Lou Proyect forwarded a link with the comment: > We are doomed as a species. Time to make your bucket list.
There have indeed been many news items recently describing from various angles how precarious the situation is and how urgent it is to take action now if we want our children and grandchildren to have a future. A common thread of most of these environmental disaster stories is that humankind has the knowledge and technology to avert this disaster, the only obstacle is our social relations. Social relations exist only in our actions and are reproduced by our actions. The byline should therefore be that we must learn to act in ways which do not reproduce the social relations dooming our species, but foster the needed change -- and maybe a discussion of those initiatives which most deserve our support (such as Bill McKibben's international power shift). Instead, Lou's joke conjures the inevitability of the destructive path which our present social relations have in store for us. Marx calls this "commodity fetishism," the view that our own social relations are inevitable natural forces. Hans G Ehrbar _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
