Michael Hoover wrote:
> > while you, doug, seem temperamentally inclined to emphasize > > capitalism's progressive tendencies
Doug Henwood wrote:
> Not really. I just have to do it on PEN-L because no one else will. > It's also a very destructive and alienating system.
Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
But that -- having positives and negatives -- can be said about any system.
Marx's "positives" about capitalism are hardly pure positives. Capitalism destroys established jobs, established communities, etc. But then it creates new jobs that are purely under the capitalist thumb. There's a switch from (perhaps primitive) autonomy of human life to non-autonomous life in work capitalist iron cage. If we extrapolate this, it ends up with the Frankfurt School's somewhat Weberian vision of totalitarian capitalism. Sure, there may be something like "full employment" (as usually defined), but there was something like that in Huxley's _Brave New World_. Of course, the reason we don't end up there (or if we do, don't stay there) is because of working-class resistance. Even without mass social-democratic or communist movements, some people are able niches of autonomy within the iron cage. Of course, these are the jobs that the bosses want to tame or downsize... ... so the struggle continues. -- Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante.
