Doug Henwood wrote:
> But it's a unique form of consciousness for First World white
> people to want to give up their mode of life, when many - most? - of
> those billions would be eager to take their place.
O.K., I've never incorporated into my thought any suggestion of anyone giving up privileges or going back to nature. And in my first post on this I cited the CM, so it was hardly news to me that Marx rejected automatic progress -- in fact by citing the CM I rather set the framework for everything else I said in subsequent posts. Yet you came back with:
"Now we know it's the invention of agriculture, which caused arthritis in women several millennia ago. Let's doff all our clothes and revert to hunting and gathering!"
Which is absurd and hardly added anything to the discussion.
I think it was you that in a recent thread implied there must be some deep psychological reason for the failure of oppressed people to rebel. (If I recall correctly most of the post was a series of such questions.) The fact that, as immediately experienced, and often as experienced by a whole generation or so or by the bulk of the people living, changes are almost always painful (regardless of how much a blessing they may turn out to be from a later perspective) goes far to explain (without any psychology more complex than a bacteria's avoidance of light)
I would like to repeat for the nth time that people that haven't read the greatest American book of the 20th century, Hinton's *Fanshen*, do so. Don't let the u.s. "maoists" turn you off to such a classic.
Carrol