RE: meiksins-wood article

["Mark Jones" <jones118@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Doyle Saylor  wrote:
> Mark Jones deserves membership in a group whether or not he is obsessive
or not.

Actually I AM obsessive about some things, primarily about restoring our
defective collective memory. I much appreciate Yoshie's remarks elsewhere on
collective amnesia about the great crimes committed in our names in Korea,
Vietnam, Africa and many other places and now in Russia. One of the
principal mechanisms of the act of 'forgetting' is the process of
'renormalising' changed realities in a way which elides their real origins;
this goes with what Situationists were I guess the first to describe as
'capitalist spectacle' (an ideo-invention which birthed most pomo thought,
unfortunately). The evanescence and endless mutability of capitalist
commodity production, in which collective narcissism and guilt-washing are
automatic functions of the renewal and reproduction of the the spectacle
into which everyday life is subsumed, are primary mechanisms of forgetting.
What is being forgotten of course, are the mountains of corpses, the rivers
of blood, the legions of ghosts, the tribes and their stories damned to
oblivion. What Nation does, as well as its half-engagement with worthy
causes and its occasional muckraking, is to promote the process of
collective forgetting which is actually the means of preparation of future
genocides (and of mass suicides). We should be more alert to this and that
is why one of our collective tasks (brilliantly carried out on this list by
Lou proyect for one) is to remember the past, our past, our class past, and
to continue to repeat the old myths and not to forget the old crimes as they
would wish us to.

Mark Jones