It can certainly not be ruled out here that todays reader of Beckett will tomorrow become a fighter against manipulation. This does not mean, though, that we have to consider Beckett as an ally. On the contrary--and I dont mean now to impugn Becketts person or his art--it is false, and a form of ideology that supports the bad reality, to transform the social form of manipulation into the *condition humaine*. Indeed, at earlier stages of capitalism its ideologists also attempted over and over again to erect the objective economic conditions that led to class struggle into general conditions of human existence. I will just give one more example of this. When anything bad is being discussed, I always come back to Nietzsche. Nietzsche, for example, made out that proletarian class consciousness was nothing more than the resentment of slaves. And this ideology, as I know only too well from my youth, prevented many decent intellectuals of that time from joining up with the workers movement, for their consciousness could not tolerate any resentment or support of resentment in an upstanding, moral person. We therefore have the task of breaking through these kinds of inhibition. We cannot do this simply by showing people abstractly the meaninglessness of manipulation, but we must direct our appeal at those strata, by no means so meagre, who experience emotionally something uneasy, distasteful and restrictive about their manipulated condition. I believe we can already speak of a mass experience of this kind. I do not know how large these sections are. They are however much, much greater than the sections we have so far reached, and so there is a major task of mobilization here. -Lukacs, Conversations with Lukacs
Posted on: Tue, 06 Jan 2015 00:32:19 +0000
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