"Well, probably just dull. Seriously, I didn't think it was necessary to qualify the jealousy part. I should have known better. Btw, I notice you didn't address the other items on my list, passion, joy, &c. Does that mean that I was right--you think they will simply become outmoded concepts? You haven't mentioned how those irrational things might disrupt your sensual and sexual paradise, with its lasting friendships." Eric Beck
"Why do you imagine a world of "emotional barrenness" when you hear someone say that communism might make possible "the beginning of pleasant surprises & lasting friendships"? When I wrote the phrase, I was thinking of my favorite writer Oscar Wilde's "new Hellenism" in his essay "The Soul of Man under Socialism" in particular, and more generally Marx's remark in the Communist Manifesto: "an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all." I also like Foucault's suggestions concerning friendship, since I agree with him that the modern notion of "sexuality" as the "truth of the self" is a problem:
....
Perhaps in your view, (1) "the beginning of pleasant surprises & lasting friendships" = (2) "mindnumbing happiness forcibly made 'free' from fear, jealousy, anger, sorrow, etc." = (3) the Brave New World. I don't think that the first equals the second and the third, nor do I think that `happiness' (work of art) is dull or mindnumbing." Yoshie ------------------
What I am not sure about is why bother to wait? I mean I don't need permission from Capital, or the State, and neither do you. There are no lashes, chains, or bars around here. The real problem is imagining that it is possible and learning how to make it possible---for pleasant surprises and lasting friendships to happen.
So, I think the overthrow of oppression exercised by all manner of institutions has to become an individual act, precisely because under a capitalist and mass consumer dominated society, the existing collective bodies and social institutions are the means of oppression---and not as they should be, means to liberation and fulfillment.
But contrary to Eric's idea that communism equals the cell block of drones off to the drab business of manufacturing for the State, I think, if you reflect a little, that image is in fact the actuality of mass consumer culture under capital. Substitute Capital for State and just bleach out a few tints of color, erase some graphics here and there, turn down the volume, and viola---anywhere USA. The quotes from Brave New World resembled neo-liberal capital making the world limitless for Genetech, USA, more than the ragged streets of Oakland or Moscow or any other industrial sewer.
But let's take it a step further. What accounts for the barren, cell block interiority and grinding poverty of imagination that seems to me completely ubiquitous? Under the tinsel of capital isn't more tinsel, but the concrete cinder blocks of a prison. It is exactly that capital appropriates the skill to productive fulfillment from labor that insures that labor is bereft of those skills and means to productive fulfillment. So then the revolt is to re-appropriate, to make ours, those skills that are now owned by capital.
Go back to what constitutes joy and liberation. I find it in the exercise of skill and the freedom to work those skills passed the point of failure---to end a fool---that is liberation---to fall over exhausted and stupid---that is joy.
And yet managing and channeling those, harnessing those simple pleasures is part of how capital enslaves. The return under capital isn't the compounding and further articulation of skill for us, but a pointless wage to buy on credit things that bring little joy and no liberation.
As for jealousy, jealousy isn't just channelled desire toward some capital good. It is to watch children playing together, running around in circles for no reason and falling down exhausted and stupid and laughing---they are living momentarily that liberatory joy that is denied us--that is jealousy. So, why watch jealously, when you can just get on with learning (re-appropriating) and playing the skills that liberate you and anyone else you can convince to go along.
Chuck Grimes