James.
>However, I wonder if your embrace of the car and opposition to carism is
>not a bit based on an essentialist understanding of the class basis of the
>opposition to car based economics?
'Essentialist': pomo code for 'objective' or 'real'.
>That doesn't mean that cars have to be entirely fazed out of an economy of
>course, but giving everyone a car to drive is not *necessarily* going to
>be embraced by working class folks who know that it aint gonna solve their
>problem of gettting to work on time.
Not necessarily, but it would go a long way. Incidentally, giving working class people cars is not some fantastic notion plucked out of a future socialist programme. It's what is happening, in Britain at least, and I suspect in the US, right now. Working class people are buying cars. Middle class people resent that, and wish that they could take them away from the working class people.
Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> writes, standing the truth on its head:
> The automobile is the
>chief barrier keeping me to get to Chicago (I live 135 miles away)
>in decent time.
Why Carrol, whatever do you mean? The car is preventing you from getting to Chicago? Please expand:
>The last 20 miles are almost always clogged (and half
>the time the car overheats from start and go motion),
Whoa, you mean, you DRIVE to Chicago. So the car is stopping you from getting to Chicago ('in decent time') because you go by car. What kind of cockamamie argument is that?
And then we ask, which car is it that is preventing you from getting to Chicago? Why its the car in front of course! Not your car. Oh no.
Coming from a small island, I have to say that you really do not know what clover you are living in. The idea that one could regularly visit a town 135 miles away is unknown in Britain, where onerous taxes increase petrol costs by 80 per cent (presumably this daylight robbery is the kind of anti-car measure you support). In fact, the idea that Chicago is in your reach is a sign of just how great your debt is to Henry Ford.
But always one to protest that the glass is half-empty, Carrol moans
>the preceding
>80 miles are intermittently clogged by construction,
Which is no doubt a problem, but if the motorway is clogged, wouldn't you want it widened? Or perhaps all those other cloggers should be kept off the roads.
>and the fact that
>most people move by automobile keeps the AMTRAK schedule too
>infrequent.
All the evidence is that if you decrease fairs and increase train journeys, it has no noticeable effect on car journeys, it just increase the total journeys. People make car and train journeys for different reasons, as a rule, and all the 'traffic calming' measures undertaken by the British govt. have had no noticeable effect on public transport.
>
>Arguing from alleged "working class" preferences is simply silly. Our
>options are set by capitalism, and one prefers the least obnoxious of
>the various alternatives. And then one makes the best of it by learning
>to like the least obnoxious of the various alternatives.
No, I think it is you who is being a silly-billy. The working class might be a notional concept to you that must be imprisoned behind inverted commas, but these are real people, who make real choices in the here and now, not in a future utopia. Hostility to car use is merely sublimated hostility to car users.
> There is simply
>no way to provide the necessary parking spaces, and as a result
>travel is often slower today than it was 80 years ago.
It's amazing that you can happily imagine a world in which all transport is undertaken by train, but can't imagine the creation of more parking spaces.
>The main objection to the auto is that when it
>becomes the main mode of transportation it becomes a torture
>machine like the wheel or the rack -- but unlike the wheel or the
>rack, we have to fool ourselves into thinking we enjoy it.
It sounds to me like you have projected your alienation from your work onto the means by which you get there. It is not the car that exploits the working class, but capitalism. I happily predict that under socialism everyone will have one. -- Jim heartfield