On Mon, Jun 4, 2012 at 9:35 AM, joseph berg <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Sun, Jun 3, 2012 at 11:17 AM, William Conger <[email protected]>wrote: > >> >> ...For instance, I've read Debord's essay on the Society of The >> Spectacle (1967) >> >> and I know it's the Bible for a lot of new situationist artists (and >> angrily >> critiques celebrity and other tokens of commodification) but I find Debord >> ridiculously dated and even paranoid in his fixation on capitalism as the >> great >> evil. The alternatives are misty stone-age economics, as far as I can >> figure >> out. Yes, Debord's very gloomy account of human debasement at the hands >> of >> capitalism may be true but when was it ever otherwise, with any economic >> scheme? >> >> > I think that ancient Sparta did not even use coins as a way of suppressing > commerce and preventing it from dominating their society. > Now that I think of it, they believed that the austerity of their military way of life helped to keep materialism in check. By the way, the Spartans weren't the only ones aware of the danger of allowing commerce to dominate society: - The state should take the entire management of commerce, industry and agriculture into its own hands, with a view to succoring the working classes and preventing them from being ground into the dust by the rich. Wang An-Shih (Chinese political reformer;1021-1086)
