Being tone deaf, I'd like to stand with the choir and lip-synch.
Gene Coyle
Rob Schaap wrote:
> A quick rant, Reverend Tom ... by way of testimony from the congregation.
>
> As Charlie Andrews so pungently summarises the whole sad business, "By
> living his life the worker produces his capacity to work."
>
> The raison d'etre of the dispossessed is to produce commodities - 'his'
> being is not an end in itself (which means the order's apologists do not
> have Kant's categorical imperative available to them when they spout that
> freedom-lovin' moralism in their defence) but a means to the end of
> accumulation. The one thing - the ONE thing - that accumulation cannot
> proffer the worker is the only thing a life needs to be itself: the
> possession of time.
>
> John Stuart Mill had an inkling of this when he wrote that line Marx liked
> enough to use: "It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made
> have lightened the day's toil of any human being." It ain't the time you
> take to make something; it's the socially necessary time - the time a
> competing owner of plant would need to pay for to have the thing made. As
> Marx avers here (chapter 15), technology cannot give us time because, under
> capitalism, its raison d'etre is to produce surplus value. So technology
> appears on the scene as a thing made of death, purchased with death to bring
> death.
>
> And if ever the 'behind-our-backness' of that which drives us needs
> verification, it's in the dominant discourse of our time. As we all
> demonstrably have ever less of the very thing that defines life itself, we
> have convinced ourselves we are wealthier than any generation in human
> history. So whatever 'wealth' is, it is not life. The dead things which
> comprise 'wealth' are, each and every one, physical manifestations of living
> denied.
>
> Ergo, the opportunity cost of capitalism is life.
>
> Ergo, capitalism is murder.
>
> >The traditional left has sought to affirm labour. The point is to abolish
> it.
>
> Neat thesis, Reverend Tom! 'The standpoint of the old leftism is the
> distribution of death and dead things; the standpoint of the new is the
> freedom to live human lives', eh?
>
> Signing up for a spot on the choir,
> Rob.
