Yet oddly enough nobody in the thousands of years of history of Ancient Egypt ever did this. :) ****************
I don't think it odd, especially when you examine the reified thinking of those times, ever reinforced by the priests of the day. Class society was is its infancy 3,000 years ago. I don't think a classless society was possible in within those material conditions of production. The point stands. If the producers organise class consciously, they can rule the world by controlling the social product of their labour, for without them, "not a single wheel would turn."
***************** CD:
Your larger point is true perhaps, but my point was that we are born into a social context not made by us, and our value systems, including the whole emancipatory humanist project thing, were not made by us either. There were no Marxists in Ancient Egypt, and there are reasons for that. :) ************
Agreed....see above.
************ CD: Maybe I'm getting cynical, but sometimes I think the universal humanist project, for all of its stated emlightenment, is actually just narrow provincialism, whereby everybody in the world should subscribe to the worldview of a largely Western intellectual current that has only existed for the historical eyeblink that is the past 300 years or so. It's another version of "the people on the other side of the river who worship false gods should worship our gods instead. That is why their harvests are so bad; they worship the wrong gods." ****************
Precisely. It is reified thinking in which the human subject attributes the power of the producers to their gods....... or abstractions like nations or Great Helmsman....I think that ideological god was the one that "failed" so to speak. Radical, class conscious subjectivity is not based on worshipping or paying obeisance to this or that masochistically endowed power, but becoming power by realising that it is human beings who create objects (including ideas), not upside-down, camera-obscura.
Mike B)
"Would you have freedom from wage-slavery.." Joe Hill http://www.shelfari.com/o1516968161
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