How to lose your edge · 5 June 2009
The landlady came to me with a simple request. Structurally, she is in power. Relationally, I am. Her hesitation, dissimulation, apologies… her waiting for me to define the situation… My first thought was: Nice to see I’m in control here! I didn’t even have to try!
She’s only just met me but has the idea that she is responsible for pleasing me. I guess it’s all those years of being a hardass. I was never a manipulator, one who instantly sends out the heat-seeking probe in to another’s psyche, looking for the weak spots. Rather I was just vaguely put off by the world, living in my own visionary bubble of “getting it”—a bubble in to which only a vfew elect would be permitted after having demonstrated their depth.
The landlady owns property and is extracting my rent purely on the basis of an arbitrary class advantage. Bourgeois swine! There is no productive relationship here… only the fiction that this place is “hers” and therefore I owe her for occupying it.
The first impulse is to respond to her solicitude the way that she expects. This is her script we’re acting out. She’s creating difficulty for herself by fearing me; and because she’s opened the door for me to act powerful, it’s natural to follow all the mental-emotional cues. Comply by dominating: be nearly silent, give no positive emotion, withhold information, act displeased. Over the years, she will learn to feel grateful for the slightest kindness from me. She will give me more and more subtle power, in the form of ego strokes and breaks on the recycling bill.
Pretty much my MO in any relationship in which my critique of capitalism comes in to play. Union activist-meets-kundalini gulag. It’s the least we landless masses can do to even the playing field.
But… I’ve been seeing how many interactions feature some unconscious layer of emotional blackmail. Not just the class warfare. Pretty much whenever a alpha is present, she sucks others’ energy, plays up their weaknesses, makes situations all about her own gratification. Are big alphas dominant and charismatic; or are they more like parasites? When someone comes around and defines the situation, is that power... or is it ultimately weakness?
I decided to take a risk with the landlady: I’m being easy. I’m acting as if we are equals on an emotional plane, rather than enemies on an economic one. Not being stupid about it, but also not interacting with trace aggression or emotional/material greed.
I admire people who live well because they are smart, who do not expend energy in tasteless ways or hoard it in tacky ones. These are the people who don’t have to make their way in the world by selling anything, by opportunism, or by being politicians.
They remind me of the old ethic Work smarter, not harder. These people tend to be ultra-clear about what makes meaning in life, and have zero interest in spending time and money in other ways. Nobody thinks to wonder what they’re doing right or try to keep up with them, because these people don’t bother to display their emotional and material wealth to others. They just live well: privately, kindly, and with great taste.
I’m not there. But I’m getting in to a practice of assuming a level of equality with everyone in my life. Doubts about their integrity? Questioning their intelligence? Wondering if they are going to annoy me? OK, fuss budget. Assume equality. By the same token, why assume anothers’ superiority? Why treat them as if their pleasure matters more than one’s own? Why assume we have less to offer? On the contrary, one could just assume equality on the level of personhood, no matter the differences in skill and social position.
So much time in my mind is spent on relationships. What else to humans even think about? Physics? Comic books? Outer space? Mostly, we think about each other. That is why what I set out as an aspirational disposition—assume equality—has turned in to a goddamn practice. Thought by thought. It’s ok though. The hardass racket had gotten dull.
Posted by (0v0)
Categories: integration
, morality
, self-deception
, social theory
Previous entry: Pathologies of Los Angeles / Next entry: Sex, Pie & Parkour
Comment
Commenting is closed for this article.
Maybe it’s off topic, but I’m curious as to the nature of the landlady’s “simple request”?
Posted by: KNL · Jun 5, 10:45 PM · #
This has made me very happy. It’s feels like a morality spa day.
Posted by: Gregor · Jun 6, 03:53 AM · #
Huh? I don’t get it. Your landlady paid for the land and the house right? You also signed a lease contract with her which means that you thought that the rent was worth, well, renting the place. An equal value and equal trade, right? (I mean, nobody put a gun to your head and said, “Sign the lease.”)
So, where’s the economic warfare?
