>>> Yoshie Furuhashi <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 05/04/99 05:37PM >>> They may want to sell it, but marketing efforts seem sporadic + half-hearted (probably because they don't believe it either). Besides, do people buy it? What I see in American people's responses to the Clinton Administration's Kosovo policy, for instance, is mainly indifference or acquiescence, along with smaller currents of distrust, anger, and hostility. As far as I know, only cruise-missile liberals + social democrats (_very few_ in number) who belong to the _opinion-making professions_ talk and act like as if they bought it. It's hard to sell MacJobs, sweatshops, deindustrialization, pauperization, debt peonage, & colonialism as the way forward in 1999. People aren't as naive as Susan Sontag. The way I see it, neither the ruling class nor the working class believe in the rhetoric of 'progress' any longer. The working class seem committed to a Machiavellian relativism as much as the ruling class are; it's just that the working class version is a releativism of the powerless while the ruling class and the governing elite go about their business without even promising capitalist 'progress' in terms of fatter paychecks. 'Progress' is dead under capitalism. In this sense, I think that postmodernists have proven to be better at reading the rhetoric and structure of feelings of the fin-de-siecle capitalism than most non-pomo/anti-pomo leftists are. ((((((((((((((((((((((( Chas.: I have to agree with Yoshie's sketch of the feeling tone of today. I would add that the working class's consciousness, from my experiences, seems drastically individualized. The bourgeoisie have succeeded more than ever in creating a feeling among most people that their chances of winning the individual "lottery ticket" of a "successful" life is greater than winning for themselves by uniting with others in collective struggle. It is the spiral of a negative feedback loop, and the further it goes, the less the actual chances of an individual winning by taking the collective route. The resignation to the role of dog in a dog-eat-dog struggle actually becomes more and more rational. Sociality is atrophying let alone socialism. Whatever. Charles Brown
