Doug:
>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.
Smoking _as mass addiction_ seems to me to be a reaction to
alienation. As I said, I don't think that pre-Columbian tribes in
the Americas were addicted to tobacco, peyote, etc., even though they
made use of such substance. Compulsive behaviors of the most
problematic kind, I think, stems from direct or indirect subjection
to the compulsive logic of M-C-M' & other oppressions. And it goes
without saying that Cuba, China, etc. are not alien to alienation,
indirect subjection to M-C-M', etc.
> >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.
"All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and
man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition
of life and his relations with his kind" (_The Communist Manifesto_).
Marx was in favor of modernity -- there is no denying that.
Yoshie
