On 7/29/06, Doyle Saylor wrote:
Do you read Marcuse?
I'm not a Marcusean, but I think his ideas are suggestive. me:
> according to Marcuse, we have to abolish surplus repression but leave > the necessary repression in place. How do we decide which is which in > practice?
Doyle:
I think I disagree with this idea of necessary repression. People start out in their birth families shaped by human interaction. It is a place of knowledge production for the child. There are many sorts of caveats about what a child is doing. Let me take an example from socialism of the past. In the Soviet Union the individual need was a problem for the collective process.
in his CRITIQUE OF THE GOTHA PROGRAM, another old guy argued that surplus-production wouldn't be abolished come socialism. Rather, it would be converted from surplus-value to a product that serves democratic goals. I think that applies to surplus-repression, too. There's some "necessary repression" that's needed just so society can persist without chaos (bad anarchy). But there's some sort of democratic surplus-repression that's needed to do better than that. Democracy is central. -- Jim Devine / "A different world can be created or re-created—but not until we stop enshrining the economic values of invisible labor, infinite and obsessive growth, and a slow environmental suicide." -- Gloria Steinem
