Re: arugula

[Jeffrey Booth <booth2@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, 25 Aug 1995, Doug Henwood wrote:

> I was disturbed to read this from Lou Proyect:
>
> > I for one would love to hear a continuing discussion between Scott and
> > Jeff, two exemplary worker-communists. I'm totally removed from the world
> > of the working-class and I would like to find out what's going on the
> > UAW-USW-IAM merger, Labor Party advocates, AFL-CIO union elections, etc.
> > I'm up here in the upper east side of manhattan nibbling on arugula salad
> > and sipping Perrier every night, so I need information from the other
> > side of the tracks.
>
> There is nothing wrong with eating arugula salad. In solidarity with the
> working class, must we confine ourselves to iceberg and cello tomatoes,
> washed down with Kost Kutter Kola? Italian communists eat sundried
> tomatoes; why can't we?
>

        I'm reading Carlo Levi's book:  Christ Stopped at Eboli and I recently
saw the movie: Il Postino.  Italian communists in these two works were
very thin and didn't seem to eat much of anything.  I'm glad they get
sun-dried tomatoes nowadays.  I'd like some too.


> In her exposition, Lisa described arugula as "trendy." The arugula boom was
> 10 years ago; it is now a member in good standing of the salad green
> family.
>
> I must object to this strain of vulgar Cuisinism infecting this list. As a
> Marxist no less orthodox than Ernest Mandel put it:
>
> <quote>
> Any rejection of the so-called 'consumer society' which moves beyond
> justified condemnation of the commercialization and dehumanization of
> consumption by capitalism to attack the historical extension of needs and
> consumption in general (i.e., moves from social criticism to a critique of
> civilization), turns back the clock from scientific to utopian socialism
> and from historical materialism to idealism. Marx fully appreciated and
> stressed the civilizing function of capital [footnote: Grundrisse, pp.
> 409-410], which he saw as the necessary preparation of the material basis
> for rich individuality.... For socialists, rejection of capitalist
> 'consumer society' can therefore never imply rejection of the extension and
> differntiation of needs as a whole, or any return to the primitive natural
> state of these needs; their aim is necessarily the development of a 'rich
> individuality' for the whole of mankind [sic].... Marx himself deliberately
> pointed out the need to work out a system of needs, which has nothing to do
> with the neo-asceticism peddled in some circles as Marxist orthodoxy
> [footnotes: Grundrisse, pp. 409, 528; TSV III: pp. 256-257, 260-261].
> <endquote>
        
        But Hemingway said:  "The rich ruin everything."  I think I would
choke on my first taste of arugula salad/lettuce if the bourgeois behind
me started talking about his maid or his car or his stock options or
whatever... .

                                -- Jeff Booth           

>
> Another reason to miss Mandel....
>
>
> Doug
>
> --
>
> Doug Henwood
> [dhenwood@xxxxxxxxx]
> Left Business Observer
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