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
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