On artificial "newness" or creativity, McDonald's comes out with some "new" special about every two months. Bourgeois mindcontrol establishes extreme presentism or disposable memory (the "end" of history). This allows them to pawn off the reshuffled cultural deck as something actually new. The French structuralist slogan _plus ca change, plus la meme chose_ (the more things change , the more they stay the same) captures the fact of the circular "change"of bourgeois society.
Charles Brown
>>> Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> 03/13/99 10:41AM >>>
James Farmelant wrote:
> March 13, 1999
>
> Freed From Ideology, Russian Philosophers Explore Limitless Possibilities
Some Marxist efforts to analyze bourgeois culture are handicapped by failure to notice that, given the core principle of that culture, individualism, one would expect endless variation, some of it quite radical, and that to the bourgeois mind itself that endless variation would appear as limitless possibility.
Applicatins of the term "decadence" (which I hold is only applicable to the cultures of tributary modes of production) usually come from failure to notice this potential for endless variation in bourgeois culture. Non-Marxist (or semi-Marxist) analysis of bourgeois culture is often equally handicapped by failing to notice that, fundamentally, the new of bourgeois culture is usually (always?) not that new.
Carrol