At 12:11 30/11/97 -0500, you wrote: We don't really need utopias. We need >plain language to describe a world where people can work 10 to 20 hours a >week producing a basket of goods that can satisfy all but those addicted to >shopping. What would go with this is a clean and healthy environment, >better health both physical and mental, an end to racism or national >oppression, and peace. > >Louis Proyect I agree in part. Here, for example, the labor movement doesn't even really have a vocabulary to describe their predicament. Thus there *is* a pressing need for giving things names in plain language, so as to be able to act on them. On the other hand, I would insist that a "utopia" (in the broad [Galeano] sense I mentioned in my last post) IS a necessity for doing politics "as long as we realize the constructedness of the myth, and the complexities of making even part of it real" (Doug). Lurking behind "plain language" is of course a version of how the world *should* be, which, I maintain, is an articulation of one way of organizing our hopes. So we're back to talking about utopias. Which is not a pointless exercise, and in which nowadays I find more nourishment in poetry than most anything else. (My favorite for the moment is Neruda's "Hombre Invisible", a sort of preface to his _Odas Elementales_, now out in an excellent bi-lingual edition). Concluding, please pardon a self-referencing here. Below a piece of a previous post of mine, which touched on the organization of hope: Often they (my students) have not even engaged/articulated what, at root, they might hope for in the world, much less how to act on it. In _Animal Dreams_, a book dedicated to the memory of Benjamin Linder (killed by contras in Nicaragua in 1987), novelist/poet Barbara Kingsolver put it this way, in the words of Hallie, her protagonist off to Nicaragua to defend the revolution: "The very least you can do in your life is figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance, but live right in it, under its roof. What I want is so simple I almost can't say it: elementary kindness. Enough to eat, enough to go around. The possibility that kids might one day grow up to be neither the destroyers or the destroyed. That's about it. Right now I'm living in that hope, running down its hallways and touching the walls on both sides." Tom Tom Kruse / Casilla 5869 / Cochabamba, Bolivia Tel/Fax: (591-42) 48242 Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
