Re: barbaric (was Marxism and religion)
On Mar 3, 2007, at 4:37 AM, James Heartfield wrote:
Yoshie raises a good question when she says:
“What if capitalism creates objective conditions — socialized forces of production — of its transcendence but, by doing so, destroys subjective conditions — thinking human beings capable of collective action — for it?”
Certainly it has preoccupied me. I wrote a book about it: ‘The
“Death of the Subject” Explained’. (excerpt: http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/en/ heartfield-james.htm) To my mind the failure of subjective agency is the more destructive
factor in today’s conditions. But there is nothing given for all time
about that.
Then there’s the point made by Slavoj Zizek - that the productiity of
capitalism depends on capitalist discipline, meaning that it’s not so
easy to carry over the technological achievements of this social
system into a socialist one.
Doug