----- Original Message ---- From: Voyou <voyou1 at gmail.com> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Sent: Thursday, December 11, 2008 12:24:31 PM Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] zeitgeist the movie
On Thu, 2008-12-11 at 08:07 -0800, Wojtek Sokolowski wrote:
> http://www.zeitgeistmovie.com/
>
> I wonder what others think of this. I found much of it very appealing
> albeit it does have some weird conspiracist strain.
I've only seen the "addendum" film, which is largely idiotic (and borderline anti-semitic) anti-fractional-reserve-banking conspiracism. I see that the sources list for the main film ( http://www.zeitgeistmovie.com/sources.htm ) involves a number of crypto-fascist usual suspects like Alex Jones, Lyndon LaRouche, and David Icke, which isn't exactly promising.
I would be interested, though, if anyone knows anything about the Venus Project, which is endorsed in the film, and appears, from its web site ( http://www.thevenusproject.com/ ), to be some kind of bizarre techno-utopian Proudhonism.
[WS:] This does not seem a very convincing critique of the film.
I've seen both parts in toto and it looks to me like a combination of various cultural tropes - most of them from the left (including the Marxist theory of value on which the critique of the monetary system seems to be based) critique of corporate power, social inequalities, prison system, critique of conventional politics, imperialism, state and religion, but some of the tropes are libertarian, populist and unitarian-universalists. It is dificult for any bona fide leftie to disagree with the crtiques of capitalism and militarism expressed in the film.
The only threads that put me off a bit is elememnts of conspiracism (espcially conspriacy theories of 9/11) and technological utopianism of the "addendum" but that utopinaims is not very differnet from "fishing in th emorning and writing poetry in the evening" that the Old Man envisioned.
An besides, it is a good, appealing piece of agit-prop. I wish that the left produced more of it.
Wojtek