G'day Wojtek, Whilst looking at our world through Marxist eyes can not but fill one with furious indignation (I'm sure Marxists have shorter life expectancies than others - I tend to swing between stomach-acid producing, blood-pressure-increasing fury and vitality-draining sadness), I do feel you might have overshot the mark somewhat here. As one who got the hell out of town (albeit not very far - we gotta work) because the virtues of the city have long been waning (less sociability, less convenient infrastructure, more malls [which I loathe with pathological intensity], more public surveillance - although the spectre of less physical safety is not yet writ large in the antipodean milieu), I can rightly be charged with taking an individualist route and thus contributing to social decline. The reasoning went thus; I'm not happy; something has to be done; no matter how much we try to add our little bit to cohere and promote that enormous well of similar feeling (it's in all the polls) in the city (I couldn't use the word 'community'), it never happens; I'm getting the hell outa here. I even prattle on and on to cyber-pals I'll never meet. Definitely a partial response to this sort of alienation, and definitely a middle-class option (computers are dear here). So we are responding to alienation in alienated ways. That's what one would expect of alienated people, no? How else would we respond? And we're not sitting somewhere above all this - we're part of it. And this ratfucker knows well enough where this is all heading: the aggregate of individually rational responses does not add up to the rational end overall. I'm reminded of Frank, Gilovich & Regan's games, in which economics students kept behaving as they had been trained to do (ie. as, er, ratfuckers) and consequently deprived both themselves and the group of optimal well-being at best, and any well-being at all at worst (great stuff; take a peek at Ormerod's *Death of Economics* pp 34-5). So my position is that we ratfuckers have no conceivable option other than the ones we're demonstrably taking. We don't need warning. Most of us know we're all fucked, and if we can speak of human nature at all here, we can certainly speak of the oft-remarked tendency of people to try to put off the minute of their own dissolution as long as possible, especially if they have kiddies to love and protect. I remember one erstwhile SS officer theorising thusly about all the people he'd been ordered to kill during WW2 - they'd all behave impeccably as they marched to their place of execution, outnumbering their executioners by mebbe twenty to one all the while, because they'd thus guarantee themselves the few extra minutes of life it took to get to the machine guns and the trench-graves. If we tend to behave like this in situations as certain as that, where, to the disengaged rational mind, 'nothing' is to be lost, and everything is up for grabs - well, we've a political problem of formidable magnitude, eh? Dropping infested corpses on us won't help much. And anyway, I thought it was the workers who lived in the burbs these days? You'd written: >This suggests that the individualistic response to crisis suggested in your >posting is the response conditined by bourgeois society. When the crisis >finally comes, bourgeoisie is more likely to use individualistic responses >to it which, in a long run, decreases their chance of survival. That is >good, no? Why would any decent Marxist want to warn the ratfuckers that >they are an endangered species? Why not dropping some infested corpses in >the burbs instead? Cheers, Rob.
