A friend of mine who teaches American studies wrote: "My only major disagreement with CLR [James]: we should be happy that the ship goes down, even if the workers mostly die and Ahab is the one that pulls it down; it was not only the first factory and the first multicultural one at that, but the first Auschwitz of the sea, and one of the most important of all. That was something that should have been seen in the 1940s and early 1950s, but the workerist perspective made the peception almost impossible. Ditto automobiles and their social role, naturally." Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)