If you really want to be pissed off, be pissed off about the land-use and open-space laws in California. Now that’s class warfare at it’s worst. All that these laws do is make housing more expensive for people who want to buy a house. The laws are great if you already have a house and want to just move into another house.
Posted by: jeff · Jun 6, 05:57 AM · #
K, she wanted to know if she could schedule some cleaning in the building at a time that might be inconvenient to me but that was convenient to her. My usual MO on this would be to refuse the request on principle. Gregor, I guess it is a morality thing. Ironic because at the same time I am reflecting on the uselessness of selling any kind of morality or spirituality.
On that note, Jeff, that is a good question. My usual response would be to engage in a dialectical conversation to draw out the hidden nature of the coercion that is the system of property ownership. Since you appear to believe that the rental agreement is a matter of individual choice, I would go behind that argument. Indeed, this is a key fiction of the capitalist ideology, in my view—the contention that the ways we all act on pain of imprisonment or homelessness are somehow “voluntary.” The blind consent of all parties involved maintains a grossly unequal, arbitrary distribution of property on the basis of the idea that we are “free.” Indeed we are “free”—because we renters fail to recognize that we are all in the same exact situation and fail then to act collectively, we remain atomized, powerlessly entering in to relationships in which we turn over most of our money to the rich—simply paying them for the fact that they are already rich enough to own property. It’s actually insane.
In order to stay in my Socratic posture and make you believe you were coming to these conclusions yourself rather than being led there by me, I’d probably take a few weeks to introduce these ideas. After that, I’d talk about the role of the state in all this. The way that government’s monopoly of violence and implicit enforcement of all contracts actually supports this insane inequality and deeply unnatural division of the world in to “owned” parcels. Then some discussion of the whole practice of rent-seeking in which the rich engage. A capitalist contends that it is only productive for some people to own property and be motivated to “improve” it, but really the rationality that follows from property ownership in the rental relationship has nothing to do with productivity. Rent-seeking is pure exploitation. There is nothing productive about it. When you see it in such a way, this contradiction is actually very upsetting to people who have a moral-spiritual belief that capitalism is a system that upholds freedom and personal responsibility.
But this is not sociology class. You are “free” to believe as you like. I don’t want to get in to it.
It’s important to unmask capitalist ideology, especially of this notion of “freedom” which is used to justify so much violence and domination in the world (worked so well for George W. Bush, you know? Obama uses it in a sometimes coercive way too). To do this, I use a counter-ideology of Marxism. But this too needs to be unmasked, of course. In practice, I am happy to see behind the system but also realize that it is REAL because everyone believes it. Why fight the basic shared understandings if my own era? Even on my small stipend, I’ve built up a pretty good Roth nest egg which I look forward to spending on a house in order to be “free” of the rental relationship. I’m enough of a capitalist to believe in the virtues of delayed gratification. :-)
Posted by: (0v0) · Jun 6, 07:29 AM · #
Well you did ask, Jeffrey…
And, Ms smartypants, you wont feel so ‘free’ when it’s up to you to get the bathroom plumbing replaced, after wedging a copy of Capital under the cistern proves ineffective.
Posted by: kitchenst(ovo) · Jun 6, 07:48 AM · #
Only because ‘round here I’m not “free” to pee in the woods! Talk about state coercion! Oh wait… there are no woods…
Posted by: (0v0) · Jun 6, 08:10 AM · #
Why would that matter? ‘Round there isn’t it usual to drink your own pee? As for shitting, that’s what the poor are there for. Mind you, it is important to maintain the value of your propety so you’d still be saddled with maintenance costs. And it would be ally our own fault, kapo colluder.
Posted by: kitchenst(ovo) · Jun 6, 08:34 AM · #
You make it sound like there’s absolutely no risk on the capitalists’ side. With a rental property, there’s risk that the owner can’t find a renter, there’s risk that some catastrophe will damage the property, there’s risk that the renter will damage the property, there’s risk that the rent price is below the mortgage of the property. There are also carrying costs for real estate: maintenance, insurance, and property taxes.
