--- On Wed, 7/1/09, Marv Gandall <marvgandall at videotron.ca> wrote:
> nostalgia for rural society and the simple, communal,
> pastoral life it was
> seen to represent predates mass education, however, and
> seems to me to have
> been essentially a reaction to the growth of industry and
> cities, seen as
> the habitat of rapacious and unscrupulous capitalists and
> their commercial
> values. This attitude was especially pronounced among young
> hippies,
> anarchists, and third worldists in the 60's, and remains a
> thread on the
> contemporary left. Romantic aesthetes and anticapitalist
> intellectuals on
> the right have also recoiled from urban slums teeming with
> vagrants,
> immigrants, crime, and disease, and "cosmopolitan" radicals
> taking aim at
> the patriotic and religious traditions and institutions of
> the host culture.
[WS:] No doubt about the "romantic" allure of the myth of rural society to hippies, anarchists, third worldists etc. This is, in essence, utopian socialism. But my question is why such a backward looking utopia has so much attraction to people who claim Karl Marx in their ideological ancestry. Why not forward looking utopia promoted by Marx?
Or to phrase it differently, idyllic rustic utopias used to be a playground for aristocracy, cf. Marie Antoinette's peasant village near Versailles http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petit_hameau . I can see certain emotional gratification to the parasitic rich flowing from such role reversal game i.e. pretense of engaging in productive work. But what does this utopia offers the self-styled defenders of the working class against capitalist predators? Is it just another example of proles aping aristocrats akin to hunting?
Wojtek