Meet George Jetson
The Jetsons was a Saturday morning cartoon that came on right after Yogi Bear and the Flintstones ( it is all about clever names) and portrayed a futuristic family driving around in little rocketships, being served by robots, having typically modern dilemnas. I remember the idealistic notion born of these times that modernization and automation would free up tons of leisure time to be spent... somehow. Anyway, how to spend that free time turns out not be the dilemna once envisioned because except for the tiny group of, elite, idle rich, nobody has any. instead we work longer, struggle frantically to be more productive in that time and produce more and more profit for, you guessed it, that group of elite, idle ,rich.
The Spectacle is the bad dream of a modern society in chains and ultimately expresses nothing more than it's wish for sleep. Debord
posted by troutsky @ 10:56 AM
2 comments
2 Comments:
How do you get the middle class to realize they are in chians when they think they are happy so long as they can drive their Hummers and worry about having a bigger house than their co-workers? Of course, the rich know that they are thriving on the sweat and blood of the poor, but they have long since lost their consciences. The poor know. We just have to mobilize, stand up, and take the fucking power back.
We talked a little the other night about class consciousness, and I think it's a current lack of good analysis that makes organizing efforts so difficult.We don't understand how the workers see themselves and consequently struggle to connect with them.So much modern terminology muddies the discourse, upwardly -mobile, middle class,under-class etc that trying to relate these to established theoretical terminology like bourgeois or proletariat is frustrating. So a sociological perspective is needed( Franks' Whats The Matter With Kansas is an effort in this direction)plus a rededication to community outreach, which is what CAJA does well.We need to figure out where that power is located (the State, the Corporation, global financial institutions,other? etc) and then figure out where they are vulnerable, their contadictions and constraints.What conditions precipitate enough "crisis" to create an opening? The "happiness" of Hummer drivers is illusory and they express their dissatisfaction in lots of ways.Manufacturing desire for commodities and fear of the "other"is part of the desparate end game of capitalism being backed further and further into a corner,in my radical opinion.
Post a Comment
<< Home