees a few years before pension rights are vested...all these forms of self realization are only too visible in this society...the America of the 1990s. It is this rough beast, lumbering toward Bethlehem now to be born of which Mathew Arnold warned.
Self-realization in conjunction with sociality means that all production and use of material culture be oriented to the affirmation of social relations. The privatized exploitation of sex, food, sports, drugs, leisure is precluded by this conjunction with sociality. The privatized use of political office; of bureau; of religious office; of the trust invested in the honorable calling of teacher...all these permit and require self realization but without the moment of sociality, humans are as balloons...'guileless oval soul-animals, taking up space, moving and rubbing on each other; drifting on silken invisible air currents.' as Sylvia Plath might put it.
Praxis is rational in that people move progressively away from a world in which they are subjected to the blind forces in nature and in alienated society. Rationality in conjunction with the two previous moments requires collective knowledge and collective control of the means of survival. This conjunction precludes the thin rationality of bureaucratic control; precludes a division of labor in which the "top" echelon claims the right to establish rules and procedures to which students, workers, customers, prisoners, soldiers, and welfare recipients are blindly subjected.
Rationality as a moment of praxis requires a healthy public sphere in which positive knowledge of social structure and function is available; in which trends are publicly known and in which goals are collectively selected as well as are the means to satisfy those goals. Sociality precludes the selection of goals which benefit only rich or powerful sectors of a population or are harmful to health and nature.
Sociality precludes the selection of means, however efficacious, which transfer the costs of goal attainment to some sectors of the population . . . to women, workers and/or minority groups. Sociality precludes the crafty conniving of the Madison avenue huckster or the cynical use of women by men or the systematic exploitation of Blacks in South Africa by American firms. Sociality precludes the use of military simulations by the Pentagon or C.I.A. as they engineer wars, invasions, coups, or blockades apart from public discussion and debate.
Praxis, as a socialist mode of human activity unites intention and behavior, thought and action, theory and method. This moment, intentionality, is essential to the dialectics of subjectivity and objectivity. One must be part of the process by which goals are set and means adopted or one has lost subjectivity. One must be able to realize one's intentions and this implies egalitarian distribution of material resources.
Intentionality monopolized by authority or by office reduces people to objects. However desirable this objectification might be from the perspective of owners, managers, bosses and social engineers, it is hostile to the human condition and precluded in authentically socialist models of self and society.
Again, intentionality must be dialectically related to the intentionality of others if the moment of sociality is to be respected. For the children of the rich to be able to travel anywhere, buy anything, experience anything does not answer to the moment of sociality...to do as they please; this ability does not advance the human project. For the General to be able to command thousands of soldiers into battle does not answer to the moment of intentionality. For the professor to give brilliant lectures oriented to her single-minded interest does not answer to the human condition if her students are not also inspired by the topic.
Children of the lower classes also need the experience of overseas travel; the ability to purchase decent clothing; access to books, concerts, and plays in London or Bombay. Soldiers; those who are about to die need do more than salute their senators...they must be able to question them. Students need do more than learn the content of a lecture; they must have some part in requesting it.
A fifth moment of praxis is that of creativity. Creativity restores history to the human enterprise. It demands that every new occasion be organized, collectively, to suit the special conditions of nature, persons, resources, and society at that time. Sameness, routine, standardization, repetition and mass processing are precluded at the moment of creativity.
Every act of love, every act of child care, of teaching, of playing music, of games and sports must be imbued with creativity. Each child, each student, each audience, each lover must be honored as a separate individual with a separate history. Advice for each legal client, for each medical patient, for each student must be hand-crafted to the constellation of circumstances in which each is found.
Each act of love, every act of child care, every lecture, every song, every game must be tailored to the personality and preferences of the lover, the child, the student, the audience or the player...and this requires creativity.
Sameness, repetition and routine may be appropriate in
processes without history or in which history is two
dimensional--as with chemistry, physics and mechanical
engineering. However for human beings and human society,
history is variable and in its variation is found the
possibility for creativity.
