Well John, I finally made the time to read some of your work, and it was well spent. Your "Blob" concept provides an interesting amalgamation of the ever-increasing plethora of obtuse political babble, a pleasant and subtly humorous route to not only discovering and understanding, but actually being able to convey an accurate and honest image of the present CONservative dominance of 1st world economic and political affairs. The "Blob" may force its way through the door of my rhetoric at some point, with your permission and an appropriate footnote, of course.
My one, very minor, stumbling block, was wondering why the term "worker" made such a repetitive appearance in your prose. Its prevalence, it seems to me, could distract from the prescience
enshrined in a very timely and novel concept.
Of course this "worker" thingy could be the result of my having just had a lengthy debate/argument with a friend at the WSWS, immediately before I read your essay, who was claiming that their peerage ("workers") were the most dedicated supporters of Julian Assange.
Anyway, thanks for the reference, and good writing.
Hi Ethan, welcome! I have long thought about how to describe the non-wealthy. Marx used the term proletariat, but that would not work today. It would sound odd to keep using that term. Worker seemed less alienating. But many poor people are not working, so it is also not accurate to talk about the non-wealthy as workers. "Worker class" is also often used, but I was also hesitant to use that.
I am fully open to suggestions, since it is something I have thought a bit about, without coming to a satisfactory conclusion.
Hey John, (pardon the tardy response, I have no viable excuse) Ah yes, if my ~8 decade old memory still serves me well, "proletariat" initially referred to the lowest class of Roman citizen; before the "enlightenment" and, in the nineteenth century, the arrival of Hegel, Marx, and Engels.
Hegel introduced a conception of history that is progressive. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels then borrowed the logic of this conception of history but modified its content. For Hegel, the content was spiritual; for Marx and Engels, the content was material (that is, it had to do with the world of matter, not the world of mind and spirit).
In Marx and Engels, the logic is the same as in Hegel, but the content is different. Their theory is called dialectical materialism or historical materialism. “Materialism” means that the theory refers not to the spiritual dimension of human experience but to the
purely material dimension. Every stage is defined in terms of relations of production and property relations, in other words, economic circumstances and who owns what. For them, history is a constant struggle, in which the conditions in one stage (thesis) produce conflict (antithesis) out of which grows a new stage (synthesis).
For instance either:
1) Feudal society (thesis) produces
2) an imbalance (antithesis) in economic relations, giving rise to the force that
will supplant it, namely
3) the bourgeoisie (synthesis).
OR:
1) Bourgeois society (thesis) produces
2) the proletariat (antithesis), and from the conflict emerges
3) communist society (synthesis).
{ By the way John, I'm not portending that this is a recollection from pure memory, I consulted some notes from a lecture I attended in 1963.}
Anyway, I agree the term "proletariat" should probably be avoided in the current divisive climate. I have often felt that the reference "disenfranchised" refers to a plurality of our citizens, rather one considers it in spiritual, economic, material, or political terms; and it certainly applies to my present circumstances in the majority of these instances.
I will definitely be reading more of your work ASAP, and thanks for the reply.
Hi Ethan, I am going to cogitate on it a bit more, because I think that The Blob has been messing with our lexicon for so long that many words no longer have their intended meaning. Liberal now means Clinton and Obama, who are about as liberal as Richard Nixon was.
Yes, I think that many socialists and communists bought into (pun intended) the idea that human relations were entirely material. That all that mattered is who owned what, and how much. It certainly contributed to the disdain that Europeans had for Native Americans because Native Americans did not believe in property in the same sense. Owning land was alien to them.
I have been working on a thesis for some time now (actually, I started writing a fictional anti-Ayn Rand book called Corputopia in 2007) which attempts to show how the implementation of money has completely corrupted society without most people realizing it whatsoever. The premise is that money is the most addictive drug known. By acting as a meta-reward for biological organisms, a reward that exceeds any normal type of reward, money drives extremely abnormal behavior that would never occur in other societal systems (for example a barter system). And of course, unregulated capitalism would then drive the most aberrant behavior because the meta reward was even greater.
I really should give Corputopia another shot, I have set it aside for several years.
