My personal favorite, quite appropriately captured on the insciption
on Marx's grave at Highgate Cemetary and summing up Marx's life
work--from his Theses on Feuerbach:
"The philosophers have only interpreted the world in
various ways; the point, however, is to change it."
Jim Craven
4 May 98 at 13:31, William S. Lear wrote:
> On Mon, May 4, 1998 at 13:51:58 (-0400) Doug Henwood writes:
> >...
> >We need more on 1), I'd say. I put Verso's Manifesto poster up over my
> >desk, with the Komar/Melamid flag on top, and "WORKERS OF THE WORLD UNITE,
> >YOU HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE BUT YOUR CHAINS," all in caps below. ...
>
> Oooh, I want one! Where can I get it?? Hell, let's get some T-shirts
> while we're at it.
>
> > .... Staring at
> >it, I first thought that the language of chains didn't have much appeal to
> >the people who were the likely targets of the poster. Sure, there are
> >(mostly figuratively, some literally) chained proletarians in New York City
> >and Juarez, but most First World workers wouldn't even want to see
> >themselves as chained. Then I thought about those auto and steel workers
> >who loved their 50+ hour weeks, so they could earn lots of overtime and
> >pull down $80-100,000 a year. Killing themselves, killing any chance of a
> >civilized home or social life, for what? SUVs? These are chains of a
> >different sort, but people are so alienated that they can't even see them.
> >So they turn to self-help books and Viagra.
>
> I second this, heartily.
>
> As Chomsky said, "we are entangled in webs of endless deceit". I was
> feverishly thinking of sexuality, SUV's, suburban life, and
> externalities the other day while driving home through Austin's now
> poisoned, smog-laden air. I do think the notion of private goods is
> also useful to consider with the morally precedent concern of
> alienation. The bias for private consumption goods infects
> everything. Sexuality, as usually produced, is consumable by the
> individual; the images in popular culture of sexuality speak of an
> anti-social, stripped-down, cheapened sensuality. The images are
> consumed, they titillate, but no tendrils of social utility spring
> forth from these tawdry substitutes of sensuality set within a richer
> social context; the images are presented in a social vacuum, a space
> in which only individual values are visible... the market filters this
> and everything, just as it filters information and manufactures our
> consent...
>
> This bias, and countless others, condition our preferences for them,
> feed back into the production system to produce still more private
> goods, and in turn our desires become part of the webs of deceit that
> fasten us securely to a system that robs us of freedom, despoils our
> environment, tears apart and stunts our non-market social relations,
> etc.
>
>
> Bill
>
James Craven
Dept. of Economics,Clark College
1800 E. McLoughlin Blvd. Vancouver, WA. 98663
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