I still believe it is a free choice. You could live in a different neighborhood, city, state, or country. You could live the monastic life of a nun. You could be an executive where the company pays for your housing.
Now the capitalism that we have today is one where we privatize the gains, but socialize the loss (e.g. Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, Bank of America, Bear Stearns, GM, Chrysler, etc.). Blech. They should’ve gone under.
But it’s good to see that the Owl is a pragmatically capitalist marxist!
Posted by: jeff · Jun 6, 10:04 AM · #
I don’t study morality, but it seems to me recently that noticing a game and choosing not to play it is what a ‘living morality’ could best be about. Having power and choosing responsibility over and over again is a joy indeed to read about. But you know I like that stuff…
Posted by: Gregor · Jun 6, 10:21 AM · #
Re: choosing to live where and how-ever, no, it’s not free, precisely because choices are made in time. My case is this:
I chose a career path that underpays me, chronically. I chose (ahem, by not choosing otherwise) an academic career that has buried me under so much loan debt I’d have to turn pirate in order to move away from this part of the country. While my current living arrangment is pretty cool, I very much DO NOT have the “freedom” to choose to live how and where ever. It is not a binary relationship between capitalism and marxism that feeds this, it’s simple existential choice. I made these choices, I have these consequences.
Posted by: patrick · Jun 6, 10:39 AM · #
Patrick,
You freely made your choice by default and you are living with consequences of your decisions. I never said that people could willy-nilly do as they please. Every decision we make has consequences. If you’re under a mountain of debt, there’s always bankruptcy (and its consequences…)
Posted by: jeff · Jun 6, 11:06 AM · #
Ok, halftime. You just read this comment thread. Which part of your body is vibrating? What is the physical tone there, what is the emotion? What is the emotion that is speaking in each of the boxes above… what is the intention and feeling there? The old free will vrs. determinism debate (which in political discourse is vulgarized as the structure vrs. agency debate) pretends to be about rational argument. It is not. It is about self-concept and the need to feel like our lives make sense. Where do those feelings live?
The only reason that I bother to write about this matter rather than, well, the fucking delights of kechari mudra or my curiosity about what a diary would look like when written by someone who intimately knew the No-Self in an everyday way, is that I want to be honest about the limitations of a concept I hold dear. That concept—exploitation—carries a lot of spotlight truthtelling in it and is terribly useful in this day and age. But holding it too tightly and serving it mindlessly also works against me and my potential for being decent in the world.
What about the concept of “freedom”? Caveman Mel Gibson shouting the word as he is pulled to pieces on the rack; George Bush justifying the subjugation of Iraq to the global market for petroleum; Obama singing the praises of laws enabling women to wear the hijab. Both freedom and necessity are just stories we tell ourselves so we feel like the world makes sense. They have little to do with our everyday lived experience.
It makes me wonder why I blog when I put all this out there and it just elicits the repeat-reaction, “I still believe in free choice.” But then, I put myself a thousand times in baddha k and then one day I notice that I’ve been hanging for dear life there in the trapezius all along. And I get interested in letting go of what I don’t need.
Posted by: (0v0) · Jun 6, 12:05 PM · #
I’ve entered into an uncoerced contract in which I agree to pay 40% of my poverty level wages annually to a landlord who is already rich because I prefer to avoid the risk associated with the fact that said property might some day experience plumbing problems or, worse still, increase in value at a rate lower than I had anticipated. I had considered avoiding these problems by becoming an executive and allowing my company to pay for my accommodations, but decided against this option on principle.
Posted by: R · Jun 6, 02:19 PM · #
Just off the phone with my landlady. I decided to go one step further, and thank her for doing my dirty work since I have chosen not to become a real estate mogul myself.
Since we were on the subject of dirty work, she offered me a job cleaning her house.
At the going rate, I will need to work exactly 427 hours each month to cover the rent on my (I mean her) lovely 2-BR.
You don’t need Marx to un-do the fictions of the dominant ideology. Just a little math will do.