Well John, I finally made the time to read some of your work, and it was well spent. Your "Blob" concept provides an interesting amalgamation of the ever-increasing plethora of obtuse political babble, a pleasant and subtly humorous route to not only discovering and understanding, but actually being able to convey an accurate and honest image of the present CONservative dominance of 1st world economic and political affairs. The "Blob" may force its way through the door of my rhetoric at some point, with your permission and an appropriate footnote, of course.
My one, very minor, stumbling block, was wondering why the term "worker" made such a repetitive appearance in your prose. Its prevalence, it seems to me, could distract from the prescience
enshrined in a very timely and novel concept.
Of course this "worker" thingy could be the result of my having just had a lengthy debate/argument with a friend at the WSWS, immediately before I read your essay, who was claiming that their peerage ("workers") were the most dedicated supporters of Julian Assange.
Anyway, thanks for the reference, and good writing.
As Usual,
EA
Hi Ethan, welcome! I have long thought about how to describe the non-wealthy. Marx used the term proletariat, but that would not work today. It would sound odd to keep using that term. Worker seemed less alienating. But many poor people are not working, so it is also not accurate to talk about the non-wealthy as workers. "Worker class" is also often used, but I was also hesitant to use that.
I am fully open to suggestions, since it is something I have thought a bit about, without coming to a satisfactory conclusion.
Hey John, (pardon the tardy response, I have no viable excuse) Ah yes, if my ~8 decade old memory still serves me well, "proletariat" initially referred to the lowest class of Roman citizen; before the "enlightenment" and, in the nineteenth century, the arrival of Hegel, Marx, and Engels.
Hegel introduced a conception of history that is progressive. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels then borrowed the logic of this conception of history but modified its content. For Hegel, the content was spiritual; for Marx and Engels, the content was material (that is, it had to do with the world of matter, not the world of mind and spirit).
In Marx and Engels, the logic is the same as in Hegel, but the content is different. Their theory is called dialectical materialism or historical materialism. “Materialism” means that the theory refers not to the spiritual dimension of human experience but to the
purely material dimension. Every stage is defined in terms of relations of production and property relations, in other words, economic circumstances and who owns what. For them, history is a constant struggle, in which the conditions in one stage (thesis) produce conflict (antithesis) out of which grows a new stage (synthesis).
For instance either:
1) Feudal society (thesis) produces
2) an imbalance (antithesis) in economic relations, giving rise to the force that
will supplant it, namely
3) the bourgeoisie (synthesis).
OR:
1) Bourgeois society (thesis) produces
2) the proletariat (antithesis), and from the conflict emerges
3) communist society (synthesis).
{ By the way John, I'm not portending that this is a recollection from pure memory, I consulted some notes from a lecture I attended in 1963.}
Anyway, I agree the term "proletariat" should probably be avoided in the current divisive climate. I have often felt that the reference "disenfranchised" refers to a plurality of our citizens, rather one considers it in spiritual, economic, material, or political terms; and it certainly applies to my present circumstances in the majority of these instances.
I will definitely be reading more of your work ASAP, and thanks for the reply.
As Usual,
EA
Hi Ethan, I am going to cogitate on it a bit more, because I think that The Blob has been messing with our lexicon for so long that many words no longer have their intended meaning. Liberal now means Clinton and Obama, who are about as liberal as Richard Nixon was.
Yes, I think that many socialists and communists bought into (pun intended) the idea that human relations were entirely material. That all that mattered is who owned what, and how much. It certainly contributed to the disdain that Europeans had for Native Americans because Native Americans did not believe in property in the same sense. Owning land was alien to them.
I have been working on a thesis for some time now (actually, I started writing a fictional anti-Ayn Rand book called Corputopia in 2007) which attempts to show how the implementation of money has completely corrupted society without most people realizing it whatsoever. The premise is that money is the most addictive drug known. By acting as a meta-reward for biological organisms, a reward that exceeds any normal type of reward, money drives extremely abnormal behavior that would never occur in other societal systems (for example a barter system). And of course, unregulated capitalism would then drive the most aberrant behavior because the meta reward was even greater.
I really should give Corputopia another shot, I have set it aside for several years.
Best, John