Bourgeois Morality

[chimx]

By way of introduction

A few weeks ago I saw the film Hard Candy (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0424136/), a film depicting a talented young female actor enacting her revenge on a pedophile first through torture, and eventually by forcing him to commit suicide. Honestly the film put me off, the way it glorified mob violence. Even more was the fact that it came on the recommendation from a friend, making me think that too many of us have come to find it acceptable to see vigilantism enacted on criminals of all varieties.

How many times have we heard comments correlating time in prison with forced sodomy? With films like Shawshank Redemption or American History X, it becomes more difficult to name prison films that don't involved some sort of rape or physical violence done to prisoners. We* have come to condone this sort of mistreatment and degradation.

After watching the film my thoughts immediately turned to Foucault's work on the historical evolution of punishment. Foucault argued that in pre-capitalist society, punishment was enacted publicly. Laws were considered an extension of a monarchs rule, and to break a law was to do physical harm to the monarch. Punishment in feudal society was done upon the body, so as to enact revenge, and done as a public spectacle.

Foucault points out the shift with the rise of capitalism. Punishment shifted away from the scaffolds and towards hidden prisons. There was a notable shift in morality, where we punish the mind instead of the body through discipline, regimentation, and confinement. This is embodied in Foucault's Panopticon.

My question, as it pertains to contemporary politics (which is why i picked this forum), is whether or not this constitutes a shift in bourgeois morality. We publicly glorify physical violence done to criminals, and this strikes me a blatant regression to pre-capitalist feudal morality.

Broader implications?

Criminal punishment doesn't seem to be the only shift in morality. 18th and 19th century liberals always held high the ideals of social mobility and meritocracy.

But in the past half century, social mobility has seen a drastic drop. The upper echelons of society are starting to much more frequently pick from their own ranks, rather than lower social classes--despite equal opportunities to higher education.[1] From what I have read of Britain, it seems that they are following a similar pattern. Social mobility is a value in decline, and has been in decline for decades.

What is the significance, if any, of this shift in bourgeois morality? Are there broader implications to this apparent "break down" in once lauded principles?




*when i say "we", i mean society at large, or at least where i am from. it has come to my attention that some of you don't understand this very simple literary tool.

1 - see economist: http://www.economist.com/world/na/displayS...tory_id=3518560 (http://www.economist.com/world/na/displayStory.cfm?story_id=3518560)

[bcbm]

But in the past half century, social mobility has seen a drastic drop.

Who gives a fuck?


What is the significance, if any, of this shift in bourgeois morality? Are there broader implications to this apparent "break down" in once lauded principles?

The bourgeois are losing their grip on society? Or they've discovered that appeasing the masses with bloody spectacles keeps them in line well enough (circuses).

[Karl Marx's Camel]

The bourgeois are losing their grip on society? Or they've discovered that appeasing the masses with bloody spectacles keeps them in line well enough (circuses).

I wouldn't really think the bourgeois (in this case film distributors?) are trying to figure out new ways to keep the exploited down. My guess would be that they think profit.

[bcbm]

Originally posted by [email protected] 02, 2006 02:30 pm

The bourgeois are losing their grip on society? Or they've discovered that appeasing the masses with bloody spectacles keeps them in line well enough (circuses).

I wouldn't really think the bourgeois (in this case film distributors?) are trying to figure out new ways to keep the exploited down. My guess would be that they think profit.
You say tomato...

[Tekun]

Are u addressing bourgeois morality exclusively?
Because its a widely known fact that in many regions of the third world, petty criminals and others who break the law are publicly punished so as to humiliate and deter any such actions from ever reoccuring
And these ppl, are clearly not a part of the bourgeoisie

[scawenb]

Don't forget that prisons were never completely hidden - they tend to be on hills near big cities with a rather brutal architecture. The gothic novel so popular with the 19th century bourgeoisie added to the imaginative fear such places conjured-up much in the same was as modern-day films.

I think the main change was no so much the public nature of punishment (which moves from demonstrative to imaginative) but from the bodily to the psychological both to the prisoner and their family as anyone who has ever visited a prison would know.

[YSR]

Chimx:

I think your assessment of the change in bourgeois morality is pretty much spot on. I think the point Tekun raises is important though. When discussing "bourgeois morality," it's key to remember that we are discussing the European bourgeois.

Truth be told, I'm not sure how the bourgeoisie came to be in other areas of the world. But I can guess that the burghers and their Protestant-influenced morality operate differently than other cultures.

