Hi Bo,
BODVAR>
>Robinson Crusoe! My childhood hero not an example of IntPoVs?
>Well, you may be right, but will perhaps agree with me
>that he was the Enlightenment DREAM - the free-floating intellect
>that would work regardless of ambient conditions.
I will just let my friend Christopher Caudwell address the issue of Crusoe.
Except to say that Intellectualism is the isolation of the ivory tower and
is reflected in the complete social isolation of Crusoe and his ilk.
ILLUSION AND REALITY by Christopher Caudwell.
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This is the bourgeois dream, the dream of the
one man alone producing the phenomena of the world. He is
Faust, Hamlet, Robinson Crusoe, Satan and Prufrock.
This "individualism" of the bourgeois, which is born of
the need to dissolve the restrictions of feudal society causes a
tremendous and ceaseless technical advance in production. In
the same way it causes in poetry a tremendous and ceaseless
advance in technique.
The capitalist finds his
very individualism, his very freedom, producing all the blind
coercion of war, anarchy, slump and revolution. The machine
in its productiveness finally threatens even him. The market
in its blindness becomes a terrifying force of nature.
By means of the market, capitalist constantly hurls down
fellow capitalist into wage-labour or relegates him to the ranks
of the temporarily privileged "salariat". The artisan of yester
day is the factory hand of today.
This is the dramatic process whereby capitalism revolutionises
itself. It does so by means of the very free market on which
the bourgeois depends for freedom. This guarantee of in-
dividualism and independence produces the very opposite-
trustification and dependence on finance capital. This golden
garden of fair competition produces the very opposite of fair-
ness: price-cutting, wars, cartels, monopolies, "corners" and
vertical trusts. But all these evils seem to the bourgeois, who
is hurled from his freedom by them, to be-as indeed they are
~direct and coercive social relations and he revolts against
them as the very opposite of his ideal recipe: the free market.
He therefore revolts against them by demanding a fairer
market and keener competition, without realising that since
these ills are created by the free market, to demand the
intensification of its freedom is to demand an intensification of
the slavery he hates. He therefore drives on the movement he
detests, and can only escape by escaping from the bourgeois
contradiction. The bourgeois is always talking about liberty
because it is always slipping from his grasp.
He finds the loneliness which is the condition of his freedom
unendurable and coercive. He finds more and more of his
experience of the earth and the universe unfriendly and a restraint
on his freedom. He ejects everything social from his soul, and
finds
that it deflates, leaving him petty, empty and insecure.
How has this come about? We can only discover why if we
now cease to take the bourgeois at his own valuation, and lay
bare the economic motion of which his own valuation of him-
self is the reflection. At each stage the bourgeois finds that his
abolition of social ''restrictions'' leads to their
intensification.
His drive towards a free market exposes the producer to a gale
of competition of which the only outcome is-an amalgama-
tion. His destruction of feudal "complexities" in favour of
the simple bourgeois right to property produces all the staggering
elaboration of the bourgeois law of contract. His hate of feudal
rule and social coercion produces the strongly-centralised,
bourgeois State with its endless petty interferences with the
liberty of the individual. Individualism has produced anti-
individualism. The very economy whose mission it seemed to
be to sweep away all social relations, produces a society more
overwhelmingly complex than any hitherto known.
His demand for freedom is a negation of freedom. He is a mirror-
revolutionary" and continually revolutionises society by asking
for that which will procure the opposite of what he desires.
Love
Fintan Mary Dunne
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