[xmca] If all hopes are lost for establishing a more workable social system , then please tell me where A.N.Leontyev has gone wrong with his definition of "Personal Meaning"

Dear Mike Thank you and you are quite right because you are so worried about so many things which pass all around you and you don't want to lose sight of any one of them . For me , it began thus : Lois Holzman <lholzman@eastsideinstitute.org> wrote:
  I think we're talking about different things, Paul, but I'll try
incorporating what I think is your topic into mine and see what gets
created.
The commodification of culture that is inherent in capitalism has been
going on for some centuries. Attempt to transform it (most attempts
people call socialism) failed, although some people think that it
slowed it down some. So on that level I can't point to anyone(s).
However, commodification is a process as well as a product, and from
that perspective, I think masses of people are, in different ways,
transforming the commodification of culture every day. I could give
instances, as I'm sure others here could, but I rather wait to see if
Im even coming close to addressing what you are raising.
  Lois

     Lois,
    
  This response has been several days in gestation and since I started it other posts have been made on the thread that I have't read yet. But to finish . .
    
  Yes, you correctly identify the direction from which my comment was made The phrase I used , "commodification of cuture" cocould be simply reduced to "commodification" if we define culture as the totality of artefacts as has been suggested recently on the list. I agree with "most people" that the only the attempts to stop commodification involve the development of socialist institutions, but I disagree that socialism has failed. There are millions of people throughout the world who still actively pursue the construction of socialism, although not in the most privileged country of the global capitalist system. There are four countries in the Western Hemisphere whose governments (all democratically elected) are actively pursuing the construction of socialist societies. At the same time, the capitalist societies increasingly face crises whose resolution isn't clear to anyone. Socialism, far from having failed, is daily proving its viability: according to UN
 statistics, Venezuela has reduced the percentage of those living in poverty by 30% in the past 5 years. There is no other country in the world that has ever achieved such a drastic reduction and it is still in process.
    
  I think this is relevant to the discussion about "learning" and "structure" in two senses:
    
  (1) Commodification, turning all artefacts into commodities, that very special kind of artefact (a widget) whose goal is to generate the greatest profit when exchanged in the market), necessarily generates exploitation of humans and the natural environment, perhaps for the simple reason that nothing qualitative of the human or the environment remains reflected in the numbers on the stock exchange that guide the way the capitalist society's labor and resources are brought together in the day-to-day reproduction of the society as a whole. I think that the fetishization/alienation inherent in these social relations exists within every member of the society and if not confronted, subordinate all individual development within a logic of exploitation.
    
  (2) For me Vygotsky's concept of ZPD is related to Paolo Freire's (following Jaspers) notion of "situation limits"; those frontiers whose transcendence awakens the very person who learns, awakens the learner. For Freire these situation limits are precisely those in which the structures of exploitation are confronted. In the countries that have been subordinated and dominated to those countries in which capitalism emerged, the political dimension of leanring, e.g., becoming literate, and the social dimension of "development" are much closer to the surface than in the central countries of the global system, especially the USA. It's not comfortable to internalize that ones own entire world depends on systematic exploitationd
    
  Development necesarrily involves a moral dimension that is socially defined -- insofar as the morality (the norms) of the society presupposes exploitation -- well, what exactly is being develooped? For me the idea that individuals can be the authors of social transformation simply has no empirical or theoretical basis. Wind waves don't affect tides.
    
  AlthoughI am not really satisfied with this response to your post, I'm sending it off, hopefully it's not totally incoherent.
         
  Paul
    
 I was inspired by this dialogue . I had previously read A.N.Leontyev's "Activity and Consciousness" several times as it was , for me , full of so many good points in understanding how one can relate one's "objective versus personal" meanings in their dialectical coverings and colourings to the reality of the whole "social relations" entailing and including one's special role in the direction of social change .
  Thus it was all selected paragraphs from A.N.Leontyev's "Activity and Consciousness" . I welcome any interpretations within that context .
  And it's me now who is still reading the unprecedented timely relevant article of Martin Packer's which just from the beginning promises lots of fruitful discussion .
  Heidi
  heidizulfai@yahoo.com
     
   

       
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Received on Mon Feb 18 16:59 PST 2008