Still, I think you've hit an interesting point. I've been thinking about this a lot too of late. When we talk about the term "bourgeois," it means totally different things in moral terms today and three hundred years ago. Where did this change in the culture of the bourgeoisie come from?

The lack of social mobility and the movement towards public punishment may be an opportunity for leftists to do correctly what we failed with in the early twentieth century, I think. That was the last time that conditions were as stratified as they are (or are quickly becoming) today. Combining these conditions with the change in bourgeois culture could certainly be the tinder of revolution.

Back to the original topic, another idea has hit me: perhaps the inherent amorality of capitalism has slowly forced the bourgeoisie to give up their religious/moral comittments? Consider the commercialization of sex, something which clearly flies in the face of bourgeois morality.

(This is really rambling, so I apologize if it doesn't make any sense.)

[SPK]

Originally posted by [email protected] 02, 2006 02:02 am
After watching the film my thoughts immediately turned to Foucault's work on the historical evolution of punishment. Foucault argued that in pre-capitalist society, punishment was enacted publicly. Laws were considered an extension of a monarchs rule, and to break a law was to do physical harm to the monarch. Punishment in feudal society was done upon the body, so as to enact revenge, and done as a public spectacle.

Foucault points out the shift with the rise of capitalism. Punishment shifted away from the scaffolds and towards hidden prisons. There was a notable shift in morality, where we punish the mind instead of the body through discipline, regimentation, and confinement. This is embodied in Foucault's Panopticon.

My question, as it pertains to contemporary politics (which is why i picked this forum), is whether or not this constitutes a shift in bourgeois morality. We publicly glorify physical violence done to criminals, and this strikes me a blatant regression to pre-capitalist feudal morality.
Your reading of Foucault is, I think, right. He does argue that, at least in part, judicial systems and prisons in the modern era moved punishment away from the public sphere, the body, and the spectacle of state (royal) power. Those strategies were replace by new ones focused instead on interiority (private, psychic states), the mind, and the internalization of exterior, material forms of power. Institutions like prisons, psychiatric hospitals, schools, and so on, attempted to develop forms of consciousness and identity that would drive individuals to regulate, normalize, and discipline their own behavior and practice. This reduced the need, on the part of the capitalist state, to use direct, physical force and violence in its project of suppressing the rebellious, burgeoning working class. It also helped integrate the proletariat into the growing industrial sector -- western europe was moving away from a feudal mode of production to a capitalist one, and people were not exactly amenable to relatively new experiences like taking orders from a manager or working on a assembly line for 12 hours a day, seven days a week, doing the same, repetitive tasks over and over again.

Foucault’s ideas in the works that you seem to be discussing (Discipline and Punish, The History of Sexuality) are applicable in understanding only some, not all, historical aspects of western capitalist states. Many folks in the usa’s prison systems are not actually guilty of any significant crime: incarceration is used as a method to directly suppress certain communities, primarily African-Americans and other people of color. This isn’t new – amerika is a genetically white-supremacist state and has violently repressed African-American, Chicano, and indigenous people for centuries -- though it has gotten quantitatively worse over the past quarter-century or so. This is definitely related to the opposition movements which arose from those communities and achieved a certain level of power in the sixties. If the strategies Foucault describes failed to achieve the goals, as set by the bourgeoisie -- the goals of pacifying certain strata of the population, including people of color, and smoothly integrating them into the broader system -- then the ruling elites returned to the classic methods of control, i.e. force and violence.

Foucault’s theories, which deemphasize the brutal, bodily use for force, don't encompass that kind of understanding. He wrote the books in question back in the early and mid-seventies in France – I don’t know, but perhaps France’s penal systems at the time had a strategy more similar to that described by him.

As you also note, in the usa today punishment is viewed basically as a type of vengeance, where a prisoner is made to suffer for their crimes, locked away forever, or simply killed -- that is the core policy of many state prison systems. There is little emphasis on reforming or changing people’s behavior or on effectively reintegrating them into society. This is not a recent development – it has been the case for decades here, basically since the ascendancy of the conservatives in the seventies.

I think that any intensification of these characteristics of prison systems in the usa is related to the increasing marginality and disposability of working class people here. For years, jobs in heavy industry and, increasingly, services have been sent overseas, so that the bosses can take advantage of lower wages and costs elsewhere. Higher productivity through automation and new technology has meant more output per worker and caused further job attrition. Mergers and concentration of capital has wiped out entire economic sectors, like family farms. The strategies Foucault describes were meant, in part, to build efficient workers, human machines for the (then) new industries. With a decreasing need for actual flesh-and-blood workers, these approaches become more and more moot --rather than return former prisoners to the workforce or the industrial reserve army, which is no longer necessary from the point-of-view of capital, these folks are simply discarded or locked away. Hence the change in "bourgeois morality".

