File spoon-archives/marxism-feminism.archive/marxism-feminism_1997/marxism-feminism.9712, message 50


From: Michael Hoover <hoov-AT-freenet.tlh.fl.us>
Subject: Re: M-FEM: All Work and No Play? No Way!
Date: Tue, 9 Dec 97 19:45:15 18000


> Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
> >We Marxists should propagate a superior politics of
> >free time, play, desire, etc.
> 
> Yes, yes, yes. But then all too many Marxists are eager to develop the
> productive forces, and think that play and desire are decadent.
> Doug

Towards a Rescue of Marcuse:

"Contemporary civilization has developed social wealth to a point
where the renunications and burdens placed on individuals seem
more and more unecessary and irrational.  The irrationality of
unfreedom is most crassly expressed in the intensified subjection of
individuals to the enormous apparatus of production and distribution,
in the de-privatization of free time, in the almost indistinguishable
fusion of constructive and destructive labor." ("Freedom and Freud's
Theory of Instincts," *Five Lectures,* 1970, p. 3)...

" ...increasing productivity of labor increases the possibility of
enjoyment and thus the potential reversal of the socially compelled
relationship between labor and enjoyment, labor and free time." (see
above reference, pp. 21)...

a related topic: historically, the left has had antipathy for sports
(Daily Worker was a prominent exception, great long time sportswriter's 
name slips my mind right now)...in spite of working class's enjoyment and
involvement...as William Morgan suggests, left intellectuals considered
sport to be "an inane, utterly frivolous enterprise, one that
functioned exclusively ...as a prop of the status quo." (*Leftist
Theories of Sport*/1994, p. 20)...

John Hoberman, in *Sport and Political Ideology*/1984, quotes
Valentinov (a friend of Lenin who apparently shared L's veiled
interest in sport) as saying: " ...to Lenin's other companions
the subject [of sport] made no more sense than embroidery or
knitting" (p. 188)...Michael


   

Driftline Main Page

 

Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005