>This is really the most egregious flaw in the "I made it so it's my
>property" argument: everything that people produce in our society, even if
>they are writing a play in their own home, is through and through a social
>product. As Kel notes, there's a social fabric here that enables any kind
>of artistic expression (language, politics, religion, tradition, etc.).
>In short, as a lone individual, you can't create anything that is socially
>interesting and/or useful.
>
>The fact that this obvious point is ignored or overlooked is a sad
>testament to the ideology of hyperindividualism in a capitalist society.
>
>Miles
I liked Carrol's term, tragic. The fact that people don't understand it isn't surprising: it's the consequence of the division of labor. Even Adam Smith understood that the DoL would cause problems--dulling the faculties and spirits of workers (which is why he said that it was a nation's duty to spend money bolstering civil society: museums, schooling, religion, arts, entertainment. Doing so would offset the deleterious effects of the DoL because they would stimulate the mind and character of workers who plugged away minute after minute, hour after hour, day after day in the move from task-oriented work to time-oriented work.
But, we also recognize that one of the problems with the DoL is _also_ that it obscures from us any understanding of how our labor is connected to the wider swath of people, past/present/future who also labor to create, distribute, _and_ consume (for as justin points out, we don't want to forget for whom we actually produce things.)
I always wonder about the DoL thing in thinking about what a socialist future might look like. While I agree that the details must be worked out as move in that directions--nodding to Carrol's "cookshops of the future," it still seems that there is such a disagreement among those of us on the left on this particular issue, that it's hard to imagine any easy answers.
kelley
"We live under the Confederacy. We're a podunk bunch of swaggering pious hicks."
--Bruce Sterling