Tuesday, February 20, 2007

In search for a job

Sometimes I regain the hope that alienation is confrontable. I also have the fear of inevitable alienation. The limits between duty and the will to work on one side and the internal and social alienation on the other, are very obscure. It is not that I am bored of working but I have this worry since I was a kid. The willingness to participate, to work, to offer my pleasant production, to feel a part of the nature, are all inside me and I believe in all of us. I wish we all were good and happy workers of this world. I have that wish as an ideal one. We all, workers, managers, administrators, politicians, capitalists, need revolution through other, awakening, humanistic, means. Well, of course I know that alienation for capitalists is qualitatively different, it is outweighed by the glory to CONTROL the production and distribution of wealth. However, it is still so evident in their faces, actions, behavior and tastes.
If poverty and development belong to the political economy analysis, then alienation derives from a human economy, one that exists in people’s mind. Working is joyfulness, do not listen to what common language says. Ageing is happiness. Love is all around and care for the others is something that comes naturally and spontaneously. I believe that all people in this world are like this, they all have the same characteristics and needs. We have to find a way to study people. I, therefore, choose to see man as a natural being, as a distinct body in the larger body of the environment that surrounds him, not immediately as a political and social being. If man has some natural characteristics and capabilities, then I visualize the political society as the framework where he/she will be able to put them in practice. This is the greatest humanistic message, inherited from the Enlightenment to the Marxian philosophy.
Does Society and Polity, as a frame where lots of conflicts take place, put in contest the positive description of man that I previously gave? Are war, oppression and poverty natural problems? Maybe yes, they do not let him develop his creativity. But, is this something that it should be taken for granted? The fact that war is internal to the social order, is it incompatible to the fact that man is satisfied through his work? Are people the same? They are, their conscience is different due to diverse social influences. Studying these differences someone becomes a social scientist. Is it possible that a social scientist will reach the conclusion that people have different needs? If yes, then anything goes. Solidarity, the sentimental preconditions of social enquire, not subjective at all but instead tightly linked to the natural tendency of man to create collectively, is lost.
Marx is so influential to me. He was accused of never have been working in his life. A psychoanalytical approach to Marx’s sentimental world, has it that his philosophical superstructure is nothing else than the only exit to the young Marx’s fear of work, his greatest but unfulfilled desire. In a few words, it is all about the obstruction of a desire. That is to say that he’d better work as a clerk than become a great philosopher. Then we would get rid of the crucial but difficult to understand questions that he posed. Take Kant, for example, he’d better become an army officer than a political philosopher. In this way, these big guys would not substitute the experience (labor for Marx, war and peace for Kant) with the literature analysis. These guys really put us difficult questions, why don’t they go and find a regular job to do? (By the way, that was what Bush 2 said to Michael Moore).
Well, dear all, these guys are big because that is the way you want to view them. To make them heroes and then accuse them for not saving you from your problems. They did not seek to become heroes for your own sake, like today’s superstars do. I see them as simple people, comrades in life, people that work, produce a spiritually and socially useful good. Like all of us, because we are all the same, even if our name is Marx, Beckham or Abadama from the north-central Congo. We are all workers and philosophers at the same time.

P.S.1. Mama, alienation is not the result of moral, ideological and educational factors (bad education, for example). Instead, it is the result of the material factors that form the dialectics of education (what is knowledge, who creates it and for whom, who is benefited from it).

P.S.2. I am not reading Marx, I just read myself.

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