Part II: The Next Top Model...of Sociopolitical Interaction

I was just reading this little excerpt of the appendix to the Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson novel(s) The Illuminatus! Trilogy

http://www.rawilson.com/whistlepiss.html

which just got me thinking again of two conflicts, and how they relate to each other.

The two conflicts are these:

(a) the struggle between producers and parasites, Haves and Have Nots, bourgeoisie and proletariat -- whatever you want to call the workers and the "employers"/rulers

(b) the struggle between "the individual" on one hand, and on the other, the social forces which keep a person from being free to do what he or she wants.

Both of these conflicts have been used as a sort of story or "narrative" (damn I sound dorky) to explain or interpret social interactions and social change historically and contemporarily. My question is, are they both right, in terms of being ways to interpret society and history? Or do they contradict each other? Also, which one, if either, is primary? Which explains more? And not least is this: If they do not contradict each other, is there any way these two "narratives" can be put together to make one big explanation?

It occurred to me that putting them together in a neat little egghead model might look like a cross.

MODEL 1

ruling class/rich

individual ------------------------ social repression

working class/poor

Of course, a maybe more interesting model thingy (and perhaps closer to the truth) would have the repressed individual be identified with the working class, and the forces of social repression that deny individuality be from the ruling class that takes his/her money and makes him/her do all the work.

MODEL 2

working-class individual ---vs--- ruling class that represses individuality to make a better cog

I haven't done an in-depth anal-ysis (which might require a trip to the proctologists to plumb the depths, since "anal" sticks out in "analysis" like a sore bum), but I suspect this second model might be close to the truth. Of course, Wilson and Shea would kick my pre-postmodern ass for talking about "the truth", especially after I just got done reading their appendix-thing about how interpreting something in a specific way makes it "Damned" and how interpretations cannot account for reality. I'm sort of distrustful of putting in too much New Left with my Old Left laborism, but the acidheads may have a point there. Perhaps there is no reason for me to even have bothered typing up this post, since both interpretations fall short of the po-mo mark> Maybe it's like all that quantum shit in Whatshisname's Uncertainty Principle about not being able to measure the velocity and location of a particle at the same time or whatever. Maybe "individual" and "working class" are two ways of looking at the same protagonist.

Remember Curtis White? Whom I quoted/agonized over/ made fun of in my last post? Well, his little "The Spirit of Disobedience" essay sez sumptin' else I think may be pertinertinent to the conflicts over these conflicts (pages 37-38):

Similar though Marx and Thoreau may be in their accounts of
the consequences of living in a society defined by money, their suggestions for
how to respond to it are poles apart. Forget the Party. Forget the revolution.
Forget the general strike. Forget the proletariat as an abstract class of human
interest. Thoreau's revolution begins not with discovering comrades to be yoked
together in solidarity but with the embrace of solitude. For Thoreau, Marx's
first and fatal error was the creation of the aggregate identity of the
proletariat. Error was substituted for error. The anonymity and futility of the
worker were replaced by the anonymity and futility of the revolutionary. A
revolution conducted by people who have only a group identity can only replace
one monolith of power with another, one misery with another, perpetuating the
cycle of domination and oppression. In solitude, the individual becomes most
human, which is to say most spiritual.

This passage speaks fucking volumes about the debates in my last post and this one.

There's also the little matter of materialism versus idealism/spiritualism. I wish I still had that copy of A People's History of Science that I'd borrowed from the library; it had notable stuff to say on this matter, from the materialist side at least.

Finally, let us acknowledge the presence, as always, of Mr. Jim Goad over this and all discussions of fancy-pants social philosophers. See, I also just got done reading my old post of the excerpt from his book The Redneck Manifesto, and I wonder how much he would want to throw out the whole debate.

Well, we know that people of whatever class are individuals, after all, and it's not for fancy-pants types to de-individualize anyone, especially individuals who happen to work for a living. Make your own theory.