Anniversary

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

>At 01:48 PM 09/19/2002 -0400, Yoshie wrote:
>>The empire narrows the range of acceptable discourse and impoverishes
>>the culture of the working class, with the result that, while
>>information may be "out there," available for those who seek it, it
>>just doesn't occur to most denizens of the empire to even look for
>>it.  Why should it occur to American workers to seek out statistics
>>of comparative wages, benefits, social programs, working hours, etc.
>>of OECD nations, for instance, when they are daily told by the mass
>>media that America is the greatest nation on earth, American workers
>>have it best, etc., etc.?  More importantly, those who manage to
>>discover such information and try to share it with others get
>>penalized socially: propose a national health care, and you'll find
>>yourself branded as a socialist in favor of forced collectivization,
>>eager to deprive individuals of their freedom of choice, etc.  The
>>hegemony of the ruling class ideas is stronger here than anywhere
>>else.
>
>Right on Yoshie. But, also, you leave out that access to information 
>does not translate into the comprehension of that information. 
>There's interpretation that needs to happen and many people in this 
>country simply do not have the skills to make these interpretations. 
>For example, many people think they are poor because they are stupid 
>or lacking in some way, and absolutely everything they are exposed 
>to in the mass media reinforces that feeling. Sometimes they go to 
>school to learn and often, everything they are taught in school also 
>reinforces that feeling.
>
>Joanna

The poor among the working class are indeed browbeaten into thinking 
that they alone are to blame for the problems that oppress them, be 
they material or cultural deprivations.  In turn, the better off 
among the working class are encouraged to think of their conditions 
as matters of personal accomplishments only (talent, hard work, 
can-do spirit, etc.), rather than matters of social structures, 
functions, etc. subject to (even radical) change.  To some of the 
poor as well as the better off, analyses that clarify the social 
relations that create poverty may even come across as personal 
affronts, as such explanations may appear to take away a sense of 
personal achievement, a belief in ability to control one's own 
destiny, etc. that they wish to have.  It is indeed difficult to 
accept the fact that some things are beyond our individual control. 
Even leftists are not exempt from this difficulty: many of us tend to 
think that our political fortunes would improve if we were more of 
this, less of that, and other things, forgetting structural analyses 
that we apply to everything except the conditions of leftists.
-- 
Yoshie

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