Marx

Peter K. peterk at enteract.com
Thu Mar 16 18:16:54 PST 2000



>wobblies and surrealists.
>
>Which is not a bad mixture.
>
>mbs

Zizekeans and Butlerites?

(I'm kidding)

Today's Suck (www.suck.com) mentioned Marxism, although they modified it with "old-school" which made me wonder what the new school is exactly. Go to the site for the hypertext links.

Hit & Run 3.16.00

[snip]

There's nothing funnier ... OK, there are loads of things funnier, but nothing's more flat-out undignified than watching purportedly "critical" countercultural types knuckle under to way-new capitalism. First the "Baffler" acquired a "web-site", its antiqued, old-fogey scare quotes failing to hide its desire to exchange "tee-shirts" and "baseball-caps" for "money."

Now Ted Rall, probably better known for his hard-nosed litigiousness than for his attempts to speak as the cartoon voice of Generation X, enters the line for sloppy seconds. His dippy pronouncements on the Zeitgeist ("Everyone knows that the real president isn't Bill Clinton - it's Bill Gates.... In a land where no one believes in anything, you are what you buy.... These days, meaning is where you find it.") hardly impelled us to dump our copies of George Soros's The Crisis of Global Capitalism or Laura Kipnis' Ecstasy Unlimited, and we weren't really sure how we'd sell them if we wanted to. After all, the help these days at small, independent book and record shops is so surly and uncouth, we simply dread contact with them. Well, Rall came to the rescue in this week's Green. Lodged awkwardly in his screed on the Used Culture Industrial Complex is a pretty good reason to throw over all those plucky, vital little bookshops and record stores: a net gain of $335 selling his used dreck via eBay. His defense boils down to rational self-interest and the profit motive, the same stuff that (gulp) leads corporations to drive wages down, maybe even (ulp) a reason indie store workers are so gosh-darn sullen and lazy. Which might go to confirm something we've long suspected: If Catholicism works to keep sex naughty, maybe old-school Marxism just makes selling out later more dirty and fun.

[end snip]

sort of Zizekean, no?



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