Posted by: (0v0) · Jun 6, 03:07 PM · #
Ok, so I guess no matter what I type, I’ll be disparaged…
But Owl, why would you expect that someone who does whatever it is that you do to be paid the same as a housekeeper? From what I understand, you invested time into getting a degree and training for your stipend. If you want to join the proletariat, tell your employer that you’ll gladly take a pay cut.
...and the curmudgeon exits to the right (apparently).
Posted by: jeff · Jun 6, 04:19 PM · #
Shot to the heart, baby. The unseen assumptions of the "choice" model are so intense once you see them. Again, my endeavor here is to go behind industrial-era assumptions. It's just difficult to take it there on the internet. We all tend to take positions and defend them as if they are our selves.
One thought for shifting perspective... read Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich. It's great.
Posted by: (0v0) · Jun 6, 04:47 PM · #
Returning to the initial post and yoga darshana/dollar darshana. How to avoid the temptation to use one form of power (psychological force) to counteract another (captital muscle) in an attempt establish some kind of relational equilibrium and whether it is possible to ‘live well’ in such a vritti-volatile environment. Is it possible to be fully aware of the imperative/imperial nature of capitalism and the attendant ‘assume the position’ scenario, to actively work on other levels/in other contexts toward the amelioration and even the dismantling of this situation whilst at the same time treating its primary beneficiaries as ‘equals’? Not just in theory (and if you are reading this blog you must surely know the theory/ies), but in wall-slapping, floor-mopping, guilt-tripping life.
Posted by: srs · Jun 7, 03:47 AM · #
Interesting following all these comments that in the original post your talking about choosing to ‘assume equality’. IE making a calculated, rational choice to assume a particular attitude/standpoint to act/behave other than your natural attitude, the hard ass. Makes me think of loving kindness meditation. Love how smart Shaky is here. He understands that we don’t tend to choose to act in a certain way, we just behave as we do in a given situation out of force of habit. Loving kindness is habit forming, start with someone you love and then extend it to everyone else until it becomes a habit and we can act that way naturally IE unconsciously even to our enemies, who of course have ceased to be our enemies.
that said I kind of prefer the hard ass that escaped in comments 4 and 12 and loved how in 4 you said you weren’t going to get into it….and then did…. in the next paragraph : )
Posted by: grimmly · Jun 7, 06:45 AM · #
Jeff,
For what it’s worth, I read some agreement between our respective comments, in your reply to my reply.
Owl,
My original impression of this post is that it wasn’t REALLY about capitalism but about interpersonal relations and the funky power dynamics that are there. Of course it didn’t take a big step to get to capitalism, but the comment thread might as easily have taken up relating.
Posted by: patrick · Jun 7, 07:11 AM · #
Gosh, I thought you were talking about tactics, not ideology. Interesting how it got there.
Posted by: KNL · Jun 8, 07:56 AM · #
(shrug) :-)
This is fun
“…the peculiar accord between Ashtanga and American values: sweat-based spirituality for a nation of self-actualizing multitaskers. Exercise with higher purpose…”
Complete with the perfect angry comment from an ashtanga defender (one of the devoted guardians of the lineage, no doubt). Have fun!
Posted by: (0v0) · Jun 8, 09:25 AM · #
Juicy, juicy, juicy! Might alphas be a root cause of class-ism and the wealth/resource-creation disparity? An irony landmine, right there.
(I haven’t gotten around to reading the comments yet, so please excuse me if mine is redundant or whatever)
Posted by: Carl · Jun 8, 12:26 PM · #
The Economist obituary seemed more interesting the New York Magazine one. It has enough irreverence to piss off some Ashtangis (go look at some of the comments.), but it has enough detail such that the author is probably an Ashtanga practitioner. (I mean, why in the world would a newsmagazine talk about which foot goes first in Padmasana?)
But used in Mr Jois’s way, which is how most Westerners understand it now, Ashtanga meant stretching, balancing and swinging to the relentless rhythm set by a little, smiling, potbellied man in an undershirt and Calvin Klein shorts, crying “Ekam, inhale! dve, exhale! trini, inhale! catavari, exhale!”, until every member of the class was breathing like Darth Vader and running with rivers of sweat.
