> Date: Thu, 30 Sep 1999 08:24:42 -0500
> From: Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu>
> Subject: Re: Meszaros, progress
>
> Re productivity as "saving time." Then the clock has been running backwards
> for about 12000 years. Hunter-gatherers seldom labor over 15-20 hrs
> per week. Capitalism also eliminated scores of xtian holidays in order
> to increase hours of work. And if one includes commute time in the
> work week (as one should), then the work week in the u.s. has been
> increasing for decades -- perhaps for over half a century.
the clok has been running backward only if you view the telos of human activity as being leisure time. if you don't view it that way--and i don't--it's been running in so many different directions and at so many different rates that 'backward' is, for all intents and purposes, a random direction.
and capitalism hasn't done *anything* in order to accomplish anything else. maybe *capitalists* have, but that's hardly a subtle distinction. *you*, whether you like it or not, are a capitalist in the sense that the range of thoughts available to you is in delimited by the construct CAPITALISM which you are decrying. if you reject that then you've got no business griping about imponderable like 'progress'; or, alternatively, if you want to gripe about things like that, then dopn't make out like you somehow stand outside of history such that you can grouse about 'progress.'
progress is *excellent*. it *rocks*. and if you don't like it, there are lots of places where what one might comparatively call 'regress' are the norm. there are lots of very fine and wonderful things about those places--until you get malaria, say, and then like mother theresa you'll hop on the first plane out of there, lest you put your life where your convic- tions supposedly are and devote the rest of your material existence to fertilizing plants that are useless even by nobly savage standards which of course preclude notions like utility.
technical advance is a two-edged sword (at least), and no one worth paying much attention to ever said that we'd have our cake and eat it too. if hunter-gatherers work less, they live shorter; we work more and live longer. six of one, half dozen of the other, 'imo.'
cheers, t