European Unions

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Sun Apr 8 12:29:50 PDT 2001


Dennis wrote:


>In another post you said that Engels wrote a pamphlet especially for
>workers' consumption. But Freddie didn't have to compete with TV, radio, the
>Web, CDs, video games, video tapes, and so on. Despite the illiteracy of his
>time, Engels could still count on enough readers to get his ideas across.
>Today? Not a chance, unless he put his ideas into a PlayStation game.

I like lots of pop culture, I'm not some latter day Adorno. But how in god's name can you make any kind of serious social analysis competitive with a PlayStation game? "Off the pigs" is kind of catchy and lives in the moment; my favorite slogan from Seattle ("Capitalism, no thanks! We will burn your fucking banks") does too, though it takes about four times as long to say. But anything beyond that will take time. You have to make people think two or three or five times about stuff they think is as timeless and natural as the movement of the sun (which we know, thanks to some pointy-headed scientists, isn't really the moving object, common sense to the contrary).

Doug



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