Oh, wait. At some point, I was being ridiculed because of freedom of choice. Damn the structure! Maybe I should shrug like Atlas had shrugged. (Ok, I really don’t believe in Rand’s Objectivist stuff, but I’m feeling a little snarky after an Ashtanga practice… so much for learning Satya.)
Posted by: jeff · Jun 8, 06:36 PM · #
That article is even more fun! I can’t wait to read all the comments this weekend. The currently last one is hilarious. Every one of these defenders who says, “YOU’RE WRONG!!! ASHTANGA IS A DEEPLY SPIRITUAL PRACTICE WITH EIGHT LIMBS!!!” makes me want to say, following Bill Clinton: “Well that depends on what the definition of the word is is.” In its present manifestation, Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga is not an eight-limbed practice; and it’s not more deeply spiritual than a trip to the grocery store. It is an exercise cult paired with an orthodoxly New Age subculture. Both of which are excellent and I do pity anyone who’s not in on them.
Now to your other ongoing remarks, Jeff. Thank you for showing me the edge.
This is the edge: assuming equality with someone who thinks those of us who are proletarians are less equal (and I assure you, my people and I are LESS THAN PROLETARIANS, we’re landless peasants—my people are so far beneath you you can’t even see the whites of their eyes Jeffrey… but maybe they never told you during your “political science” and “accounting” classes that the working class is the engine of history).
This is the edge: Assuming equality with said economic elitists even though they understand less of reality than you do.
Assuming equality with limited-insight elitists even when they refuse to open their minds to you, when they are smug, and when they are full of their own hollow, barely on-topic “cleverness” vis-à-vis your most sincere attempts to offer what you have with an open heart and mind.
I love ya Jeff, right now, you shit. But maybe you could try just being quiet. I don’t give a care, since years of teaching social theory to rich entitled pre-law students from the OC has pretty well crushed my ego in this department, but you’re driving a few of the others up a wall.
Posted by: (0v0) · Jun 8, 07:52 PM · #
P.S. Grim I had to put on my secret titanium wrist band to write that. You still might owe me a drink though.
Posted by: (0v0) · Jun 8, 07:55 PM · #
It would take many blows with an adamantium piledriver to come close to crushing your ego, and as so much of said compound has been squandered on the set of the latest piece of x-crudesence, that obdurate little Kanda will have to remain intactus. But enough about you. Choice and the exercise thereof is such a central spinozal stem of godhead (giving). I, for example, choose to sport a pair of turquoise sequined shorts as lineal tribute to the primordial pescatorial progenitor of this practice. They were fashioned for me by an occasional denizienne of this domain in a lofty part of al culto centro. Now, whilst we’re about it, let me lend you usage of my sound tap siddha for a quick listen-in to said divartha’s chosen spleen stream:
‘...THAT’s what I CANNOT stand about THAT FUCKER not acknowledging my FREEDOM to follow a parampathetical FUCKING lineage in whatever WAY I fucking CHOOSE..’
Enough. But I do acknowledge the importance of context (look it up princepesa). I have had recent rather gerundive occasion to visit New Zealand in order to correct young Mr Sansom on a couple of points of practice. When I strode shalawards I heard the ejactultion ‘Choice!’ emenating from so many of the comely girls and lissome lads of that environ. Not a rather vulgar stripped down chant from young liberal ladies re their primary body-right, but in that antipodean idiom an expressal of just approval; “oooh, choice!”
A professor of Linguistics at some shed with the vulgar appellation ‘The University of Auckland’ attempted to explain that this particularly unimaginative (and, may I say, somewhat over-ambitious) usage stems from so many dispossessed sans-capital emigres and polynesian hearth planters equating the ability to choose with the good and the beautiful. How foolish. They clearly don’t know their advaita from their benevolent benighter, aka myself. I informed this shabby pedant of peasant proclivity that he would enjoy far greater mercantile glory by spending just a little more time in choosing his outfits than by wallowing in his own etymologically fuelled pomposity, but he clearly was either unwilling or unable to grasp this globule of divine amritic spittle between his ink-stained fingers – o! the callouses of academia – in order to better his lot. His choice.
