One-Dimensional Man in The Postmodern Age

Re-Thinking The Bourgeois Subject, Toward the Sensibilities of Freedom.

 

J.L. Hinman

  

either traditional Marxism, nor postmodernism, grasp the dynamic nature of the cultural and economic process shaping the consciousness of the bourgeoisified subject. Traditional Marxists tend to view the process from a transhistorical perspective; class conflict within a framework of economic determinism, and to deal with the bourgeois subject by creating its own "socialist man." Postmodernism, to a large extent, seeks to evade the problem by eliminating the subject altogether. Both camps fail to produce a dynamic critique of the process, and both fail to translate what they do understand into a consciousness capable of resisting bourgeoisification. The industrial production mode of late capitalism necessitates a total way of life that shapes people into alienated consumers and reduces all personal and social values to economic commodity. The only hope for re-thinking the left is to cultivate sensibilities of freedom that create new possibilities and new ways of life.

Traditional Marxism always tried to work the other way around, to have the revolution, to produce a society capable of forging the "new humanity," and then to produce a free individual, one whose freedom is predicated upon the Vanguard, the state, and the party line. This is like wanting to have a child, and then to consummate the marriage. Moreover, capitalism has delivered the goods, and bound the consciousness of the subject to itself as supplier. It has produced:

...a social totality integrated under the universal form of commodity production. Under the domination of the commodity structure, a phantom objectivity is conferred upon human relations, transforming social relations into relations between things; subjectivity, the consciousness, comes to reflect and reproduce this system of domination, giving it the character of a `second nature.' ¹

In other words, the mode of production shapes a total way of life that revolves around commodity. This process, rather than labor alone as in traditional Marxism, creates the bond of social relations. This ensemble forges an obedient subject. Within that framework class struggle and exploitation exist as historical contingencies. The alienated subject is itself a product of the way of life.^{2 (CLICK TO LINK FULL ARTICLE)}

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