[lbo-talk] Trotsky on the Evils of Gum

Chris Doss lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com
Tue May 12 14:53:48 PDT 2009


Lord.

Chewing Gum In The Subway

"The car of the subway is jammed. At the station strong-bodied attendants pushed the passengers in the stomachs with their knees in order to be able to shut the steel doors of the cars. . . . The working population of New York has left today another part of its life's energy in the temples of Capital. Some of the people have become weaker; others have grown richer. In the subway are those who have become weaker. The color of their faces is greyish, their hands are hanging down weakly, their eyes are dim. . . . Only their jaws are moving, submissively, evenly, without joy or animation. . . . What are they trying to find in this miserable, degrading chewing? . . . When an infant, exhausted from hunger and crying, is pathetically moving its dull eyes, and there is no milk in the mother's breasts or in the bottle, the mother pushes a rubber nipple into the child's mouth— and the child sucks it desperately. . . . F'or a while it deceives itself by the

movement of its own lips.

"Thus it is with these people in the subway. . . . Capital does not like the working man to think and is afraid. ... It has therefore adopted measures. ... It has put up automats in each station and has filled them with disgusting candied gum. With an automatic movement of the hand the people extract from these automats pieces of sweetish gum, and they grind it with the automatic chewing of their jaws. . . . It looks like a religious rite, like some silent prayer to God-Capital."

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,770539,00.html



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list