Now one thing young Mr Wong and i agree on is the appropriate placement of spotlighting in sudios yogic. They should be arranged so as to highlight serrati and filibrated spinal erectors and, as he so often points out…but I digress a little, gossip is my own little poison of choice no need to traduce you people with its toxicities.
Finally, it has sometimes occurred to me whilst floating lightly out of pungu mayurasana that so many have made the wrong choice in adopting this practice as a means to beautification. After all, are there no surgeons? Surely a better option but, after all, they are free to choose.
Posted by: catygay · Jun 9, 01:19 AM · #
Ramesh Baleskar reads this blog?
And he carries a trident and is buddies with Duncan Wong?
Small world.
Posted by: (0v0) · Jun 9, 04:55 AM · #
So before I finally stfu, what makes you think that I’m some kind of economic elitist (I’m not even a land owner)? Last time I checked, I performed the job of software janitor (I think that College of Engineering at my Alma Mater may be disappointed that I’ve been binned with Poli Sci’s and CPAs). As far as labor being the engine of the economy, the last time I checked, since the industrial revolution, the balance of capital vs. labor as inputs into economic productivity is tilted towards capital, not labor. For example, my job is completely useless without all of the capital around me. I suspect the same for your position (I’ve never seen you blog about sweating out in the fields from a day’s labor for sustenance.)
(I don’t own any real estate because I can do simple arithmetic and notice that renting is cheaper than buying real estate. Even when the nominal interest rates are at 5%)
And, yes, I will now stfu.
Posted by: jeff · Jun 9, 06:46 AM · #
I’m sure I’m missing some irony there, but what’s a software janitor? I keep thinking helpdesk person but I might have got it wrong.
Posted by: V · Jun 9, 07:40 AM · #
The guy who sweeps up the bugs after the tiers of customer support have found that they can’t solve the problem because the software has a “real” bug. It’s a very expensive form of software engineering because of the expediency in trying to solve whatever the problem is. Typically a customer will stop buying stuff if the problem isn’t fixed.
Posted by: jeff · Jun 9, 07:59 AM · #
I stand corrected. It was not Ramesh Baleskar but Carlos Adonis, The Young God (of) Ashtanga Yoga. In his sequined nut-huggers. It’s been years since Carlos made an appearance to us here in the blogosphere. That’s why you have to read his comments twice before they make sense.
Catch that, Jeff? I am not saying STFU. I’m sorry if I seemed so harsh. I did get a little off my center there last night, and that’s my own issue, piledriver or no piledriver. Anyway, I’m asking for some receptivity (which is quiet) so that the ideas in play here don’t whiz past you quite so quickly. You’re missing what has already been said. This thread is already ridiculously full of tedious explication and I won’t harangue on.
But maybe re-examine the relationship of the cleaning lady and the land lady? First, pretend the land-lady is your mom and the cleaning lady is a robot. Then switch it, so that the cleaning lady is your mom and the landlady is a robot. What are the rules of this game? Where are the choices? Where do the chips go?
As for this mix of capital and labor and how much of the global economy is one or another, whatevs. Pre-singularity capitalist concepts. Ring up the labor economists at Notre Dame for a different version of the present data.
Posted by: (0v0) · Jun 9, 09:32 AM · #
I’ve been thinking about physics and comic books very much lately.
Posted by: Carl · Jun 9, 09:42 AM · #
I think the real subversive choice here involves a gent wearing ladies’ flared yoga pants and acting all macho about it. Seriously folks, could you get away with that if not for capitalism?
Posted by: Jamie · Jun 9, 10:24 AM · #
Thank god capitalism swept away the cross-dressing taboo!
Posted by: (0v0) · Jun 9, 05:59 PM · #
What are the rules of this game? Ok, I’ll bite since you have a new blog post and that there will be less traffic here.
I don’t know what the rules are…
Considering that a contract was made between me and a land-lord, why does it matter if the land lord is my mommy or a robot?
