I feel so dirty.

[Paul Henry Rosenberg]

Kelly wrote:

> At 01:02 PM 1/1/1999 +0000, you wrote:
> >In message <368BE00B.576B at gte.net>, Paul Henry Rosenberg <rad at gte.net>
> >writes
> >
> >>The fact is, materialism DOES have it limits.  The
> >>hippies were one expression of that realization, and
> >>look how much a couple thousand of them scared the bejezus
> >>out of the big cigars, until a new wave of bc-wannabees
> >>showed how readily hippiehood and its spin-offs could be
> >>marketed to the millions.
> 
> It was already being spun off and marketed before the new wave came along.

New wave?  Hey, I'm talking the 1960s! 

And, of course capitalism is going to rip off everything that's not
nailed down so tight it makes more sense to blow it up, that, to me, is
a given.

> And, as someone else said--you even implied--anti materialism
> is parasitic on materialism. 

What's the distinction between being "parasitic" and being a dialectical
consequnce of?

To me, the former simply closes off possibilities as a snobbish,
distancing judgement that makes it quite comfortable to continue
theorizing.  The latter is messier, and allows the possibility of
actually *doing* something.

> That doesn't mean that I dismiss this; rather, I merely
> want to point out that moral superiority can't rest on
> that sort of binary.  Not for long anyway.  There has to
> be a firmer ground upon which to stake those claims. 
> Otherwise they're driving pylons into shale.

But that's always the case, now isn't it?  Class antagonism built on
hating individual capitalists is hardly any firmer.  You start with
people's inchoate grapplings with contradictions, and try to find firmer
foundations for them.  Same as it ever was.

> And I expect a whole hell of a lot more from the
> simplicity crowd because they ought to damn know
> better, since those I've run across consider
> themselves lefties.

Yes, well, just what has "leftist" meant in the US for the last 30
years?  Certainly NOT the kind of grasp of economics that characterized
it in the generation before.  

I sympathize with your exasperation, but I think the problem lies
deeper, and so I want to ask what chance this movement offers (or, more
fundamentally, what chance the anxieties that give rise to it offers) to
develop what should have been there all along, but rather obviously has
not been.

> It  is rilly rilly annoying when some upper middle
> class people who've hit stumbling blocks in the
> trajectory of their careers  wax effusively about
> the joys of the simple life, cotton, growing their
> own vegetables, picking berries in the wild and
> making their own jam, Sally's Boutique, the wonders
> of composting, bartering, not buying a new wardrobe
> each season, and washing out Zip-loc bags.  For I'm
> impelled to say in reply:  "Why you should meet my
> grandma, she'll teach you a thing or two; she taught me."

Yup, I'm with you 100%.  The scent of new-found moral superiority
(replacing the old discarded model) can be right up there with
fingernails scratching on the blackboard.  But you really don't have to
hang around with these people if you don't want to.  Or you can pick
your spots.  

The point is, don't get dragged into their personal histories melodrama
in a reactive mode.  And don't cultivate a mode of analysis that leads
so automatically to this kind of reactivity.  There are underlying
material realities at work, and your annoyance with these jerks is
distracting your attention dfrom them.  

> It's like they fucking discovered it, while all
> around them the people they've been blind to--or
> rather the people they've felt superior to for
> other reasons their entire lives--have been doing
> quite the same their entire godamned lives.  They
> should know better.

Yup.  Now how do you theorize your way into a strategy that does
anything productive with YOUR superior insight?  

> >It's one thing to have the have-nots revolt against
> >a system that exploits them and denies them satisfaction.
> >It's far more devastating to have the heirs of affluence
> >turn their backs and say the game is just a waste of time.
> >It delegitimates the whole affair from a truly
> >unexpected direction.
> 
> Did anyone say it was a waste of time?  Huh?
> I said...

You misunderstand me.  I wasn't saying that to characterize you or
anyone else's views here.  I was saying that to characterize the views
of people who come to view the materializt rat-race as a waste of time.  

> that I didn't care for their moral superiority,
> for they're lack of any sophisticated theoretical
> reasons for doing what they do other than as a
> not-well-thought out response to the crises of late
> capitalism:  specifically the Time Bind and downsizings
> here in the US.  When a woman tells me about how
> she's dropping out of the rat race in order to simplify
> her and her family's life I'd say that she's
> misdirecting her efforts just a wee bit.  She's
> failing to ask why is it a fucking rat race, why
> is it she must work more and more, why can't she
> find decent daycare, why do the schools suck, why
> her husband by the way isn't picking up his godamned
> share of the second shift.  And worse, from my own
> experience, those very same women often were once the
> very ones to denigrate stay-at-home moms, failing to
> realize that staying home for a lot of women hasn't
> always been a choice.  What choice is there, say, if
> you make minimum wage; it is much simpler and cheaper
> to stay home.

All this is *VERY* well said, and much more on point than your earlier
put-downs.  The illuminating of shared (cross-class, cross-racial,
etc.), politically-determined material conditions is precisely what we
should be about, IMHO.  

If all we do is express our annoyance with them, well, that's one more
opening for the Christian Right to walk in, and explain how the
underlying problem is the "spiritual vacuum" in their life that can only
be filled by Jesus, a registered trademark of The Promise Keepers, Inc.,
or whatever the latest brand-name label is hot at the moment.

> Besides when simplifying your life becomes a regular
> feature on Oprah and similar sorts of talk shows, then
> I think we have damn good reason to be suspicious.

Suspicious, sure.  But also on the lookout for opportunities.
 
> Oh I'll not say this anymore, as I wouldn't want to
> deligitimate their efforts toward revolutionary change.

Hey, I'm not saying that their efforts are in themselves toward
revolutionary change. It's our jobs as those who believe in the
revolutionary need to push things in that direction, to reveal the
underlying conditions, challenge the warm & fuzzy mystifications, etc.

> Voluntary simplicity is generally not that voluntary
> when you get right down to it. 

Oh but it is.  On an individual level.  That's the perennial challenge
in the US -- dealing with the addiction to individualist thinking. 
There's nothing new in this underlying problem -- it's just a new
configuration.

> It does little to change things, it simply makes capitalism
> more damn efficient by creating a new sort of reserve army
> of the under-and unemployed, people who accept their situation
> since they think it's a fucking choice.

Well, for many people (including myself) who've worked as contractors &
consultants, etc., it actually WAS a fucking choice.  I knew all along
that MY choice, what suited me, was not a good thing in the wider mass
sense.  But THAT'S the level at which I really didn't have a choice. 
Choosing to work on a contract basis, so I could take weeks or months
off at a time was DEFINITELY something I chose.  Having it be part of a
general de-stabilization of hard-won working class gains was not.

> Now, were these folks to demonstrate to
> me that they have more sophisticated reasons for doing
> all this, then yeah, I'd applaud it. I'd still be critical,
> but much more sympathetic.  Shutting up because I might
> delegitimate the positive features of their efforts hardly
> seems the appropriate response.  And, for me shutting up
> vitiates the very project of critical theory.

I'm not saying you should shut up, Kelly.  I'm saying you should think
more like an activist -- how can we take advantage of this inchoate
reaction -- rather than an armchair critic.  

People NEVER have very sophisticated reasons they can articulate (or
even recognize) on their own.  Poets, philosophers, comics and
troublemakers are always necessary to develop such sophistication. 
Naturally, there's a strong conservative bias -- the revolution that can
be televised will always have a huge advantage.  That harldy means we
should give up without a fight and decide to stick with throwing
tomatoes.


-- 
Paul Rosenberg
Reason and Democracy
rad at gte.net
 
"Let's put the information BACK into the information age!"