Creativity is, of course, constrained by the moments of sociality as well as the other moments of praxis. This constraint precludes creativity in designing poison gases, in designing instruments of torture or nuclear terror and in pursuing scientific means of circumventing the self system.
To summarize, a socialist model of self incorporates a set of social identities oriented to productive work. These social identities mediate behavior and are the primary means of social control. The five moments of praxis permeate and constrain the range of social identities permitted and the embodiment of any given social identity in any concrete setting. All social identities are embedded in a network of friendly, supportive social relations.
Praxis Society Such a model of self requires a specific kind of society. It cannot be a class society, a mass society or a society which transfers alienation to other societies or to sectors of its own population. Socialist society is not comprised of formal organizations processing masses of faceless persons through the routines of the day. Such a society may have state ownership of the means of production of material, ideological and political culture but it is not a praxis society and thus not authentically a socialist society--however useful and progressive it might be in certain historical periods.
Nor are the dramaturgical maneuvers of the trickster, the gamester, the salesperson, the public relations or the advertising specialist natural to a praxis society. Only when the moments of praxis are possible for every human being on a routine basis will it be possible for a given society to claim for itself the title of a socialist society.
There is much to do and many social transformations to come before a socialist society is possible. That does not preclude specific individuals from creative and progressive praxis in capi-
talist or bureaucratic socialist nations but it does make such work difficult. It is to the eternal credit of the human species that people can, once in a while, transcend particular non-praxis social arrangements and move toward social revolution.
The task of social revolution is not the mutable self of a stockbroker; it is not the creation of a self system oriented to change per se. It is not jogging, meditating or acts of petty criticism. Social revolution requires the elimination of those structural features of a society which obstruct and distort the self process. Social revolution requires the replacement of elitist modes of production and distribution with socialist modes.
The human process requires that each person have access to the material basis with which to sustain life; to the social basis with which to create social life and to the cultural basis with which to enrich social life. These are possible. Class, racist, sexist, feudal and elitist societies reduce those possibilities. Efforts to justify stratified societies; efforts to promote reform of stratified societies or efforts, such as those of Zurcher, to put forward false solutions to the problem of alienation impede social revolution and are to be opposed.
An adequate self system requires an adequate society.
The material bases for a strong and competent self system is a socialist society infused with the sort of Marxist humanism discussed so forcefully by Schaff (1970). An exploitative, crime- ridden society eternally in economic crisis and using war as a way to win markets and minds is scarcely the grounding for a good and decent self system. Zurcher fails to the extent he forgets to link the fate of self to that of the society in which one must manage.
In his book, the linkage between self and society is tenuous indeed. Zurcher has considerable talent and a commendable grasp of the literature. I would like to see him use that talent to better purpose. My suggestion is that he...and others who pursue his mission...read Schroyer, Ollman, Schaff, Habermas, Markovic, and others in the critical school. Then I would like to see his books and articles.
As long as Zurcher stays within the literature of liberal capitalism, he will fail in what clearly are well meant efforts.
Clarence Lee
Clarence Lee from Tennessee loved the commercials on TV. He watched with wide believing eyes and bought everything it advertises... cream to make his skin feel better spray to make his hair look wetter bleach to make his white things whiter stylish jeans that fit much tighter toothpaste for his cavities powder for his doggie's fleas purple mouthwash for his breath deodorant to stop his sweath He bought each cereal they presented, bought each game that they invented.
So you see that money buys anything for which one sighs: so watch TV and buy from liars anything your heart desires.
...started by Silverstein
...ended by TRY
Well, if it's dancing you would be There's better pipes than poetry. Ale, man, ale's the stuff to drink for fellows whom it hurts to think.
Look into the pewter pot and see the world as it is not. Pints and quarts of Ludlow beer Then the world is not so queer.
In a lovely muck, you've lain Happy til you woke again. And malt does more than Milton can to justify the world to man.
...adapted from Housman
