[lbo-talk] 35-cent ice cream and anarchist theory

James Heartfield Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk
Fri May 1 09:51:58 PDT 2009


Alan writes "if you read my post, I never said anything about self-denial, penurious thrift or the limitation of births"

and I never said you did.

All I said was that if you do not like the idea that working class demands are for more (or the whole product of their labour, as they used to say) when it comes from Gompers' mouth, maybe you would like it better from Connolly's or Pankhurst's.

(It just happens that when she wrote it, Pankhurst was replying to a birth-control enthusiast - and it is at least an argument that some birth-control enthusiasts were more motivated by eugenic concerns that the liberation of women.)

I don't own a car, and I live in a terraced house, but I don't think that working people in general are consuming too much, and I prefer not to mock the consumer society at a time when incomes are being held down.

Conspicuous consumption? That was Vance Packard and Thorstein Veblen's criticism of capitalism. I prefer Marx's point that needs are plainly social, and comparative.

'A house may be large or small; as long as the surrounding houses are equally small it satisfies all social demands for a dwelling. But let a palace arise beside the little house, and it shrinks from a little house into a hut. ... Our desires and pleasures spring from society; we measure them, therefore, by society and not by the objects which serve for their satisfaction. Becuase they are of a social nature, they are of a relative nature.' Wage Labour and Capital, Peking, 1978, p 35

Or as my daughters say, if I buy one a comic and not the other, 'that's not fair!'



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