| so this started as a reply to an article posted by zak and turned into psudo-marxist rant. well, i missed the class, so i guess i had to do something with the crazy old fellow. that and i haven't slept in 28 hours. anyway, don’t bother reading this unless you read this article first as it wont really make much sense. http://www.alternet.org/democracy/77498/?page=entire oh yeah, i didn’t edit this, so please forgive any tomfoolery or blatant codswallop. cheers interesting article, it reminds me of the communist manifesto in a few ways. first, its overly general and mostly unsubstantiated. the author sacrifices supporting empirical evidence for linguistic grandeur much as marx and engels did. it also makes the mistake of insisting that revolution is inevitable...or next to inevitable--history has, at least as far as i can tell, shown that revolution is rarely inevitable till the very crest of the wave, and revolutions are very rarely, if ever, truly revolutionary. that being said, like the communist manifesto, i appreciate a great many of the connections the author made between the political and economic conditions of his context, and the progressive possibilities that many people ignore. in other words, he drawing attention to possibilities that most people believe are both impossible and undesirable, and analyzing them in such a way as to illustrate their validity. that is, he sounds really really coool--i like is description of society (in most cases), but the conclusions he draws from that description don’t seem entirely founded in the data he provides. this is not to say i could do any better, but you get my point. regardless, you all should know by now that i'm all for some sort of revolution. though i agree with M. L. King that that most meaningful change comes through non-violent resistance, there comes a point where things are simply going to get dirty. i see this as a problem. violence simply perpetuates existing inequities and eventually recreates the conditions upon which the original revolution was founded, which seems hardly revolutionary to me. that is, every revolution to this point in history has done little apart from temporarily reorganizing the existing power structure, normally in economic as well as political terms. in other words, the revolutionaries become the oppressors and either the oppressors become the oppressed or a new oppressed emerges which eventually has its own revolution. marx discussed this extensively, and imagined that communism could bring an end to this cycle, but his dialectic/hegelian view of time is somewhat, umm, naive? i don’t really want to go into the details (i just wrote a massive essay on this last week), but i don’t really put much stock in communism solving all the world's problems. in my mind, there has never been a true or lasting revolution and i have absolutely no idea what could bring one about or if its even possible. in the end, i can see where this guy is coming from with his preconditions of a revolution (at least to the extent that its possible)--most of them seem to at least make a modest revolution more probable, but i don’t think we've come anywhere near meeting many of the preconditions. people are still too comfortable and the horatio alger myth (ie, the american dream) is still far to trusted and depended upon, blindly, by the vast majority of the country (or at least those of the country that i have met...maybe its just depauw). the problem really, as far as i can tell, is what marx called commodity fetishism, or some modernized derivative of it. basically, people are distracted by the material wealth that they are surrounded by. things may not be quite as our parents promised us, or quite as good as they were or we would like them to be (we dream of the stars by the way while a good portion of the rest of the world exists in squalor…that’s another long rant i don’t really want to pursue right now, but think about global capitalism and the new proletariat), but we still have it damn good in the western world. im broke as all hell, but i was tacitly reminded the other day of how well off i really am. we live in a consumeri tic parasite where what we desire desires keep growing and our goals are always just beyond our reach. the consumeristic system keeps thinking that what we desire is just beyond our grasp, within reach tomorrow or the next day, as long as things get a little better and we get that raise. material objects are given a palpable (though illusory) power--mere objects are given meaning and cultural/social significance to an absurd extent. just watch 5 minutes of commercials and you'll know what i mean. truth be told, i don’t think we know what the hell we want. we live in a system in which the only end goal is material "progress" and aesthetic gratification. thus, we keep pileing and pileing up our riches with no real goal in mind and then throw a hissy fit when things go poorly. now, i'm all for material comfort and security, but i'm trying to make a point that our values seem a little screwed up--not that i know what our values should be, but pure consumption and accumulation of material wealth seems one sided and rather...silly? in my conspiratorial mind, i think that this is a deliberate, or at the very least, necessary aspect of modern capitalism--its how the existing power structure is maintained. people are distracted by the dangling marshmallow of material prosperity and the mindnumbing and misleading character of modern media to the extent that they not only don’t want to act so as to bring about change, but couldn’t even if they tried. in the meantime, the capitalist monster keeps getting bigger and bigger through our unthinking contribution to the existing consumerist paradigm. its part of our socialization (and a material necessity in a way) to sit and watch tv then buy the products advertised on it. we cant really think outside of the box--this system is all we've ever known so we think things like lasting revolution are impossible and utopian, but they may not be, it may just be the capitalist system feeding us crap so we don’t question, don’t create, don’t imagine, don’t envision a new world. ok, now i'm getting really conspiratorial. anyway, i got sidetracked, what i was going to say is that in our culture, we are purely consumptive. tv, movies, video games, coffee, beer, cigarettes, even books or real art. not that any of these things are bad in and of themselves, just that in excess they distract from many of the real issues that face our world, or simply the given individual. life is a weird thing, but many people that ive met rarely stop to think about it in any meaningful sense. we are, myself included, almost exclusively consumptive with only a shred of the creative, which, again with the marx, what seems to me to be a uniquely human faculty, and in that sense, at least really cool (wow, that’s funny...i think i'm going to get shit for that one). at least speaking for myself, what i define as "fun" is almost always passive and consumptive. consumption is not bad at all, it is necessary, but think about what you imagine as leisure or time off or play or whatever. really, i think for any meaningful revolution to occur, we as a nation need to reprioritize or rebalance a bit, a sort of cultural revolution if you will--not that i know how to go about that. otherwise, we and our kids are just going to end up in the same place a couple decades or centuries from now. I'm not a utopianist, nothing will ever be perfect, and i don’t think it ever really should be (though that’s just an arbitrary statement in a way...like the rest of this, well, i guess its an essay now), and i think a revolution of some sort is necessary and hopefully coming. really, ill take what i can get, i too feel a deep need for some sort of significant change, but when i hear that there is an inevitable violent revolution on the way, i get a little sceptical and apprehensive. really, as far as i can tell, the only thing that would really necessitate a revolutionary change would be a near global energy/resource crisis, which may be on the way. that or if bush somehow overthrows the government, but he doesn’t have the approval rating for that anymore. all this being said, i am still a consumeristic materialistic bastard. i honestly feel somewhat guilty for spending this much time disparaging a system of which i am a pretty willing participant. yeah, i’ll be honest, i don’t really know what to do about it—that’s my biggest problem i guess, i don’t know how to, as hans put it, make this real. hmm...any thoughts? |
