Diane
I must respond to your challenge to justify my words of last week about
"the psychology of the human being brought up in the society of generalised
commodity production having at its very centre the money symbol?"
The first thing I observe about the position of money in the development of
the psychology of the modern personality is that money does not obtrude
very much into the life of the child, though it is of course implicit in
everything.
Even as an adolescent where she is subject to school education, she is
surrounded by people in authority, a kind of extended family, and money
still lies largely outside her world. The money relation is not (yet!)
visible in the relation between the school child and her teacher
(University academics are nowadays told to see their students as
"customers" and students now commonly demand value for their money in terms
of grades!).
Nevertheless, in the thousands of hours of images bombarding the child from
the TV, money figures prominently. The advertisements are the foremost
representations of the real world which is to be distinguished from the
fictional world presented in between the ads. Mom controls the visit to the
supermarket, but if the child tries to lift an enticing candy from the
shelf, she is soon reminded of the money imperative and figures of
authority tell her that she must pay for it first. Maybe her Mom tells her
that "we can't afford it", or that she'll have to do a chore to earn it?
In short, in childhood, the money relation exists on the periphery of her
world, but it is the periphery that leads to the real world, the world
outside of family and teachers, the world into which she will one day "grow
up".
(Hopefully) money does not teach her the relative value of things about the
home, except maybe if she breaks something and is reminded how expensive it
was, but it is still teaching her the value of everything in the real world
outside the home and school. And as the observations of the precocious
young candy-sellers of Brazil confirm, and as my own experience as a
mediocre maths teacher in Brixton showed me, children who have to solve
problems with money in the real world of the street, invent all sort of
mathematical operations and learn to manipulate value relations in such a
way that elementary mathematics comes relatively easily to them, if the
teacher can help them make the conneciton. It is ironically mostly among
poor kids that this kind of street education is found; kids from well-off
households don't have to do odd jobs, swap trinkets for cash and so, and
approach the conception of value by a different route.
But the main thing that the child first learns through the money relation
is the dichotomy between the fictional, genuinely human relations that form
her immediate surroundings, and the real world outside. Here, outside,
money constitutes the consent of the whole community, the system of values,
and in fact underlies all the practical activities and human relations of
the outside world: money is the symbol through which she may make sense of
the world beyond.
As education progresses and as the child focuses her attention on "what are
you going to be when you grow up?" then the problem of earning a living
begins to loom large. Will she be a million dollar a year executive, a car
washer, or a voluntary helper at kinder? Will she be like Uncle Fred who's
unemployed or like Auntie Catherine who owns shares in MicroSoft?
What is obvious here is the centrality of the money relation in the
formation of ethics, but ethics and knowledge are inseparable. I can only
have knowledge of what I do; I can only do what I have knowledge of.
Being an adult is identical with earning a living. "The anatomy of the
human being is the key to the anatomy of the ape".
Thus we have the institution of "work experience", where the adolescent
learns about relations at work, about the difference between being a
student-consumer and being a worker-provider. This is intended to motive
and focus the student's further study, to learn to see the relevance of
school education to "earning a living", to having something to sell on the
labour market. More and more kids nowadays (in my experience) evaluate
their learning in this way.
Although I think it can be argued that money may contribute to the facility
to abstract, I wouldn't see the money relation as crucial to learning to
make concepts. In fact, it could be argued that a world dominated by
commodity production is one which presents itself in the form of complexes
rather than concepts - heterogeneous objects related the relatively
arbitrary and subjective attributes of price and brand name.
However, the young person's real relation to the real world is a mediated
one, and the study of theories, of the mediated approach to reality, is
taken into the real world of work predominately not in the practice of
manual or even technical skill, but increasingly in the form of
collaborating with other people in the production process, and this system
of relations is, even within enterprises, a relation mediated by value. The
use of tools has been increasingly replaced by the use of commerce.
Nowadays young workers are taught to budget, to organise their own time, to
have regard for customer demand, etc., etc. In other words, the economic
aspect of work so penetrates the labour process nowadays that production
and commerce are inseparable.
Gone are the days (I believe) when the person of the King or the President
constituted the ideal, the personality of the community as a whole. This
role is now dominated by money.
Does this make sense?
Andy
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| - Andy Blunden - Home Page - http://home.mira.net/~andy/index.htm - |
| "It has been said that the very essence of civilisation consists of |
| purposely building monuments so as not to forget". L S Vygotsky 1930 |
~ Spirit, Money & Modernity, Melbourne Uni Summer School 23/24 Feb '01 ~
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