buddy hackett?
tony wrote:
>He used to write for the Australian Communist Party paper, "Tribune" back in
>the good old days before the Wall fell and the 20thC came to a premature end.
or, more to the point, when sections of the CPA were scuttling off to form factions in the ALP, and were letting the architects of ALP policy sell their line in the Trib as a prelude to the embrace...
speaking of 'celebrities', Wark's book is called _Celebrities, Culture and Cyberspace_. reviewed by Jayson Althofer who writes:
"[Wark] is an eager running-dog of cyberspace capitalism, thrilled to fetch and fetishise its apparent benefits. It draws on Marshall Berman's reading of Karl Marx (on 'constant revolutionising of production') to argue that the information revolution has already happened and is happening constantly. This can sound like a paean to the dynamism of global capitalism; given the system's 'revolutionary' structure and structural indeterminacy, socialist movements for the determinate negation of capitalism are rendered unecessary, and probably elitist in any case. Cybercapitalism is 'the revolution.'
...the social tendency of Wark's [book] is to celebrate the speedy spread of 'the open vectors of cyberspace.' Information is already liberated... this is not to say that Wark does not see problems in its dstribution. However, responsibility fr unequal access to information, has, in his argument, more to do with the 'infomation proletariat', who persist with an irrational dogged resistance to cybercapitalism, than with the owners, managers and ideologues of that system.
...Despite attention to some important questions of class, Wark's treatment of suburban 'info-proles' smacks of the interests of a self-assured 'strata of comfortable urban and inner suburban information burghers.' The insistence that the info-proles should 'join the emerging public consensus on how to speak and act in a postindustrial society' seems elitist and incipiently authoritarian, though couched in terms of an urbane manufacture of consent...
Because 'The community is the collective victim of profoundly unequal access to information ...' a Labor government's goals will include the civilised management of cybercapitalism to eliminate the gross inequalities in the distribution of the fruits of information production. Thus the familiar tension between class conflict and community consensus runs through the book. But mediation by urbane intellectuals can help resolve (or pacify) class divisions: 'The agenda for Labor (is) to spread the cultural and economic benefits of cyberspace ... to make itself the power that night broker the interests of the information proletariat. Blue collar voters ... have to be persuaded that it was not really in their interests to resist the postindustrial order ... Labor has to find benefits for those chunks of suburbia that have been shut off, or wanted to shut themselves off, from absorbing and applying new information. At the same time, it has to persuade the more urbane beneficiaries of cyberspace that it is also in their interests to defuse such a resistance.' If this is Left-of-Third-Way idealism, I shudder to imagine an open alibi for a Realpolitik of some metropolitain intellectuals protecting their class interests by servicing the Labor Party machine." _Overland_ , 157.
Angela