Pre-modernism

Eric Franz Leher fr102anz at netvigator.com
Thu Jan 24 05:31:33 PST 2002



> "dlawbailey" wrote:
>
>
> Pre-modernism is a silly and basically conservative vewipoint. It's
> very,
> very, very clear that the world's population cannot live without modern
> technology. Those who are forced to tend to die in large numbers and no
> reasonable person would want to live that way. Among reasonable people I
> number the list members here. If you don't believe in modern technology,
> the answer is really simple. Go live in the woods for a while.
>
I'll ignore a couple of non sequiturs here and cut to the chase.

I think it is safe to say that not one single person on this list has ever advocated a return to a hunter-gatherer existence, seeing as it is clearly not possible barring near-extinction of the human race. Wanting to correct certain misconceptions about this way of life is not the same as advocacy.

There aren't any primitivists on this list. What seems to happen, from my brief engagement with this, is that if someone brings up the possibility of a technology / leisure trade-off, they get tarred as advocating a return to the Paleolithic. Even quite intelligent fold don't seem to comprehend that a comparatively small tradeoff is all that would be required here (more in another post)

We might want to ask ourselves why on earth we are leftists if we can't get beyond the notion of the 40- (or at best 35-) hour week. Technology is _supposed_ to bring freedom from labour (didn't Marx say this?) Of course under capitalist social relations it can't do that. That's why in Aus (for example) we've had the 40-hour-week since 1850-something, I think. No matter what advances in productivity, we still get lumbered with it.

Anyway I intended to address this in another post, so I'll close this now. My thanks to Thiago for making the relevant points more completely and with greater knowledge than I could have.

Eric Leher



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list