Tom Walker wrote:
>
>
> And structurally, Tully's quite right to observe a symbiotic
> relationship between capital and labour (or the working class, as she
> put it).
I read "working class" in her posts as being a collective noun, merely a shorthand way of grouping people. And "capitalist" seemed to be used similarly. Hence I didn't see her as referring to any kind of relationship at all, symbiotic or otherwise. We'll see what she has to say on that.
> If anyone would have the power to terminate that relationship
> -- I once read in some old 19th century tome -- it would be the working
> class (or labour or the proletariat or...).
:-) Not by a buyers' strike though.
> So, correct me if I'm wrong
> here, but... Tully's offense would appear to be that she inadvertantly
> uttered an analysis more marxist than the marxists. Heaven forfend! How
> Bourgeois of her! No wonder your teeth are on edge.
I don't see anything even mildly radical in urging individual use of consumption power. Let's go back to your emphasis on time. One of the major barriers to organized resistance to capital (in any of its guises) is sheer lack of time -- overwork but also the hassle of getting to and from work and reproducing oneself day by day. And now Tully (and others like her) want us to spend even _more_ of our time in arriving at our individual and isolated choices as consumers. Are those people who spend two hours each way to work supposed to just quit and starve, or what! Of course those miles of three-lane traffic around Chicago are a crime -- but I don't see those in that traffic as having much choice. And it has nothing to do with free will -- one of those 19th c. tomes also talks of us making history but not precisely under conditions of our own choosing.
Incidentally, I forget where I read it, but just recently someone calculated the enormous (and unrealizable) amount of farm production that would be necessary to have biomass substitute for petroleum. The farmers in England would be unable to raise _anything_ except vegetable oil crops, and England would still have to import even more vegetable oil for its energy needs. (I'm not reporting too accurately, but this was the thrust of it.)
Carrol