From: "David Bedggood" <dr.bedggood-AT-auckland.ac.nz>
Date: Thu, 4 Sep 1997 12:59:59 1200+
Subject: Re: M-G: The sigh of the oppressed creature


Chris, 
Di is a commodity full stop. What's with this "psychological 
commodity". A commodity is a use-value sold as an exchange-value to 
meet a need, whatever need. 

What is "latent religiosity".  This is psychobabble. Marx explained 
the material causes of religion as your quotes demonstrate. Under 
capitalism the forms religion took on tended to express the nature of 
capitalist alienation - a personal god for a personally alienated 
bourgeois subject. 
SO WHAT IS "STRANGE AND UNPREDICTABLE" ABOUT ALL 
THIS?

The sheer extent of the grieving surely confirms  to  Marxists the 
truth that "too late" capitalism has twisted the knife very deep and 
found an "icon commodity" to plaster over it. But we have to unpack 
Marxs analysis using his method touncover  the concrete truth, not 
blabber on about "community" on a marxism list.

COMMUNITY is just as alienated as god -  its the 
secularisation of god in the too-late capitalist period. The fact 
that people are expressing their REAL needs is a fact of life, its 
not GOOD that they are doing it in this way, nor is it GOOD that they 
are looking for community as the answer. 
CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS  is what we need. 
COMMUNISM NOT COMMUNITY.

Your right about one thing I don't want to cut off their heads, just 
their bank accounts. 

Dave.


Chris wrote:
So ironically, it seems to me that through this intermediary, Diana, 
who is openly described by a leading British editor Andrew McNeil as 
a world wide "commodity" (that is, a psychological commodity) the 
latent religiosity of our species reasserts itself in strange and 
unpredictable ways. 

What will be bad is the opium like-nature of the experience. 

What is good is and will be, the simple expression of community. When
people stand in silence for Diana they know at some level that the sense of
community they are expressing embraces someone who came from a broken
marriage, and whose marriage has broken up, who has had a nervous
breakdown, screamed and felt desperately like killing herself, who touches
someone with HIV infection whether they are gay or not, who cuddled a black
child missing a leg because she believes that the governments of the world,
*including the US government NB* should not delay any longer the banning of
landmines. And whose sense of participation in community embraces muslims
too. Embraces in all senses of the word and they do not hold that against
her. This last point is one by no means yet won and the events around her
death are if nothing else a valuable step forward in the acceptance of
people of muslim culture without discrimination (and that is still true
even if it takes a playboy to do it.)

At its best this religiosity will express a sense of human community.

I do not see why marxists need totally to merge with it, not to feel
horrified or embarrassed by it.



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