<html> Bill: Thanks for responding.  Sorry if I poured it on a tad too thick or otherwise didn't carefully read what you wrote..  But let me just push one point a bit further... You wrote: <blockquote type=cite class=cite cite>Perhaps I didn't caution that some workers sometimes feel they have some of the good things in life, but Christ man, I wasn't writing a book or an academic thesis. Obviously a slogan isn't the whole truth. And there's nothing in that slogan to suggest that capitalists=good and workers=bad. ("Four legs good, two legs, baaaa-d!" Is how Orwell ridicules this dichotomy in Animal Farm.) That sort of thinking misses the whole point, which is that it isn't about good or bad people, its the materialist conception, that systems make people what they are. That is the point of that slogan, not that capitalists are born evil and workers are all saints.</blockquote> I've been fighting the individualism of American college students day in and day out for the past 20 years, so you don't have to convince me about the importance of getting people to see how "systems make people what they are."  Yet, doesn't this move still somewhat beg the question: what exactly ARE the people that the system makes?  Essentialized notions of the individual-- which too often carry the day, even now-- would have it that the individual is somehow ONE THING.  In our case, this leads quite easily into block categorizing "working people" as "alienated," or "exploited" or what have you.  Yet, even a little self-reflection tells us that the self is not one thing, but many, all in a conflicted and ever-changing whirl-- and filled with pain, pleasure, joy and sorrow-- all maybe in the same instant.  Just think about your last dinner party, last Friday's work-day, or your last birthday.  Alienated and exploited people can and do have fun.. and maybe not just alienated and exploited fun. Marx wasn't much of a social psychologist but he was definitely on to something with his statement about the individual as an "ensemble of social relations" (the exact source escapes me, but it's probably in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts).  Unfortunately, the few who have tried to build on this insight, either with Freud, or the American Pragmatists (G.H. Mead in particular), have tended to produce an overly cognitive and rational individual, however amenable to being "made by systems."  So, I think a lot more work could and should be done here... and my preference, obviously, is to look toward the post-structuralists. But you and I have no real disagreement as to the starting place, which is to counter lopsidedness of "people make their own lives," with "but not under conditions of their own choosing."  We've a long way to go before most people are able to understand, and live by, that truth. Best, Cliff </html>