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In a message dated 1/13/2010 5:43:36 P.M. Pacific Standard Time,
bbaue...@gmail.com writes:
The Matrix was capitalism, not technology, and it was a system of
surplus extraction that operated without most people knowing it because of
the dreamlike state much like consumer society.
Reply
Interesting metaphor.
Capitalism as surplus extraction rather than the bourgeois production of
commodities and the wage form of labor as the mode of distribution? (Boy that
was a crappy sentence). Hey, I don't recall a bunch of capitalists,
factories of workers and exchange of products. Production in Zion seems for
direct consumption and military defense.
For me the technology was embodied in machine society and self aware
machines driven to seek a sustainable energy source. These self aware machines
posses the capacity for machine reproduction, rather than commodity
exchange. My take was that the machines had destroyed the society wide
productivity
infrastructure that gave birth to the machines.
Wait a minute, we are talking about a fantasy flick. Heroic characters,
spiritual enlightenment, girl gets boy and revelations. And lots of bullets.
A dream state as metaphor for the fetish that attaches itself to commodity
production? I can buy that. If a movie inspires one to strive to break the
chains of our mutual degradation more power to you.
Will Smith was offered the lead role of Neo but turned it down. Thus, our
hero was white in a context representative of all hues of color and peoples,
although I do not recall a Mexican/Chicano character. .Perhaps, the self
reproducing character of machine society displaced their labor inputs and
Mexican labor migrated to another part of earth.
Yea, I know, . . . . its not funny.
Then, I very much liked, The Long Kiss Goodbye.
Boy does not get girl. The end of the Cold War polarize intelligence
agencies seeking new enemies to win support for massive funding. Girl is forced
to shed the outer trappings of the great American middle class to discover
her true identity, and then proceeds to kick everyone ass in the movie.
My kinda girl.
I was like, damn, I need to marry Geena Davis.
Then the wife said, Its just a movie. Take the garbage out and stop
playin..
WL.
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