What bothers me about the passage on Lou's blog is, in a way, that it is badly written. It wasn't footnotes that I missed, but any sense at all in the writing that he had encountered much Marxist writing or for that matter had considered very carefully just what the hell he means by unfree labor. Your lecture at Berkeley had no footnotes, but it did have the 'thickness' I miss in the Graeber selection. (Sorry but the FHP article has the same weakness as Graeber has here.) Consider this short passage:
" All those millions of slaves and serfs and coolies and debt peons disappear, or if we must speak of them, we write them off as temporary bumps along the road. Like sweatshops, this is assumed to be a stage that industrializing nations had to pass through, just as it is still assumed that all those millions of debt peons and contract laborers and sweatshop workers who still exist, often in the same places, will surely live to see their children become regular wage laborers with health insurance and pensions, and their children, doctors and lawyers and entrepreneurs." Note just two points in this horrible bit of prose: the sloppy use of "we" and the suspicious passive constructions. I would call attention to those matters in a freshman theme. It would take more than footnotes to justify such prose. Carrol --------------------------------------------- This was a passage -- a few paragraphs out of a very "thick" and rich book. As for the writing -- I thought it was the best writing I had seen from an academic in a long time. The generosity of his spirit shone through every line, but more, this was not a wall of words; it was, intentionally, an informal yet precise narrative and argument so constructed as to make the reader feel the need to become engaged with it, to complete it, to open it to others. The passive voice is not suspicious: he's talking about what has come to pass as homespun wisdom in the west and he is arguing that it's so much claptrap. You should read the book. Joanna _______________________________________________
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