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Great speech by Pullman (of His Dark Materials-fame) in defense of public libraries. If it weren't for my own local library, I would never have discovered the works of Raoul Vanneigem and the old copies of the "International Situationist" review. I would never have been fascinated by the quirky, ironic slogans of the Situationists : "Will you go to work today ?", "Run fast, Comrade, the establishment is catching up with you", "Comute, work, sleep", etc. I would never have read Debord, then Marx, then ... Pullman locates the origin of the "greedy ghost" of Capitalism in some flaw in the human psyche going back tens of thousands of years. I wouldn't put it that way, as I see authoritarian control over a social group as a result of the mode of production prevalent in that community. And the greedy ghost of Capitalism is quite unique as it is founded upon the prevalence of wage labour in society. Pullman quotes Marx, criticizes the Chicago School, goes back to the industrial revolution >>And you could go a little further back to the end of the nineteenth century and look at the ideas of “scientific management”, as it was called, the idea of Frederick Taylor that you could get more work out of an employee by splitting up his job into tiny parts and timing how long it took to do each one, and so on – the transformation of human craftsmanship into mechanical mass production. And you could go on, further back in time, way back before recorded history. The ultimate source is probably the tendency in some of us, part of our psychological inheritance from our far-distant ancestors, the tendency to look for extreme solutions, absolute truths, abstract answers. but skips quite a lot in going from "the end of craftmanship" to "the tendency to look for extreme solutions". This much about his thinking was already clear from reading "His Dark Materials" : an interest in neurology, comparative human psychology, human prehistory (shamanisim especially), genetics, materialism, atheism. And the central importance of evolution (in one of the alternative worlds the heroes land up in, horse-like sapient creatures have evolved a complex relationship with the nuts that fall from trees in order to travel). And taking Bakunin's famous remark quite seriously : "If God existed we would have to destroy him", adding Gnostic speculations on emanations, and ending up with a thrilling, cosmic assault by mankind against a so-called "God" who in fact is just a creature made of "Dust" like the rest of the universe (although the first-born, thus keeping the link with Gnosticism). Milton's "Paradise Lost" depiction of Satan is probably another source of inspiration. But anyway, I enjoy his books (and so does my kid) and I feel he is quite right when he states that when Capitalism gets its greedy hands on public libraries, it is THE ULTIMATE symbol of the subjugation of society to the dictates of money. ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
