>"...my idea of cushiness includes the time and capacity for intellectual
>and
>aesthetic engagement..." doug
>
>
>the old man would seem to have agreed:
>
>
>
>"...The less you eat, drink and read books; the less you go to the
>theater, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love,
>theorize, sing, paint... The less you are, the more you have; the less
>you express your own life, the greater is your alienated life..." karl
Doug wrote:
And it's no accident, as the vulgar Marxists used to say (to pinch a phrase from John Leonard).
Doug
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Yes, but aren't you forgetting something? The old man also held that we live under a mode of production that is based upon alienated rather than self-fulfilling activity. We are suspended between the poles of possessing rather than enjoying and consuming passively rather than creating. This dilemma can't be solved primarily on an individual basis, i.e. through a choice of lifesyle. It requires a collective i.e. revolutionary political solution, which may just involve a little self-sacrifice, and perhaps a conflict between the necessities of such action and individual enjoyment and success. The old man, whose radicalism cost him an academic appointment when he was a young man, who lived much of his life in semi-slums with creditors beating down his door, who had beg and borrow constantly to stay afloat, was painfully aware of the problem.