> Dave wrote:
>
> > Rather than referencing some period in history or prehistory as you might
> > expect, I'd instead say something like very early childhood
>
> A friend of mine has been researching commodification and childhood, or in
> other words, the point at which one is targeted, created, or perhaps it is
> summoned, as a consumer. The threshold of pre-consumerism seems to be
> getting younger; just as working age has in a lot of countries -- the toy
> industry in the EPZ's in China, kids working as part of the labour of a
> whole family in outwork putting together components of toys in lots of other
> places... It's an interesting nexus... Perhaps it explains something about
> why the anti-sweat campaigns seem to be so, well, youthful?
Very possibly. And the spirit in which many of the successful protests of late have been carried out is not expressed as a youthfulness that has as its opposition some notion of staid old age and the attendant generational conflicts of the past - rather, it seems like a more extreme youthfulness, paradoxically inclusive, that expresses a connection with that pre-consumerist state that all of us, young and old, passed through in our childhood. Or so it has often appeared to me. I admit it's strange. (Note: this is not a reference to the "inner child" shit that made the rounds awhile back.)
This unexpected state of affairs could be an outgrowth of the collective reaction to a transcendant capitalism that recently crossed some indiscernible threshold, or could be akin in an oddly metaphorical way to the buildup of a speculative market bubble (OK, that's a stretch, but would be intriguing to contemplate) - but in any case may be why things in many respects have felt "different" at times, confounding many attempts on the part of the media et al to explain everything - the anarchic, unpredictable nature of the protests, the surprising, unlikely coalitions, the absence of heavy, dogmatic rhetoric in favor of a pervasive sense of whimsy and playfulness, and even the reduction of the objects of criticism to pitiful excuses and transparent rationalizations like so many rejected playmates in the schoolyard. What's more, a few of them seemed to recognize and acknowledge, whether tacitly or explicitly, the undeniable kernels of truth that formed the bedrock of the protesters' assertions. Something about the way the protesters made their case made this possible.
There should be a lesson in this for those mired in the dominant (maudlin, divisive, elitist) modes of the recent past: Rigid, dogmatic rhetoric begets more of the same from the other side, to no purpose - and understandable apathy on the part of the populace at large.
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/ dave /