Louis Proyect wrote:
>This has nothing to do with my post. I was not writing about smoking habits
>in Cuba versus the United States. I was writing about wasting land on a
>habit. I don't know much about China, but I do know that Cuba has been on
>an all out drive to get people to stop smoking for the past 10 years. But
>in essence my post was about colonialism, an uncomfortable subject for some.
Your post also tried to explain smoking as a reaction to alienation
under conditions of wage labor. That explanation doesn't seem to hold
water.
> >Is restoring "the sacral" a Marxist goal?
>
>Yes.
This is news to me. I had no idea that Marx or any of his progeny had
much truck with "sacred rites and observances." I thought Marxism was
rather hostile to such mystifications. Perhaps I took my instruction
in Marxism from the Reader's Digest, and was therefore badly misled.
>This is libertarian fluff. Completely harmless, but besides the point. When
>we have embarked on the task of constructing world socialism, the main
>criterion will be the efficacy of resources not petty-bourgeois obsessions
>about "freedom".
Another instance of my failure to understand Marxism, I guess. I
thought Marx was a critic of the failure of bourgeois society to live
up to its promises of freedom, but had a kind word or two to say
about its partial fulfillment of these goals, and thought that
communist society would lead to the free development of all.
Similarly, I thought "efficiency" sounded more like an engineering or
capitalist value rather than a revolutionary one.
Doug
