Question:
There's one other of his podcasts I will send later that along with
this podcast fills out the general political and social beefs of anti-
feminists. He does it in a semi-entertaining way while effectively
teaching what to most people is a new but scary paradigm.
Answer:
Well, Marx's theories of political-economy turned
out to be wrong and those who took them up
caused terrible misery for millions, even billions
of people in the 20th century. With the magnaminity
of the victors of the long struggle (or should I say
"survivors"?), we can look back 150 years and
perhaps concede that in Marx's day when he
developed his economic theories there wasn't
much to go on and tho' his economics turned out
to be wrongly based, there were many others
among his contemporaries whose theories of
political-economy were just as wrong, often
because of the same errors. We don't hear as
much about the others because they did not start
a political movement that went international
and became the ideology of brutal, revolutionary
regimes ruling hundreds of millions of people.
Now that the Cold War has been over for almost
a whole generation (next year's college freshmen
won't be old enough to have seen the fall of the
Berlin Wall), the "boogey-man" image of Marx
is fading and scholars can begin to look at his
sociological ideas without being pressured into
(or suspected of) defending Marx's bad economics.
A good deal of time has passed since I last read
much of Marx and even more time has passed
since I took a very interesting course in Marxist
political-economy. What I remember about Marx's
ideas that I believe is regrettably underappreciated
is his analysis of the industrial worker's alienation
from the means of production. He believed that
a requirement for a healthy psychology was being
able to take pride in one's own finished work and
someone who works on an assembly line organized
on principles of the division of labor where the
divisions are so finely divided that a worker is
used like a machine (e.g., bolt turner, cotter pin
inserter, spot welder, bobbin threader, loom
operator, pin polisher). Eric Hoffer discusses
some of these very same sort of dehumanizing
work practices in one of his lesser read books
(_The Ordeal of Change_ IIRC). Craft workers
of all political persuasions have long lamented
that mass produced products show that they are
banged together by people who have no pride
in their work.
Whew! Bottom line (you were beginning to
wonder if I even had one, weren't you ;-) is
that I think this stuff of Marx's that today go by
names like Psychology of Work Life are what
give Rich Zubaty's podcasts a Marxian flavor --
along with his 1960s counter-culture and beatnik
(neo-beatnik? ;-) style.
I offer this excerpt from Zubaty's book that I found
on the web as evidence:
Starting 140 years ago, men were taken completely out
of nature and sent in to the office and the factory
where they manufacture and sell more items to make
women's lives easier. Thus, men have been maneuvered
into doing work that historically, for 2.2 million years,
had been women's work: farming and making pots.
