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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