File spoon-archives/marxism.archive/marxism_1994/marxism.Jul12-Aug17.94, message 97


From: SUBTILE-AT-aol.com
Date: Sat, 23 Jul 94 20:57:31 EDT
Subject: Reply to Rob Harle's introduction


I sympathize with Rob Harle's reading of what's going on here quite a lot.
 Rob says that 

I'm especially interested in HOW and If
electronic networks will bring about social change to ALL humanity

and he says:

Seems to me discussion of marxist texts is a worthy exercise so long as 
it is coupled with ideas or proposals for positive action! It is all very 
well for us to sit at our bourgeois computers with our bourgeois telephones
discussing the theory of a classless society when billions of humans have
barely enough to eat let alone access to communication networks?
The possibility of electronic communication increasing the gap between the
uneducated class and the educated class is very real which is in 
contradistinction to what the media hype would have us believe.

the fact of the matter is that we are doing academic work here, which can
probably best be viewed (in terms of power) as a rearguard action against our
disempowerment by the machineries of capitalism.  I don't really see us
drifting into a world where everybody has a computer and a telephone -- the
amount of industrial waste and ecological devastation that would be produced
as a byproduct of making everyone in the world into a First World consumer
would extinguish all life on Earth.  I argue that one of the most powerful
uses of Marx, therefore, as regards the current era, is ecomarxism.  One of
the main tenets of Marx's analysis of capitalism in CAPITAL, repeated, I
think, in Mandel's LATE CAPITALISM, is that capitalist production is
wasteful.  This also forms the main argument for calling Soviet communism
"state capitalism."  

Hope I haven't wasted too much of your time, money, and resources with this
reply.
-Samuel Day Fassbinder



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