[chimx]

Interesting conclusion SPK. How, if at all, would you say the decline of social mobility as a bourgeois value fits into that equation. Are there other examples of shifting bourgeois morality?

The relevance seems note worthy due to the fact, that as Foucault points out in his book, that one of the declining points of feudal rule was the sympathy that eventually developed for criminals being made a spectacle of. As feudalism fell and capitalism ascended, immoral treatment to prisoners became a rallying point for anti-monarch advocates. Just look at the beheading of noble families in France with the invention of the guillotine during the French Revolution.

Is it possible to exploit this shift like capitalists did 300 years ago?

[commiecrusader]

Social mobility has forever been an immaterial phenomenom, created by the bourgeoisie to create the impression of fairness. However it has never ever been a common occurence. Token members of the proletariat were allowed to better themselves to maintain the illusion, but I researched this in sociology last year and something like 95% of people who move from the working to middle class return to working class levels of income and well-being within 5 years. There is next to no permanent transition upwards in the class structure. And if you think of it this way, why would there be? Almost everyone would choose to beter themselves if they could, leaving the bourgeoisie with no prols to exploit.

[chimx]

read the economist article. it will strongly disagree with your "research". everything else i have read shows high social mobility from the 1950s through th 1970s.

[SPK]

Originally posted by [email protected] 08, 2006 02:50 am
Interesting conclusion SPK. How, if at all, would you say the decline of social mobility as a bourgeois value fits into that equation.
Oops, I only addressed one facet of your original post, and not the other aspect. :blush:

What is the relation between the decrease in social mobility that the usa has seen over the past quarter-century or so (I agree with you – that is a real phenomenon) and changing (?) forms of bourgeois morality? Well, I didn’t find it hard, in my previous post, to relate the changing penal strategies here to changing forms of bourgeois morality. That’s because there was a clear shift, starting in the seventies, from the kind of approach Foucault describes to a different, more punitive approach. That change in concrete, material practices was accompanied by a loud public campaign, spearheaded by the then-ascendant conservative movement, to ideologically justify those moves – by using the crudest racism, and so forth. This shift in penal strategies was basically finalized years ago – the more reactionary elements of the ruling class were successful in their efforts.

But when it comes to this question of a drop in social mobility, I don’t see any significant ideological shift, in the form of bourgeois morality, accompanying it. At least, not a shift in the public sphere, one analogous to the conservative campaign I described above: talk-show hosts on the radio spouting right-wing nonsense, televangelists going on and on, etc. Now, the bourgeoisie themselves, apart from their hirelings and functionaries, may be saying something different behind closed doors, which they tend to do :lol: , but I don’t know what that is. I’m basically looking at the ways in which these ideologies are taken up, or not, broadly among people -- among the petty bourgeoisie and the majority of the working class.

Of course, the traditional amerikan "values" of hard work and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps have been beaten into people's heads for a long time now. They were pervasive during periods of reduced class disparities, and are similarly pervasive now with increased class disparities. Those "ideals" are a constant and wouldn't seem to be helpful, by themselves, in explaining the situation today versus a quarter-century ago. Moreover, the reduction in social mobility is constant and unending at this point: it has steadily progressed over the years from workers in the traditional heavy industries, like steel and automotive (the seventies), to family farms (the eighties), to oil (again, the eighties) to aerospace (the early nineties, after the end of the Cold War), and to services like technology today. Ever-increasing numbers of people are impacted, which in the long run threatens the capitalist system. However, the ruling elites keep yapping on endlessly with their old line about the benefits of working hard, taking out lots of loans, going to school, getting further training and degrees, and so on – even though more people than ever understand this to be complete bullshit.

So, I perceive a silence or absence in bourgeois ideology about this question of mobility and the different effects, on different strata of the people, that it has over time. Am I wrong? What do you see in this regard, in terms of a shift in subjective bourgeois morality, not just in terms of the objective phenomena of reduced mobility? If there is a silence or absence today, as I described, why would that be?

[commiecrusader]

Originally posted by [email protected] 08, 2006 07:48 pm
read the economist article. it will strongly disagree with your "research". everything else i have read shows high social mobility from the 1950s through th 1970s.
Does everything you've read say how long-term the social mobility is? And I ask you, as I said before, if social mobility does really exist then why doesn't everyone better their situation... because its impossible to in a capitalist system.