Labor now supports media merger, Net dereg (fwd)

Dennis Robert Redmond dredmond at efn.org
Sun Jun 16 17:40:13 PDT 2002


On Sun, 16 Jun 2002, Nathan Newman wrote:


> THe rhetoric may be solid but where do the profits go? Capital is
> incredibly hip to commodifying dissent, as the saying goes.

Profits aren't just economic. They're symbolic, cultural, political, social, psychological, etc. The notion of a pure, unmediated dissent constantly being swallowed up by Evil Corporate Machines is itself a piece of ideology: a libertarianism blind to the division of labor which makes even the smallest gesture of dissent possible in the first place.

It's not a question of choosing between card checks and analyses of Nintendo. Each needs the other: resisting capital in the workplace means decoding some very complex ideologies, finding narratives which put working people at the center of the labor process. The same is true of cultural praxis.

Not that I blame the union movement for being slow to recognize this. I think the MLA last year didn't have a single seminar devoted to videogames or videogame culture (someone correct me if I'm wrong).

-- Dennis



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