Am I supposed to be complaining about the absurdity of giving my hard earnings to a non-human thing? Sorry to disappoint, but that doesn’t bother me. I believe that my apartment lease is with a corporation, a non-tangible thing. (In this respect, I guess I could lash out in a Democratic sort of way about how the corporations are stealing my earnings.) But then again, some of my earnings are already diverted to yet another non-human thing, the government. (In this respect I guess I could lash out in a Republican sort of way about how the government doesn’t serve me, but I serve it.) I accept that this is what society says about how it wants to work and my mote of a role in society. My choice is exile from this society and into another. (Of course being a singleton is probably out of the question, lest comparisons to Kazynski may be made.)
You hinted at the how renters should collectivize (I think that’s a word), but did you ever consider it from the land-lord’s side? Assuming, multiple land-lords for rental properties, there is competition and there is risk. In other words, a renter can always rent someplace else assuming there’s no collusion in supply.
Or am I supposed to be hurt that you compared my mommy to the cleaning lady? (If my mommy were ever a housekeeper, I hypothetically may be offended)
Or are we supposed to have a discussion about the metaphysics of the mind and whether or not the robot has a soul / self awareness / consciousness / mind? I don’t know if I could follow such a discussion because my knowledge of stuff is practically nil. (I only mention this question because because you mentioned a singularity: it wasn’t clear which you meant, the agrarian, the industrial, the technorapture of Kurzweil and Vinge, or something else)
Or am I supposed to be complaining about how I work for a corporation (yet another non-tangible, non-human thing)?
Posted by: jeff · Jun 10, 07:08 AM · #
Communists go on about misappropriation of resources, but the interesting issue that they skip over is why the production classes produce so much. Why do they overproduce as they do?
Posted by: Carl · Jun 10, 09:55 AM · #
Why do you make such inaccurate assertions? Most analyses of economic behavior will discuss the imperative for constant production of surplus and increase in profits. As Marx and others explained, this just built in to capitalism. It’s not that some isolated group chooses to create excess and should be blamed for their “wastefulness”... it’s intrinsic to the relationships in which we are al involved. Capitalism generates profits. Thats how it works. If you see surplus and profits as waste, then yes, you’re coming up on the outer edges of the utility of the capitalist worldview. Just as as Planet Earth is doing these days too.
J. Yes Kurzweil. At some point industrial ideas about the self and labor aren’t going to fit at all, but as long as there is rent-extraction critique and action on that critique is useful. Otherwise, I’m going to ignore your inner child, allright? The answers to all your questions are in the thread above. Or if you’re actually lost, read David Harvey—his early stuff.
Posted by: (0v0) · Jun 10, 01:25 PM · #
Liz, how can anybody touch that most recent dream entry with their remarks? This entry resides closer to remark-access.
Maybe capitalism is what it is because most everybody fails to execute imaginative alternatives for themselves. It’s blunt-minded conformity, rather than appropriation by some sort of directive force.
Posted by: Carl · Jun 11, 06:00 AM · #
Carl, that’s interesting. Yeah, it’s a mix of creative ingenuity and mindless conformity. Man [sic!] makes his own history, but not under conditions of his own choosing!
Liz, just noticed the comments section is broken above! That’s hilarious! I was feeling proud of myself because I’d written something so weird that nobody had any response! Well, maybe that’s true, but …
I’ve got family arriving in a few min, so no time to fix it though.
XOXOVO
Posted by: (0v0) · Jun 11, 10:27 AM · #
But how could someone offer comments for that entry? That would be like finding a particularly vivid mural of street art, and then scrawling one’s initials in the corner of it.
Posted by: Carl · Jun 11, 11:36 AM · #
So my chinchilla fell in the fishtank and came out looking like a rat….. was wondering what a Mammoth would look like if it fell in a lake.
Posted by: grimmly · Jun 11, 01:56 PM · #
Nietzsche went fishing? Savage little beast.
Posted by: (0v0) · Jun 12, 06:43 PM · #