[lbo-talk] We're all irrelevant

Bill Bartlett billbartlett at dodo.com.au
Mon Jul 24 16:38:28 PDT 2006


At 10:10 AM -0500 24/7/06, Michael McIntyre wrote:


>My German is less than rudimentary. Is the Gruppe Krisis' Manifesto
>against
>Labour (<http://members.blackbox.net/oebgdk/krisis_manifest-englisch.html>http://members.blackbox.net/oebgdk/krisis_manifest-englisch.html)
>a fair summary of your tendency. I'm guessing that if I want to
>understand more I should look at Moishe Postone's Time, Labour and
>Social Domination?

Right at the start, well the second para, I came across this:

"In the wake of the micro-electronic revolution, wealth production increasingly became independent from the actual expenditure of human labour power to an extent quite recently only imaginable in science fiction. No one can seriously maintain any longer that this process can be halted or reversed. Selling the commodity labour power in the 21st century is as promising as the sale of stagecoaches has proved to be in the 20th century."

This was a promising start to some kind of political satire, I read on. But a few paras later there was not only no punch line, but the joke seemed to be falling flat. I started wondering if the author was actually serious.

Somebody please help, the writing style is too turgid to endure reading the whole thing, unless it is a joke. A manifesto premised on such an absurd analysis had better be a joke, tell me its a joke, tell me its got a hilarious punch line somewhere?

Bill Bartlett Bracknell Tas



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